Letter from Behind the Green Fox
Growing up at a housing estate on the outskirts of Prague, I always dreamt of living in an old house in the centre, with high ceilings and thick walls. But as chance would have it as an adult I ended up living just next door from the street where I spent my childhood – Za Zelenou liškou or Behind the Green Fox.
Apparently, there used to be an inn in the 18th century built on the main road from Prague to České Budějovice, with a green fox – zelená liška – on its sign. The inn was eventually swallowed up by the famous arms and motorcycle manufacturer Jawa, but its name was preserved in the street name Za Zelenou Liškou.
But my native street has more to itself than just a peculiar name. It is a home to Prague’s very first functionalist housing estate, built in the mid-1930s. It features plain minimalist houses with built-in galleries facing the street and enclosed gardens with full-grown trees in the back. But Zelená liška is perhaps better known for another housing estate, built in the 1950s, which was the first in Czechoslovakia featuring prefabricated apartment blocks, known as paneláks. You probably won’t be able to tell the difference from other housing estates that cropped up across the country in the years to follow.
But there are some differences, such as the central trash chute, which I have never seen in any other building in the country, and which, to my knowledge, was never put into operation. There are ornamental ledges and house signs, typical for the style of sorela or socialist realism. And there is also a fallout shelter, connecting all the buildings on the estate, designed to protect the inhabitants from radioactive fallout in case of a nuclear attack by the western enemies. After all, the houses were built during the Cold War.
In spite of being only a few metro stops from the centre of Prague, Zelená liška has preserved a hint of the periphery that it used to be when my father moved here in the early 1950s. And spending most of my life in one spot, I feel literally like I live in a village, and know most of the old residents.
The area has recently become a target for developers with plans to build high-rise buildings on every free site available. As a proud resident of Zelená liška, I am prepared to fight for its atmosphere to be preserved.
