Historian Cynthia Paces on when Prague really was heart of Europe – and her own family’s close ties to city
Cynthia Paces is the author of Prague: The Heart of Europe, which traces the city’s fascinating history from the 10th century to the modern era. The US historian also has strong personal ties to the city, from which the Pačes family were forced to flee after the 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.
Please tell us about your own background and your own family’s story. Your family name was Pačes?
“That’s right, yes. My father was born in Prague in 1943. His parents were from just slightly southeast of Prague; my grandfather was from Kostelec nad Černými lesy, and my grandmother was from a smaller village in that area.
“But they both came to Prague in the 1930s and started a small business that made liqueurs – after-dinner drinks. My grandfather apparently had a patent for a chocolate hazelnut liqueur.
“I was always drawn to the story of my family’s time [in Prague], my father’s short time there.”
“It was a small family business, but especially after World War II, for those three years before 1948 it really became popular, so they were successful small business people.
“My father was born in 1943, so in the heart of World War II, and he was the middle of three brothers.
“So I was always drawn to the story of my family’s time there, my father’s short period of time there; he was seven when they left the country, in 1950, and then came to the United States after living in displaced persons’ camps in Germany.
“My grandparents, as I mentioned, were business owners. And when the Communist Party nationalised all businesses they, especially my grandfather, became somewhat politically active in some anti-Communist groups.
“When that was discovered, it was clear that he needed to leave the country
“I asked my father why Grandma was crying, and he said she was remembering the time she was in prison. As a child I was just shocked.”
“I remember growing up knowing a little bit about that story and I have this very strong memory of being eight or nine years old and we were at my grandparents’ house and they were watching the news – and my grandmother started crying during a report about the Iran hostages.
“I asked my father why Grandma was crying, and he said she was remembering the time when she was in prison.
“And as a child I was just shocked. I couldn’t have imagined what she had possibly done. As a child you think, If you go to jail, you’re a bad person.
“It really made me just want to know more about my family’s story. And as a child if there was a research paper to do, or a short story to write, I was always trying to learn about that part of the world.”
Why was your granny in jail?
“It’s a very complicated story that my father has pieced together.
“My grandfather escaped and my grandmother was home, caring for her three sons, along with her mother-in-law, who was living with them and helping her.
“Our understanding is that somebody came to the house – and it may have been some kind of bribe or set-up – and said that they knew my grandfather and had some information that would have confirmed to her that it was somebody who had met him, and asked for money.
“She was very desperate – her younger child was an infant, my father was about six and their other son was maybe 12 – and she did give him some money, from what we can understand.
“And then she was arrested as if it was some sort of bribe or illegal payment to somebody.
“It’s really hard to understand when you look at the documents. But it was just in that period of time as the Communists were taking over, when there was a lot of injustice, I would say.
“We also found records in the archive that her mother-in-law could take my uncle, an infant, to the prison one time a day so she could nurse him.
“It’s just hard to imagine: being a mother, without her husband and being in this situation.
“She was let out of prison after four months and the family escaped very soon after that. Without my father’s grandmother, so I know he and my older uncle really missed her.
“So it was definitely that time when families were broken up.”
To jump forward in time quite a lot, you say in your book that in the early 1990s you came to Prague with your grandfather.
“I did, yes. When things were shifting in Eastern Europe I was a university student.
“The Berlin Wall came down and the Velvet Revolution happened and I studied there in 1990 at letní škola, at the summer school, at Charles University, and I loved it so much that I decided I wanted to come back for a semester.
“Then I studied at Charles University in the fall of 1991 – and that was the first time my grandfather had come back in 40 years; my grandmother had passed away in the early 1980s, so she never returned.
“But being with him there was just an incredible experience. It was very difficult. He, you can imagine, was very emotional. He had a lot of anxiety about being there after 40 years – he was about 80 years old at the time.
“[My grandfather] had a lot of anxiety about being there after 40 years – he was about 80 at the time.”
“He was meeting some of his nephews and their children, who he knew about but had never met. His own brothers and sisters had already passed away.
“I have such strong memories of being in Kostelec with him and some relatives, and him taking me to where he was baptised.
“In Prague the business they owned was truly a home business – it was in the garage, in the basement of their house.
“It was turned into a multi-family home on the outskirts of Prague and the part that had been his business was turned into the State Biological Institute.
“I just remember him looking at the sign, and where it might have said his name once upon a time it now said State Biological Institute.
“It was not in great repair. I grew up watching my grandparents fix up their home all the time and doing their own work, and looking back 30 years later I realise how much it must have been painful to see that place at the end of his life.
“But the house was restituted to him. He was the only person who had ever owned it. It was a development that he bought into in the ‘30s, when they were expanding into what now is Prague 10, or Strašnice.
“So he did get the house back, he did get Czech citizenship, and until the last year of his life he went back every year for about seven years.”
To move on to your book, it’s called Prague: The Heart of Europe. When was Prague really the heart of Europe?
“When I was asked for a title of the book I was encouraged to use something very catchy. And as you know, since you live there, there’s a lot of T-shirts that say ‘the heart of Europe’.
“Obviously it’s a geographic region in the centre of Europe, and so one of the points that I make is that even as early as the 10th century, it was very, very close to where the major north-south and the major west-east axes on the trade routes were.
“You have travelogues that go far back – to the late 10th century – that talk about the market, that talk about Jews and Krakovians and Muscovites and Turks; we’re not sure exactly who those people were, but certainly a lot of different people were converging there to trade.
“So some of this is an acknowledgement of that geography.
“But then Prague had two golden periods, as they like to say, when it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. And that was of course during the reign of Charles IV, in the 14th century, and then again during the reign of Rudolph II, in the 16th and into the early 17th century.
“You don’t have the Prague we have today without Charles IV.”
“And those were periods of time when you had two emperors who were very determined to make Prague a political but also a cultural centre.
“For Charles also it was a centre for church and state, so he brings an archbishopric, through his contacts with the current pope, who had been his tutor when he was a priest as a young man in Paris.
“And he’s able to bring the university, he’s able to establish an archbishopric and then to bring artists from all over: from Italy, from the German Lands.
“Then Rudolph, two centuries later, really emulates him in doing that. Again, he brings Italian painters, like Arcimboldo, or Dutch print makers, like Sadeler, and then of course all of the scientists: the astronomers and, a little more infamously, the alchemists.
“But I also like to reflect on the more recent period, when I was there for the first time in the early ‘90s. As you might know, Havel used a heart in his signature and once he had a neon heart installed onto the Castle.
“You can’t idealise any political figure too much, but he really was somebody who so much believed in social justice and civil society and saw, I think, this idea of humanism as being the heart of what he believed in.
“The last colour photo that’s in my book, in the centre of the book – I was so lucky to get this beautiful insert from OUP [Oxford University Press] – is the monument to him in between the National Theatre and the Black Light Theatre, which is a glowing red heart breaking out of a cage.
“I think that in the early ‘90s that city had a lot of heart. He was somebody who was looked to by others around the world as kind of a moral leader.
“Like everyone, he had his flaws, but I think that he was so determined to be a representative of peace – he famously said [the Czechs] wouldn’t go to war with Slovakia in the way that we saw in Yugoslavia.
“So I would put the early ‘90s in there, too.”
Can we say that Charles IV was the greatest ever influence on Prague? He brought the archbishopric, as you say, and the university. Then there’s the bridge, and he created the New Town and also the Horse Market, which became Wenceslas Square.
“I think you have to say yes. Sometimes the obvious answer is the wrong answer, but usually the obvious answer is the right answer [laughs].
“You don’t have the Prague we have today without Charles IV. The university is such a formidable intellectual centre in Europe.
“But, yes, that vision, I think, of art and learning and the relationship between the church and the state; it isn’t as prominent any more but was so much a shaper of the city and the importance of the city in that region.
“He really was, in a way, a philosopher king.
“He certainly also saw his battles, especially before he became the emperor, with his father, who was a real sort of medieval warrior.
“But his dream was to create that intellectual, cultural capital.”
Your book covers over a millennium. Is there any particular period that you were most drawn to, or that you are most drawn to?
“My training is really as a modernist. I studied the Habsburg monarchy with Istvan Deak at Columbia, who was one of the foremost experts on the region.
“So I certainly am the most comfortable researching that modern period.
“And I really love the 1890s up until World War I, where I feel like you have maybe the last breath of that multicultural Prague, which is important as a theme in my book: of German and Czech art and literature and music, as well as the prominence of Jewish intellectuals. Of course Kafka, Einstein, Max Brod.
“I really love the 1890s up until WWI, where I feel like you have maybe the last breath of that multicultural Prague.”
“There too you can’t idealise, because there’s also a lot of nationalist tension. There were riots in the 1890s and again in 1907 between Czechs and Germans. There was anti-Semitism.
“And yet, that’s a period of time where you get some of the Art Nouveau architecture that’s so beautiful. You get some of the beginnings of even the modernist movement.
“So I really do love that period. It’s the first period I wrote about, the first period I researched.
“But also I was very drawn to learning about some of the earlier periods where I knew brush strokes.
“I really had to learn from other historians how to interpret the Middle Ages, how to interpret the early modern period, how medievalists think about that period as a period we can’t really understand the way we might be able to understand the modern period.
“That was fun for me. So it was nice to be in my comfort zone and to go deep there, but it was also really interesting to me to understand a little bit more about the structure of the early medieval state, for example.”
You referred to Jewish history in Prague, of which there has been a lot. But it seems like for most of the period we’re talking the Jews suffered and were mistreated quite often, by different rulers?
“Absolutely. One of the things that is so important to understand – I really believe this and I said it several times in the book – is that we would not have the Prague we have without the Jewish community.
“They not only did play a significant economic role, but they also added so much to the cultural milieu of Prague.
“The rulers had, I think, a very mixed relationship with them. They very much knew that they needed to have the economic knowledge of the Jewish economic elite.
“But having said that – and this is one point I make in the book quite a lot – most of the Jews were quite poor. Most Jews in Prague were working within their community in services that were for one another: they were butchers, they were tailors.
“When they traded in the market places, they traded with non-Jews but they also had their own markets.
“And they were closed off. They could only move out of that part of the city in the 19th century.
“But the rulers also – it’s very ironic when you hear it – considered the Jews part of the royal treasury.
“In doing so, many of the rulers would protect the Jewish quarter because they knew that they were necessary. And they also didn’t want the daily violence that sometimes anti-Semitism provoked.
“So I feel like you get this very push-pull relationship between the rulers and the community.
“You had these small daily instances of anti-Semitism, where there’s vandalism, where there’s anti-Semitic sentiment. And then there are these moments in history, like 1389, when there was a horrible massacre that is remembered at the Old New Synagogue every year.
“Maria Theresa is known for reform and educating girls and modernising the bureaucracy – and yet she’s responsible for this large-scale expulsion of the Jews in the 1740s.”
“Or you have Maria Theresa, who is known for so much reform and educating girls and modernising the bureaucracy – and yet she’s responsible for this large-scale expulsion of the Jews in the 1740s.
“And in that case it was only when some of the Prague burghers realised that they needed them back, or the economic position that they had in society, that she allowed them back.
“Other times you had the burghers telling the emperor to get rid of them as they were competing with them.
“And then the emperor had to decide who to listen to: their own advisors, who were saying it was a vital part of the urban economy, or these elite city dwellers saying they were competing with them.
“So they did a remarkable job creating this cultural milieu with these incredible synagogues and the Town Hall, but also these centres of learning.
“We have these stories of Rabbi Loew inventing the Golem, which is something that was only attributed to him in the 19th century, but what we really have are these erudite writings where he was almost prefiguring Erasmus and other Renaissance writers about how to educate children.
“Some of the ideas that he writes about are still things that we take for granted in educating children today.
“So if you don’t centre the Jewish story in the history of Prague, you’ve done the whole history a disservice.”
About the German aspect of Prague, obviously something was lost when that was diminished and eventually disappeared. At the same time, isn’t there something kind of exciting about the Czech National Revival and the Czechs coming to the fore, so to speak?
“If you don’t centre the Jewish story in the history of Prague, you’ve done the whole history a disservice.”
“Yes. I think you’re very right.
“I’m just thinking as you’re speaking about that idea of newness, almost of a romance. Like in a new romance: you’re very excited and you want to show your best and you want to do creative things.
“I feel like there was a population among the Czech revivalists – Palacký, but also Božena Němcová the writer, or Karolína Světlá, who grew up speaking German but basically converted.
“Sometimes you have the passion of converts, who were speaking German and then said, This is exciting – and changed languages.
“So, yes. In my first book [Prague Panoramas] I look at what the Czechs were trying to discover about their past, to really almost create a national identity.
“So they look at Jan Hus and they ask what they can take from this medieval figure. Or they kind of invent a version of St. Wenceslas and ask how they can make him a symbol of who they are.
“You see tremendous creativity, such as the painters who decorate the interior of the National Theatre with these epic murals. And then within a couple of months of opening the theatre burns and within a few weeks they collect money all over again.
“That’s the kind of passion that you see – almost like what we were talking about with the 1990s, when there was this feeling.
“I remember being there in the summer of 1990s: the elections were going on and people truly were singing John Lennon songs on the Charles Bridge, and young girls were charging a small amount of money to paint people’s faces with pretty patterns or flowers and to braid hair.
“And there was this moment of kind of like the ‘60s were back, in the most idealised way.
“So yes, I think that the 1890s had a feel of that too. The flip side is of course that there was violence. Jews, again, became associated by many Czech nationalists as German and were scapegoated quite a lot of the time.
“So to be Czech often meant to not be German, and therefore sometimes to not be Jewish – although there were some Jews who gravitated toward the Czech community.
“Yes, I kind of fell in love with those stories too, especially writing my first book.
“I remember the first day that I was at the city archive when I was a graduate student. I was looking at the records of the committee that built that Jan Hus memorial – and there was a sign-in sheet of who was there at that first meeting.
“You could see that people were using different pens, just like you might pass around a sheet at a meeting.
“And Tomáš Masaryk was there, with his signature in a fountain pen. And just the idea of being a young historian and seeing other names, like Jan Podlipný, who was the mayor. So they were all there.
“But then to see Masaryk’s signature and just think he was a professor that was sitting at this meeting and they passed the paper to him – you know, that is an exciting period, for sure.”
Prague: The Heart of Europe comes out in Europe and the UK on the Oxford University Press imprint on January 8, 2026.
