What do you think?
Rate this book
Prague: Crossroads of Europe
Thirty years ago, Prague was a closed book to most travelers. Today, it is Europe’s fifth-most-visited city, surpassed only by London, Paris, Istanbul, and Rome. With a stunning natural setting on the Vltava river and featuring a spectacular architectural potpourri of everything from Romanesque rotundas to gothic towers, Renaissance palaces, Baroque churches, art nouveau cafés, and cubist apartment buildings, Prague may well be Europe’s most beautiful capital city.
But behind this beauty lies a turbulent and often violent history, and in this book, Derek Sayer explores both. Located at the uneasy center of the continent, Prague has been a crossroads of cultures for more than a millennium. From the religious wars of the middle ages and the nationalist struggles of the nineteenth century to the modern conflicts of fascism, communism, and democracy, Prague’s history is the history of the forces that have shaped Europe.
Sayer also goes beyond the complexities of Prague’s colorful past: his expert, very readable, and exquisitely illustrated guide helps us to see what Prague is today. He not only provides listings of what to see, hear, and do and where to eat, drink, and shop, but also offers deep personal reflection on the sides of Prague tourists seldom see, from a model interwar modernist villa colony to Europe’s biggest Vietnamese market.
But behind this beauty lies a turbulent and often violent history, and in this book, Derek Sayer explores both. Located at the uneasy center of the continent, Prague has been a crossroads of cultures for more than a millennium. From the religious wars of the middle ages and the nationalist struggles of the nineteenth century to the modern conflicts of fascism, communism, and democracy, Prague’s history is the history of the forces that have shaped Europe.
Sayer also goes beyond the complexities of Prague’s colorful past: his expert, very readable, and exquisitely illustrated guide helps us to see what Prague is today. He not only provides listings of what to see, hear, and do and where to eat, drink, and shop, but also offers deep personal reflection on the sides of Prague tourists seldom see, from a model interwar modernist villa colony to Europe’s biggest Vietnamese market.
- GenresHistory
280 pages, Hardcover
Published January 15, 2019
3 people are currently reading
16 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 10, 2025
I have never been to Prague and will probably never go, but I found this book very interesting. The author did a good job of making me feel the sweep of Prague's history, that the city existed long before there were Hussites. The author also had a talent for selecting a great quote or pointing out something absurd. So this was not a "this happened, then this happened," and "Building X is an example of Style Z," type of book.
Any guidebook has one job: to make the reader wish he could go to the city in question. "Prague: Crossroads of Europe" succeeds in this and made me want to read more about Prague.
Any guidebook has one job: to make the reader wish he could go to the city in question. "Prague: Crossroads of Europe" succeeds in this and made me want to read more about Prague.
Read
July 21, 2019Note: This book is showing up here as a new edition of Sayer's Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, which it is NOT.
The following is extracted from my longer review at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev....
In the years since the Velvet Revolution, Prague—for forty years a near-mystery behind the Iron Curtain—has become one of Europe’s most visited cities. Praised in the early 1990s as an expat destination rivaling Paris of the 1920s, then infested in the 2000s by drunken British stag parties, Prague has nonetheless remained a site too little understood by most of its visitors, many of whom have very little awareness of its complex history.
Derek Sayer’s Prague: Crossroads of Europe should help travelers gain a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the city and its context. Part of Reaktion’s Cityscapes series (other titles address Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, New York, Paris, and San Francisco), it combines history with travel guide. Titles in this series are written “by authors with intimate knowledge of the cities,” provide “a unique overview of a city’s past as well as a focused eye on its present,” and offer “essential cultural companions to the world’s greatest cities.” To accomplish this, the usual travel-guide format is reversed: instead of a short overview of the city followed by endless listings of sights, lodgings, restaurants, and shops, here we have 226 illustrated pages of urban and national history followed by twenty pages of listings, five pages of chronology, fifteen pages of citations for quoted material and additional sources, two pages of suggested reading and viewing, and a ten-page index.
As a scholar who often writes about Prague and the Czech lands (notably, the prize-winning books The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History [1998] and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History [2013]), Sayer is an appropriately knowledgeable author for this title. His background as a sociologist, combined with decades of research on Czech cultural history, gives him an unusually broad basis from which to prepare a guide for the intelligent, nonspecialist traveler. He writes in an accessible, jargon-free style and has a fine eye for the telling detail and illuminating anecdote.
While it is not conceived as an analytical text and (unsurprisingly) does not offer detailed accounts of population shifts, annexations of suburbs, construction of sewers, waterworks, or electrical grids, nor maps of the city’s growth, fortifications, or metro, Sayer is nonetheless alert to such
matters and weaves them into his text. The meat of the book consists of an informative prologue, twelve chapters of history, and seven essays about aspects of the city today.
The twelve historical chapters take us from the legendary birth of the city up to a brief look at the Velvet Revolution and its aftermath. The section “The City Today” then provides essays on the Prague coffee house, beer, Cubism, modernity, the Karlín district, Little Hanoi, and the Dancing House. These provide looks at aspects of the present-day city that include much political, ethnic, artistic, literary, and historical information. They do not attempt to give an account of the entire metropolitan area, but rather use specific topics to convey important aspects of the city.
While Prague: Crossroads of Europe is not a substitute for a scholarly text on the urban history of Prague, overall it provides a remarkably useful and very readable short history that will certainly be welcomed by scholars visiting the city; it can also be used as a quick reference. Sayer sprinkles information about numerous historical periods and topics into his chapters, which makes for a more engaging read but means the index is vital for readers who want to know specifics about particular structures or topics. Also, while quotations are cited and general sources are given, scholarly readers will have to hunt for sources of some of the information (such as data on street paving or electrification). Here, additional “Further Reading” titles would have been helpful. But so long as the reader recognizes the overarching purpose of the book, which is to give the traveler a historically focused introduction to the city, scholars as well as the general public should find this a worthy volume. In fact, it could also serve as a textbook for a course on the city, if supplemented with suitable additional readings.
The following is extracted from my longer review at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev....
In the years since the Velvet Revolution, Prague—for forty years a near-mystery behind the Iron Curtain—has become one of Europe’s most visited cities. Praised in the early 1990s as an expat destination rivaling Paris of the 1920s, then infested in the 2000s by drunken British stag parties, Prague has nonetheless remained a site too little understood by most of its visitors, many of whom have very little awareness of its complex history.
Derek Sayer’s Prague: Crossroads of Europe should help travelers gain a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the city and its context. Part of Reaktion’s Cityscapes series (other titles address Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, New York, Paris, and San Francisco), it combines history with travel guide. Titles in this series are written “by authors with intimate knowledge of the cities,” provide “a unique overview of a city’s past as well as a focused eye on its present,” and offer “essential cultural companions to the world’s greatest cities.” To accomplish this, the usual travel-guide format is reversed: instead of a short overview of the city followed by endless listings of sights, lodgings, restaurants, and shops, here we have 226 illustrated pages of urban and national history followed by twenty pages of listings, five pages of chronology, fifteen pages of citations for quoted material and additional sources, two pages of suggested reading and viewing, and a ten-page index.
As a scholar who often writes about Prague and the Czech lands (notably, the prize-winning books The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History [1998] and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History [2013]), Sayer is an appropriately knowledgeable author for this title. His background as a sociologist, combined with decades of research on Czech cultural history, gives him an unusually broad basis from which to prepare a guide for the intelligent, nonspecialist traveler. He writes in an accessible, jargon-free style and has a fine eye for the telling detail and illuminating anecdote.
While it is not conceived as an analytical text and (unsurprisingly) does not offer detailed accounts of population shifts, annexations of suburbs, construction of sewers, waterworks, or electrical grids, nor maps of the city’s growth, fortifications, or metro, Sayer is nonetheless alert to such
matters and weaves them into his text. The meat of the book consists of an informative prologue, twelve chapters of history, and seven essays about aspects of the city today.
The twelve historical chapters take us from the legendary birth of the city up to a brief look at the Velvet Revolution and its aftermath. The section “The City Today” then provides essays on the Prague coffee house, beer, Cubism, modernity, the Karlín district, Little Hanoi, and the Dancing House. These provide looks at aspects of the present-day city that include much political, ethnic, artistic, literary, and historical information. They do not attempt to give an account of the entire metropolitan area, but rather use specific topics to convey important aspects of the city.
While Prague: Crossroads of Europe is not a substitute for a scholarly text on the urban history of Prague, overall it provides a remarkably useful and very readable short history that will certainly be welcomed by scholars visiting the city; it can also be used as a quick reference. Sayer sprinkles information about numerous historical periods and topics into his chapters, which makes for a more engaging read but means the index is vital for readers who want to know specifics about particular structures or topics. Also, while quotations are cited and general sources are given, scholarly readers will have to hunt for sources of some of the information (such as data on street paving or electrification). Here, additional “Further Reading” titles would have been helpful. But so long as the reader recognizes the overarching purpose of the book, which is to give the traveler a historically focused introduction to the city, scholars as well as the general public should find this a worthy volume. In fact, it could also serve as a textbook for a course on the city, if supplemented with suitable additional readings.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews