Hloubětín immediately gives the impression of an aesthetically pleasing station, as the Prague Metro finally dips its toes into multi-coloured territory. Gone are the two-tone offerings of stations past, as Hloubětín comes flying out of the gate with a striking facade that offers yellow, green, both royal and navy blue on a plain white background. It is a delight, for sure.
That is about as good as it gets for Hloubětín. Sure, that likely sounds a little disrespectful, but I’ve stressed on many occasions throughout the book already that not everything is beautiful all of the time, and neither should it be. The initial array of sights waiting at the exit of the metro station don’t inspire a huge amount of hope either. An outdated looking casino-slash-Chinese restaurant is the first establishment that comes into view, a building that inspires neither a desire to gamble nor a need to dine on fine oriental cuisine.
A seemingly devastated shopping centre stands opposite, either under construction or reeling from a recent earthquake. The sight of police talking to idling folk is not a strange one, although it is never really clear if the folk are being apprehended because of a transgression of simply occupying a little bit more of the officer’s shift. Hloubětín is some nine kilometres from the centre of Prague, the hustle and bustle of the middle long gone, and this part of the city really does feel like an entirely different town.
It won’t come as a great surprise to hear that until 1922 it was a different town, swallowed up in the great Prague expansion of that hallowed year. The town itself first appears in the record books in the 13th century, when the fabulously named Teutonic Knights took control of it. It has been through a number of name changes over the years, all which seem to have been based around the Czech word Hlúpata. That might not seem weird to the non-Czech speaker, but knowing that is is pretty much the Czech word for ‘fool’ might change that. Why would you name your town Fool? There must be a good reason for it. Maybe it was to try and keep the Teutonic Knights from messing things up too much, following the example of the oh so green Iceland? Or maybe the emphasis on the fool comes from the fact that the town centres around an old pub, a very old pub, a 17th-century pub, presumably full of fools?
The oldest building here is the Gothic church of St. Jiří, a structure first mentioned along with the town itself in 1207. Originally a Romanesque piece of work, the church has seen wars, fire, famine, the introduction of baby boxes and a whole lot more over the last 800 years. Fairly standard stuff, in truth.
Hold on a second, baby boxes? A baby what now? If you have a particularly dark imagination then you may have conjured up an idea already, but let me douse those dark fires. A baby box is exactly what it says on the tin — a box for babies. The first Baby Box in the entire country was installed in a dilapidated Habsburg-era building in Hloubětín in 2005, a building that now houses a gynaecological clinic. The whole thing was an initiative of a private NGO by the name of Statim, run by a father of 20 (only eight of whom are biological) called Ludvík Hess. The idea of this remote building and device is for mothers to leave unwanted children without being seen. Leaflets can be found offering advice to the distressed mother, but I dare say the decision has been made by the time she makes it to the box. When the child has been deposited an alarm goes off in the clinic, alerting the nurses inside of the presence of a child in the box. Over the first seven years, 17 babies were left here.
Some of you may respond to this idea with no small amount of horror, and that is understandable. Abandoning babies in boxes?! Horrible! How could anyone do that to a child?! I would never do such a thing! All understandable responses, but let us be humans here. First of all, it is best not to try and criticise the choices made by an individual in a position so desperate as to leave their baby in a box. Nobody makes such a decision on a whim. The Czech Republic has a serious problem with abandoned children, and man-made economical misery has seen the number of kids left on the streets rise sharply over the last couple of decades. Nobody wants babies being left in boxes, but it is a whole lot better than babies being left on the side of the road or in actual bins.
Because that is what happens from time to time. Single parents in a hopelessly desperate state might not be able to see the options in front of them, and the baby box provides an outlet that is as humane as abandonment is going to get. The baby might not know who its biological parents are as it grows up, but it won’t die in a bin either. The right to life is far more important than the right to know who your biological parents are, surely.
The use of the word ‘dilapidated’ a few paragraphs isn’t entirely fair, as the baby box is found near to Hloubětín’s Neo-Gothic castle, built on the site of an old fortress that was burned to the ground by the Swedes in 1648. It is owned by the Jewish community, who regained control of the building in 1990 and in turn rented it to the gynaecology clinic. The castle is undoubtedly an impressive building, but it is somewhat difficult to appreciate when aware of the whole baby box thing, or more the mental distress that one must go through before deciding to go there. It is difficult to think of a more cruel decision one might be forced to make.
In Via The Left Bank of the ‘90s, John Bills takes the reader on a tour of Prague using the underground network as his guide, from the birth of the city at Vyšehrad through to the Velvet Revolution at Národní Třída and everywhere in between, including blokes who loved orchids and no small amount of executions. This is everything you ever wanted to know about Prague, and then some. The eBook available in our splendid little shop here.
Poshlost Books 