The World of the City Park (The Vrchlický Park)

Egon Erwin Kisch

(…) The pond fed by the waterfall seems endlessly vast. This is where the pretzel seller offers round pretzels on a stick, three pieces for a kreutzer or a large butter one for two kreutzers. Then there is a woman with red, green and blue ten-kreutzer balloons, a grocer selling candied orange peel, and a confectioner with cheap multicoloured sweets. Chubby citizens feed swans and a stork with pretzels, and little girls in white dresses, socks and white shoes press their foreheads against the cool handrails gazing at unfathomably dark water.

A crane stands on one foot all day long, and it also has one eye only. It was brought by the explorer Holub from a far, far-away place somewhere in Africa, and we are also about to set for adventures far away. (…)

Text source: KISCH, Egon, Ervín. Pražská dobrodružství. Praha: Tiskárna RP. 1968. p. 45.

Photo source: Archiv Hl. města Prahy (City of Prague Archives)