Memorial to the Victims of Communism

Why is it significant?

Stand at the foot of the hill, where the tram stop meets the green slope, and look at the stairway climbing towards the trees. Seven bronze men are walking down it towards you, one behind the other. The man at the bottom looks whole.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand at the foot of the hill, where the tram stop meets the green slope, and look at the stairway climbing towards the trees. Seven bronze men are walking down it towards you, one behind the other. The man at the bottom looks whole. The ones behind him are missing an arm, a leg, half a chest... and the highest is barely a silhouette at all.

This is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, unveiled in 2002, twelve years after the regime fell. The sculptor was Olbram Zoubek, working with the architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk Hölzel. Zoubek knew the subject from close up. In January 1969, when the student Jan Palach burned himself to death in protest against the Soviet occupation, it was Zoubek who took his death mask, and for the next twenty years he was largely shut out of official art.

Now walk up to the bronze strip that runs along the middle of the steps. It is a ledger. Its numbers count the cost of the communist years: more than two hundred thousand people sentenced, 248 executed, some four and a half thousand who died in prison, 327 killed trying to cross the border, and more than 170,000 who left the country. There are no names. That is the point. The figures stand for people whose lives were not always ended, but slowly taken apart, exactly like the bronze.

Come back at dusk, when the lights along the steps come on and the men seem to step out of the dark. Locals hurry past to the tram, children run up the steps on Sunday afternoons... and that ordinariness is part of the design. The memorial does not sit in a solemn, fenced-off square. It stands at a busy corner of Malá Strana, at the exact line where the city stops and the hill begins.

And that is where this walk is going: up. Petřín is Prague's green hill, a slope of orchards, woods and old stone that rises straight out of the historic centre, and almost every Praguer has a memory of it, a first kiss, a school trip, a winter sledge run. Walk a few steps north along Újezd to the bottom of the funicular, then either ride it one stop or take the footpath beside the track. We meet again at the halfway station, among the trees.