Café Slavia: The Living Room of Czech Literature
Why is it significant?
Stand on the corner where Národní avenue meets the river, and look at the tall windows on the ground floor of the building opposite the National Theatre. Behind them is Café Slavia, open since 1884, and for well over a century the living room of Czech literature.
Key Facts
| Place | Café Slavia: The Living Room of Czech Literature |
|---|---|
| Address | Smetanovo nábř. 1012/2, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08150, 14.41320 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the corner where Národní avenue meets the river, and look at the tall windows on the ground floor of the building opposite the National Theatre. Behind them is Café Slavia, open since 1884, and for well over a century the living room of Czech literature.
Its regulars read like the contents page of a national anthology. Writers and painters, and actors from the theatre across the street who came over after the curtain fell. In the 1920s the young avant-garde poets of the Devětsil group, with their theorist Karel Teige, argued here about poetry, surrealism and revolution over cups of cold coffee. The poet Jaroslav Seifert, one of them, sat in these rooms for decades. In 1984 he became the first Czech to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a signatory of the dissident Charter 77, to the visible discomfort of the regime.
Inside, look for the painting on the wall: The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva. A man sits at a café table, staring at a glass of pale green spirit, while a translucent green woman, the spirit of the drink itself, perches on the table in front of him. It has hung here for so long that the café is hard to imagine without her.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Slavia was also where dissidents met, and where secret police informers sat at the next table pretending to read the paper. Václav Havel was a regular. After 1989, in a dispute over the building, the café closed for several years, and Havel, by then president, was among those who called for it to reopen. It finally did in the late 1990s.
The view is the real reason to come. From these windows you see the Vltava, Petřín Hill and Prague Castle floating above Malá Strana, the panorama every poet in this room tried at some point to put into words. Now turn your back on the river and walk east along Národní, past the National Theatre's golden roof, to the long facade at number 22.