Letná Plain: The Field Where a Regime Heard the Keys
Why is it significant?
Walk out onto the wide, flat grassland and keep going until the traffic noise fades behind you. It is just a field, enormous and a little scruffy, with a football stadium on one side and tram lines along the edges. And yet more Czech history has gathered on this grass than in many palaces.
Key Facts
| Place | Letná Plain: The Field Where a Regime Heard the Keys |
|---|---|
| Address | Letenská pláň, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09850, 14.42000 |
| Part of Walk | Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk out onto the wide, flat grassland and keep going until the traffic noise fades behind you. It is just a field, enormous and a little scruffy, with a football stadium on one side and tram lines along the edges. And yet more Czech history has gathered on this grass than in many palaces.
For decades the communist regime used Letná as its parade ground. On May Day and on great anniversaries, columns of soldiers, tanks and missiles rolled past a tribune where the party leaders stood and waved, and factory delegations marched past with banners and portraits. Attendance was not exactly optional.
Then, on 25 and 26 November 1989, a week after police had beaten students on Národní street, the opposition Civic Forum called a rally here. Around three quarters of a million people came, the largest demonstration in the country's history. They jingled their keys in the cold air, a sound like hundreds of thousands of tiny bells, telling the regime that its time was up. A general strike followed, and barely a month later the dissident playwright Václav Havel was president.
The same field has seen almost everything since. In April 1990 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass here, the first papal visit to Czechoslovakia, before a vast crowd. Rock concerts, circuses and festivals have pitched their tents here, and every few years the field fills again when Czechs feel the need to say something together.
On the western side stands the stadium of Sparta Prague, one of the oldest football clubs in the country, founded in 1893. On match days the whole neighbourhood turns red, and the rivalry with Slavia, from across the river, is older than Czechoslovakia itself. Now head for the eastern edge of the plain, where a long pale building of the 1930s stands on Kostelní street.