Old Town Square North

And so we move slowly along the north side of the square that dominated Kafka's life, the buildings now so brightly painted that Kafka might not recognize them if he were there today. The yellow building with its Art Nouveau facade, topped by figures of firefighters, was designed by architect Oswald Polivka in the 19th century but renovated in the 21st. It replaced the building where Kafka's father had his first shop.

When we double back and retrace the route, from further back, we see something that Franz wouldn't see until adulthood: the statue of the radical Czech preacher Jan Hus.  Kafka witnessed the unveiling of this statue in 1915, exactly five hundred years after Hus was burned at the stake for heresy. The statue’s massiveness was not however a testament to the courage and integrity of Hus' attacks on the Catholic Church, but to his modern-day transformation into a symbol of Czech nationalism.  Not an irony, one supposes, that would have been lost on Kafka.