Café Slavia
The Café Slavia (Address: Smetanovo nábřeží 1012/2) is a known Prague Artist Café in the style of the 1930s on the banks of the Vltava River . The most famous piece of furniture is the 1901 Art Nouveau painting The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva .
history
The café was established in 1884 as a theater café in a Zinspalais Palais Lažanský (Palác Lažanských) belonging to Count Leopold Lažanský z Bukové, built in 1861–1863 . The construction of the neighboring Czech National Theater , begun in 1868, had stimulated the surrounding hospitality industry.
Café Slavia opened its doors on August 30, 1884 and benefited greatly from the theater. The regulars included Bedřich Smetana (who also lived at this address for a while), the actor Jindřich Mošna and the director Jaroslav Kvapil.
In the interwar period, the restaurant was redesigned in the French Art Deco style. The restaurant became a meeting place for authors such as Karel Čapek , Jaroslav Seifert or later, during the communist era, Václav Havel . The avant-garde Czech artists' association " Devětsil " (German: " Butterbur ") met here.
Right from the start, the restaurant had national Czech connotations. But Egon Erwin Kisch and the last German-speaking narrator in Prague, Lenka Reinerová , frequented the place, and the so-called “ Friday Rounds ” also gathered here .
Rainer Maria Rilke immortalized Slavia literarily as Café National in his novellas King Bohusch and Die Geschwister . Also in the book Comet Halley by Jaroslav Seifert to play a role. In his poem Cafe Slavia (1967) Seifert writes about Guillaume Apollinaire's visit there:
“In honor of the poet, absinthe was drunk,
which is greener than anything green,
and when we looked out of the window from our table
, the Seine flowed under the quay.
Oh yes, the Seine! "
Ota Filip wrote the novel Cafe Slavia in 1985 and Reiner Kunze named a subsection of his book The Wonderful Years after the cafe.
The Slavia was nationalized in 1948 and leased to a Russian-American entrepreneur in 1992 - after the end of the East-West conflict . It reopened in 1997 and is now popular with both Prague audiences and tourists.
Web links
- Cultural-historical representation of the role of the café
- Report on Hillary Clinton's visit to Café Slavia
- Photos by Jeff Shanberg
Individual evidence
- ^ Leopold Lažanský from Bukowa
- ^ New edition: Cafe Slavia. Herbig, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7766-2255-5 .
- ↑ Reiner Kunze: The wonderful years. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-10-042003-9 .
Coordinates: 50 ° 4 ′ 54.6 " N , 14 ° 24 ′ 47.7" E