The summer of 2016 saw me travel to the Czech Republic for the first time. The following piece I wrote for a college competition, the brief being to write a 400 word piece on a place at which you feel connected to the past.

A sea of ‘selfie-sticks’, segways and sight-seers who had no more comprehension of where they were than was given through the viewfinder of their iPhone swamped the square at all times. Whilst Prague’s iconic old town square seemed an ideal location for this piece, the reality of being there proved very different. The disregard and seeming disinterest in the subjects of their incessant snapping provided not only a physical barrier when trying to traverse the square but also made it very difficult to feel the impact of what had happened there. The story of church reformer and catalyst of the Hussite wars, Jan Hus, felt buried and inaccessible to me.

However, a place I had not expected to evoke such strong emotions was Letná Park, home to Prague’s giant metronome. One evening, I chanced to climb the steps to investigate further the metronome we had heard about from tour guides, expecting a throng of tourists. The metronome inhabits the spot once occupied by 17,000 tonnes of communist dictator, the largest statue of Stalin that has ever existed. What I actually found were local people living for themselves, not in the service of the tourist horde occupying the city. The overwhelming sense of the place was one of community. People lined the base of the metronome, reading, sharing a drink and generally taking in the vista of the greater city. The clatter of skateboards and laughter again gave the place a sense of unadulterated life, the normal tourist spots were completely lacking.

Standing sentinel over the city the colossus provided a clear symbol of the vice grip held by the USSR over Czechoslovakia. Whilst the ‘queue for meat’ was demolished after standing for only seven years, Czechoslovakia was subject to a soviet puppet government for forty-one years. During this time the people of Prague saw their aspirations snuffed out as they were condemned to manual labour, their hope of enjoying basic liberties like freedom of speech and movement crushed in 1968, and the once exuberant progress of their country dwindle behind the iron curtain. The site of the Stalin statue remains a symbol of their struggle with communism; an ideology based on community. Communism was however unable to bring Czechoslovakia together in anything but despair. However, fifty-four years after the destruction of the monument, the community of Prague have finally taken the space for their own; coming together in the face of the country's troubled past. The metronome continues to tick; demonstrating time has started to flow again in a place that was held hostage in the past for so long.