Colonial

Walking in Prague, one will not necessarily see the signs of Ajvaz’s “other city” (five days are too few to that), but in the details and moods there lies something from other cities, mainly from Vienna and Budapest. Even in the modern buildings, as if the sense of belonging together secretly survived the collapse of the pre-1918 world, or, in defiance of the crash, even decades later created squares and buildings of the same style, like Széna Square in Budapest and Anděl in Prague. It was the more surprising, therefore, when I stumbled across a tangible sign of this former unity on the Small Side of Prague, not far from the corner of the Újezd and the Petřinska:


I could not clear up what stood in the place of the current shop (maybe our readers can tell more about it). Most probably a simple colonial, a grocery store, as my newfound acquintance, Jakub pointed out, even though at first I thought it to be a liquor shop. In any case, it has a striking similarity with other fossils of the Monarchy, like the earlier seen inscriptions of Lemberg.