In 1989, Richard Fidler was living in London as part of the provocative Australian comedy trio Doug Anthony All Stars when revolution broke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him.
Thiry years later, Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe’s most Instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth century, a Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world’s biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it.
