NOVE MESTO part 2

This week we are in the second part of Nove Mesto. The first flat that I lived in when I came to Prague was in Naplavni street and was a great place to start getting to know the Prague night life better and many a Saturday/Sunday morning was spent at the gyros stand on Spalena, not a place you want to be at 4.00/5.00 in the morning. During this time I didn't really have a good look around and I was unaware till much later of the significant history that this area has and now of course when I tell people about this are, my favourite subject is the much hated figure of Reinhard Heydrich and the British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government in exile. The assassination attempt was close to Bulovka in Prague 8 on the 27th May and he died from his injuries 12 days later on June 8th. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Lezaky. Lidice was razed to the ground; all adult males were executed, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps.

Heydrich's assailants hid in safe houses, and eventually took refuge in Cyril and Methodius Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Prague. A traitor in the Czech resistance betrayed their location. The church was surrounded by eight hundred members of the SS and Gestapo. Several Czechs were killed, and the remainder hid in the church's crypt. The Germans attempted to flush the men out with gunfire, tear gas, and by flooding the crypt. Eventually an entrance was created with explosives. Rather than surrender, the soldiers took their own lives.

I took the photos one weekend in June and it was when there were celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of this tragic event, when I say tragic I mean to the Czechoslovak country of course, so I thought it appropriate to write about it in this blog. The area itself though, is a hub of activity during the day and really comes alive at night. Even though I tried to limit the number of photos I took and only take photos of nice interesting shops bars and restaurants, I snapped up around 200 just in the second part of this blog and found it very hard to stick to the usual 10 places of interest and 10 bars, so this week I have decided to include 15 of each and still there are a lot of places that should also have been included that I decided to leave out, only for the reason that I knew these places too well and thought that other new interesting places deserved some of the limelight this time, so I apologise now to Nebe and the Red room for not including them in my selection.

Review

I (SVG) was asked to write the review because we went to this restaurant almost half a year ago and I always boast about my amazing memory... Well I think we women generally remember things better, especially promises, and to be more precise, the unfulfilled ones. We also start to forget when we have the first child and our brain is split in two - not sure what happens with more children, I'm scared to think about it. Back to the review - what I think we had as a starter was hommos and a very good soup which I can't find on the menu on the Internet. As a main course, I had a small selection of vegetarian starters/snacks which wasn't very exciting although I did like everything, especially the hommos and the other mash. David had lamb and, let me quote, it was "very Morrocan and rustic, flavoursome and filling". Good food turns David into a poet, you see.

The restaurant was quiet at the time we were there but I saw its lively side some other evening when there was a concert, generally there is a positive vibe in this place, and what I always pay attention to - clean, nicely decorated toilets and a baby changing table, yay! I would certainly go again and recommend the cuisine to meat-eaters.