Much has already been written about the architecture of the Prague metro, which opened 50 years ago. And rightfully so. Few subways can evoke such an uplifting feeling as Prague’s A line. All you have to do is look at some of the stations with their conical stoves, the way they subtly soften the light. They refer to history and their surroundings, but at the same time they build it completely anew.
Even the much discussed visual smog in the subway is not as terrible as it might seem. Compared to Berlin or Budapest, where the walls of (relatively drab) stations are routinely plastered with advertising banners from floor to ceiling. And it doesn’t help that they are often posters referring to tourist attractions on the surface. The majestic architecture of the oldest parts of the Prague metro is an attraction in itself.
But what about all the empty spaces? No billboards, no display cases newly lined with exhibits, no art in the lobbies. The subway is fascinating even where there is nothing. In the vistas of dark tunnels, empty transfer corridors, in places where there are no banners, no art. That is where it is closest to our subconscious.
A few days ago, a sixteen-year-old boy, Jan Boháč, appeared in the vestibule of the Anděl metro station with a petition. In it, he requested the removal of the Moscow–Prague inscription, a legacy of the previous regime, which still adorns the marble lining of the former Moskva. It was supposed to serve, among other things, as a reminder that Soviet engineers were significantly involved in the construction of the station in the 1980s (the Czechoslovak ones in return helped with the construction of the Pražskaja station). However, Deputy Minister for Transport Zdeněk Hřib objects that the sculpture is a lie. There was no friendship between Moscow and Prague, the Soviet Union occupied Prague.
Why is it that an explanatory sign was not added to the inscription a long time ago, which the metro architect Anna Švarc already thought about last year?
Maybe also because in the underground we are used to overlooking everything a little. Medieval excavations in the vestibule of Műstok, but also advertisements for pizza. Sometimes both at the same time, when commerce pushes history. If Jan Boháč had known that a mosaic with Lenin was hidden behind the newsstand on Staroměstská…
The Czech action video game Hrot playfully plays with the spirit of the dark past in the subway. Set in the world of communist Prague, it begins at the Kosmonautů station (today’s Háje). Empty, dark corridors, ventilation shafts, pixelated visuals and brownish colors refer to the first shooters, after all, it is built on the engine of the famous Quake game. Your enemies? For example, the Konfidenti – giant flying heads that call out: “Lenin lives!”
Hrot is not trying to make any valuable comment on the discussion about the traumas of the past. All he cares about is summoning ghosts from subway lobbies and shooting them head on.
Subway in the subconscious
I must have been eleven years old when a friend pointed out to me, with a certain pride that he knew more than I did, “You’re about to enter a nuclear bomb bunker.” It scared the crap out of me. Not only because I couldn’t imagine anything scarier than nuclear war, but also because I never noticed the huge pressure door at the end of the tunnel. It’s all in front of my eyes every day – and I haven’t seen them anyway.
The metro is an environment of extremes. Either it turns on selective blindness in a person, thanks to which they regularly pass sculptures celebrating the friendship between Moscow and Prague, or it opens up uncertainty and fear.
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“That’s exactly how the subway seemed to him. Behind its tunnels, stations and nooks and crannies, it reminded him most of the underworld. All around stone like in temple corridors, lights like beams and strangely cold darkness. And thousands of people still flocked to it every day, rushing for something elusive. A lost soul, as he himself was,” wrote writer Michal Šefara in the thriller Underworld in 2017.
In Shephar’s story, pigeons die mysteriously in the vestibules, mysterious signs appear on the walls of the tunnels. The stations themselves come alive. The writer originally from Břeclav claims that the metro is like the shadow of the city. And that moving freely in close proximity to the underworld – it can be waiting for us right behind the inconspicuous door for maintenance workers – is quite foolish from the people of Prague. According to Šefara, it is even worse to build new tunnels of the planned route D. “Who knows where people will kick. Prague has its soul, the question is whether we want to dig into it.”
Šefara frankly admits that he was inspired by the now legendary underground novel Metro 2033 by the Russian writer Dmitry Gluchovsky. His massively successful post-apocalyptic trilogy, which spawned a series of computer games, also appealed to readers who feel anxious on the subway. Metro 2033, however, was mainly aimed at those of us who are restlessly peering at the pressure doors and Googling the nuclear shelter in Klárov.
In Gluchovsky’s trilogy, the Moscow metro becomes the only place where humanity has not been affected by nuclear armageddon. The survivors drink mushroom tea or brandy made in the tunnels and dream of the ancient past. He suspects that humanity has gone back thousands of years in evolution. Underground stations become political enclaves, here fascists, elsewhere communists.
Like Šefara, Gluchovski likes to work with mysterious elements. In some places they worship the Great Worm, in others they have to fight with “demons”, mutated monsters living on the surface of devastated Moscow, who occasionally descend underground and threaten the last survivors. Far more dangerous are the places where the subway tunnels “talk” or simply concentrate something elusive but destructive. Just don’t be careful and you can go crazy in them.
Underground irony
The painful paradox of the Russian-Ukrainian war seemingly turned Gluchovsky’s story on its head. But not quite. Over time, the Russian writer left the mysterious Metro line, and in other works (Metro 2034 and 2035) increasingly perceived the underground microworld as an allegory for human smallness and blindness. Similar to the author’s other works, the underground saga could be read as a critique of Russian conditions.
“Metro 2035 was released in 2015, a year after the annexation of Crimea. The main character of that saga, Arťom, was trying to save the residents of the subway all the time. He told people that it was better on the surface, he tried to get them there. But then he said to himself: go to hell, fuck you, I’m tired of you. And he went to the surface alone,” explained Gluchovskij in an interview for Seznam Zprávy last year. “These are the feelings I experience. You try to convince people and they tell you that you are the worst foreign agent.”
The author of a post-apocalyptic subway survival saga has been sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison by the Russian government. Allegedly because he urged his fellow citizens not to support the invasion of Ukraine.
See how Seznam Zpráv photographer Michal Turek captured the Prague subway at night:
Photo: Michal Turek, Seznam Zpravy
Meanwhile, something very similar to Gluchovsky’s story was happening in the subway in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“The mental pressure gets to you down there. When a thousand people frown at you 24 hours a day, it sticks to you,” says documentary filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovský. He filmed in the Kharkiv underground with people who were hiding there from Russian attacks. The film Timidity focused on a young boy, Nikita, who is obviously suffering after spending months in the subway underground. He is quiet, pensive, the doctor in the improvised office in the station lobby diagnoses him with an extreme lack of vitamin D.
In Shrewdness, subway cars are transformed into sad bedrooms, while the subway lobby is crowded with waiting people whose train just won’t come home. Poignant songs are heard through the station, which many “fellow passengers” are already fed up with. And then there’s Nikita, who hasn’t seen sunlight in five months. “I can’t imagine what all this will do to the children. What kind of people will they be in fifteen years,” says Ostrochovský.
A strange bitterness remains after the fascination with the mystery of the subway. Ostrochovský’s film serves as proof that there may not be any mystery hidden in the underground corridors. Just the horror of the idea that we will be stuck in such a place with our own consciousness.
Vertigo from emptiness
It is of course possible to feel safe in the subway – or not to deal with its atmosphere at all. It’s enough that a person is in a hurry for a meeting and doesn’t care about anything other than getting to the destination as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the subway is a place where one stands very close to the so-called liminal space. That is, an unstable, borderline place.
British academic and blogger Ian Rodwell explains that a typical liminal space is the beach. The transition point between the land and the sea, which disappears for a few hours at high tide, is flooded with water. The word of Latin origin is also used in connection with psychology. It indicates transitional life periods – for example between childhood and adulthood, periods of separation and divorce, times when we feel vulnerable and experience fundamental changes.
The metro is not a beach (even if it has already been underwater), nor are we experiencing major life changes here. On the other hand, just watch what it does to our psyche when we step onto the very edge of the platform. We look into the depth of the tunnel. Or if we imagine that we are in a transfer corridor and find that the elevator is not working and the escape exits are locked.
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Another term that should be associated with the atmosphere of the subway is non-places. Anthropologist Marc Augé used them to denote spaces with a single purpose. Places that we only have to pass through, only to shop. We often legitimize ourselves in them, pay a fee, orient ourselves according to information signs. We rarely confess our love in them, we don’t care about them, we don’t cry – that’s not done here.
But precisely because of its spacelessness and liminality, the subway becomes a great projection screen for our imaginations. Fantasy can behave under the sterile fluorescent lights of underground passages in the same way as in the dark in the middle of the forest.
In the darkness of the tunnel, the imagination is even stronger. Even some unnamed metro employees admit that when an immeasurable length of tunnel opens up in front of them – for example from IP Pavlova to distant Ládví – they sometimes feel a little dizzy.
So far, the last book in which the subway turned into a haunted place was the novella “U” by the German writer Timur Vermes, translated last year. A woman and a man in the Berlin underground, a busy day and Vermes’ staccato narration, which plays with the idea that a few-minute, completely purposeful journey through the underground would become an endless, horror trip. What if the vertigo from the tunnel was real and lasted more than a few seconds?
U can be read on the way from Depo Hostivař to Dejvicka (you won’t even need an extension to Motolo). You will probably forget about her quickly. But Vermes captures well the subtle weight that some of us feel when we find ourselves in the darkness of the underground. Behind that strange feeling in the metro may not be the ghost of Lenin, who is said to sometimes walk along Dejvická. It may not even be a harbinger of the apocalypse and a life spent underground, but purely a fear of an unstable, unnatural environment. After all, if the station pumps were turned off, the subway would soon be flooded with groundwater.
In the end, Metro copes well with its instability. And if he adds a sign to the Moscow-Prague sculpture, maybe even Lenin’s ghost will stop haunting it.
