Day Six. The same poet. The city that printed his words when his empire banned them.
The 6 A.M. Train
There is a particular discipline to the early morning train. Not the romantic kind of early, not the pre-dawn departure into mystery, but the practical kind: the alarm at five, the dark streets, the station tea that is too hot to drink properly, the platform in the grey hour before the city has quite decided to begin. The Vienna–Prague route departs at six. It arrives, four hours later, at ten. This is what transit looks like when you have filled a week with Shevchenko and there is still a city left to visit.
I had done the Vienna portion of this journey already, in the particular way that Vienna and I have arranged our relationship: the city as base, the city as fulcrum, the city I pass through on the way to everywhere else. This time I was passing through it on the way north. The train moved out of the station in the early morning grey, the Austrian countryside resolving slowly from darkness into green, and I settled in with tea and the quiet particular to trains in the hour when most of the carriage is still sleeping.
Four hours is long enough to think. I thought about Prague.
What Prague Knew Before I Arrived
Shevchenko never went to Prague. This is one of the facts about him that carries its own weight: a man of enormous intellectual reach, connected to the Slavic world through his poetry and his friendships and his reading, and he never stood in this city. He dedicated the introduction of his poem The Heretic, about Jan Hus, the Czech reformer who was burned for his refusal to be silent — to the Czech Slavist Pavlo Jozef Šafárik. He knew what Hus meant. He understood what it was to hold to truth at the cost of everything. He wrote about Hus from a country under the same empire that would eventually exile him to the Kazakh steppe. He never came to the city whose hero he honoured.
And yet Prague had done something for Shevchenko that no other city had done.
In 1876, when the Russian Empire issued the Ems Decree, the ukaz that banned the publication of Ukrainian-language texts, it was in Prague that the first complete, uncensored edition of the Kobzar was printed. Two volumes, in the printing house of Eduard Grégr, with the effort of Sofia and Oleksandr Rusov and Fedir Vovk and their Czech allies. The empire tried to silence a poet. Prague printed his words and sent them back across the border in defiance. There is a commemorative plaque today on the building at the corner of Opletalova and Politických vězňů streets, a building that carries, in its stone, the record of what solidarity between peoples can look like when it chooses to be concrete.
The train arrived at Praha Hlavní Nádraží at ten in the morning. I found the tram.
Náměstí Kinských and What Replaced the Tank
The tram system in Prague is one of the great pleasures of European transit: old, red, reliable, moving through streets that were built for horses and have been persuaded, over a century, to accommodate electric rails. I had the address of the monument, náměstí Kinských, Smíchov, Praha 5, and the tram would carry me to the stop at Švandovo Divadlo, from which the monument is a short walk.
I knew something about the square before I arrived. This is what it looked like before 2009, before Shevchenko: it had a Soviet tank on it. A real tank, a T-34 IS-2, on a high granite pedestal, placed there as a monument to the liberation of Prague by the Red Army in 1945. After 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled through Prague again, the monument had become something more complicated: not a symbol of liberation but of occupation, of the same force that had liberated you returning to crush what you had built in the decades since. In 1991, a young artist named David Černý painted it pink. The authorities painted it back. Members of parliament painted it pink again. Eventually the tank was removed, and the pedestal came down, and the square got its original name back, Kinských, not Square of the Soviet Tankists, and a fountain appeared where the pedestal had stood.
And on the other side of the square, since 2009, a young Ukrainian poet holds a scroll to his heart and looks out across the place where a Soviet tank used to stand.
I find this arrangement clarifying.
The Young Man with the Scroll
I came around the corner from the tram stop and found him without difficulty. The monument is not hidden; it is not tucked away in a residential neighbourhood or placed somewhere that requires navigational determination. It stands in an open square, in front of the UN representation in the Czech Republic, visible and deliberate.
What stopped me, as it had in Vienna, was the youth of him.
This is the young Shevchenko, the face taken from his early self-portrait, unlined, full of something that has not yet been tested by exile and prohibition and the long erosion of Kazakhstan’s winters. He stands in a frock coat, his left hand pressing a scroll to his heart. The scroll contains his words. He is holding them close to himself, protecting them, offering them simultaneously. The gesture is both private and public, both guarded and extended: these are mine, and I am giving them to you.
The sculpture was created by Ukrainian sculptors V.I. Znoba and M.V. Znoba, with architect Veronika Dirova, executed by the Znoba Atelier in Kyiv. The younger Znoba, Mykola, born in 1974, prepared this work specifically for Prague. The Ukrainian community in the Czech Republic debated the design; the vote for the younger Shevchenko rather than the older, familiar icon won by a single vote. One vote. I am grateful for that margin.
The monument was unveiled on March 25, 2009, by President Viktor Yushchenko during a state visit to the Czech Republic. Under the choral singing of Reve ta Stohne Dnipro Shyrokyi, the President and Kateryna Yushchenko removed the covering from the bronze. Yushchenko said at the ceremony: Shevchenko is on Czech soil today, in a country he never visited in life, but which he loved, and to which his image has now come permanently.
Permanently. The word lands differently now, after February 2022.
In May 2022, the Ukrainian Embassy in Prague surrounded the monument with sandbags, the same sandbags that had been protecting statues in Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv, as part of an initiative to make visible to European city-dwellers what Ukrainian cities were living through every day. A Ukrainian poet on a Czech square, in a city that had once known its own occupation, wrapped in the symbols of a war he had spent his life prophesying.
He had seen this before. He had written about it. He had been right.
Заповіт, Carved in Stone
I did what I always do. I stood at the base of the monument and I recited.
In Prague, the recitation had a quality it had not quite had elsewhere in this series. Because Заповіт is not only the poem I carry with me to every monument, it is also, here, the poem inscribed on the monument itself. The words I was saying into the Prague air were already carved into the stone beneath my feet.
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій, Щоб лани широкополі, І Дніпро, і кручі Було видно, було чути, Як реве ревучий.
Standing in Smíchov, in the square where a Soviet tank once stood and was painted pink by a young artist who refused the symbol, saying Zapoвіт back to the man who had written it, with those same words already present in the stone, there is a particular doubling to that. You are not speaking into absence. You are speaking into echo. The poem answers itself.
I said Слава Україні.
The Bus to the Lennon Wall
I did not linger on the tram back toward the centre. I had one more stop, and the city was cooperating: clear November air, the kind of Central European autumn afternoon that makes you feel the light is doing something personal, something directed specifically at you. I caught the bus that would carry me to the Lennon Wall, Malá Strana, the Lesser Town, the curve of the Vltava, the winding lanes behind the embassy buildings.
The Lennon Wall is not a monument to John Lennon in the way a bronze statue is a monument. It is a surface, a permission, a place where people have been writing and drawing and leaving words since the 1980s, when Czech youth began using the image of a Beatle as a language for everything they could not say directly about freedom and peace and the desire for something other than what the system offered. The authorities painted over it. The writing came back. It always came back.
After February 24, 2022, the wall became something else as well: a canvas for solidarity with Ukraine. Messages in Ukrainian, in Czech, in English, in a dozen other languages. The blue and yellow of the flag woven into murals alongside the old images of Lennon and peace signs and flowers. A wall that had always been about the refusal to be silent, receiving the Ukrainian refusal to be silenced.
I stood at the Lennon Wall and I thought about the printing house around the corner from the train station, where in 1876 the Kobzar came out when the empire said it could not. I thought about the young man with the scroll at náměstí Kinských. I thought about the single vote margin that gave us the young Shevchenko instead of the older one.
The words on the wall and the words on the pedestal and the words in the scroll held to the bronze heart: they are all the same refusal. They just wear different shapes in different centuries.
He was already there when I arrived. The square where a tank once stood. The fountain where the pedestal was. The young poet holding his words close and offering them at the same time.
He always is.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
More this week. Each day, a different city. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The monument to Taras Shevchenko in Prague stands at náměstí Kinských in the Smíchov district (Praha 5), before the UN representation in the Czech Republic. It is a 2.2-metre bronze figure depicting a young Shevchenko — his face modelled on his early self-portrait — pressing a scroll to his heart. It was created by Ukrainian sculptors V.I. Znoba and M.V. Znoba with architect Veronika Dirova, produced by the Znoba Atelier in Kyiv. Commissioned by the Ukrainian community in the Czech Republic, it was unveiled on March 25, 2009, by President Viktor Yushchenko during a state visit. The total cost of construction and installation was approximately 2 million Czech crowns. The square where it stands was formerly known as náměstí Sovětských tankistů — Square of the Soviet Tankists — and bore a T-34 IS-2 tank monument, made infamous when artist David Černý painted it pink in 1991 as an act of protest; the tank was removed that same year. In May 2022, the monument was surrounded by sandbags in solidarity with Ukraine, as part of an initiative by the Ukrainian Embassy and the City of Prague. The nearest tram stop is Švandovo Divadlo, served by trams 1, 2, 9, 12, 15, and 20. Prague is also home to a commemorative plaque at the corner of Opletalova and Politických vězňů streets, marking the building where the first uncensored edition of the Kobzar was printed in 1876 by Eduard Grégr’s printing house.
References
Czech-Ukrainian Scientific Society. (2026, March 9). On the anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko. Prague. https://www.facebook.com/groups/512687172453850/posts/3087921954930346/
Embassy of Ukraine in the Czech Republic. (2021, March 11). У Чехії поклали квіти до меморіальної дошки та пам’ятника Шевченку. Ukrinform. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-diaspora/3206069-u-cehii-poklali-kviti-do-memorialnoi-doski-ta-pamatnika-sevcenku-i-znali-video.html
KP Ukraine. (2022, May 31). В Чехії пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку «захистили від обстрілів» мішками з піском. https://kp.ua/life/v-chekhii-pamjatnik-tarasu-shevchenko-zashchitili-ot-obstrelov-meshkami-s-peskom
Radio Prague (Russian Service). (2016, April 28). Четверть века «розовому танку». https://ruski.radio.cz/chetvert-veka-rozovomu-tanku-8227283
Shukach. (2017). Пам’ятник Т.Г. Шевченку, м. Прага. https://www.shukach.com/ru/node/60173
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку (Прага). https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пам’ятник_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Прага)
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