Stories in timber and stone - Europe’s Old Towns

Dear fellow travellers,

The first time I set foot in Prague’s Old Town square I was just 19 years old, on the second leg of an Interrail trip. It was one of those journeys with no real plan beyond a vague idea that we might to “see Europe”. Or perhaps better: to see the Europe that I imagined was out there waiting for me.

In Prague, it felt like I had already found that very Europe. Cobblestones and Gothic spires. The astronomical clock on the town hall. The jumble of buildings all around that spoke of a different time, far beyond living memory. And then there was the clamour of young people sitting by the statue, with bottles of beer and the odd guitar, bringing the scene right back to the mid-1990s. Our hostel, just a few steps away, in the labyrinth of streets that surrounded the square.

As we travelled, these set-piece Old Town squares became a central motif of the trip. Find a hostel in or as close to the “Old Town” as possible. We were not interested in the bits of the cities that look like something we could find in Liverpool or Manchester. We wanted something that we felt was authentically different. Prague, at the very start of our trip, set a standard. Followed by the neighbourhood around the castle in Budapest. Then Ljubljana, tucked in beside its deep green river. They were romantic places. Places a bookish 19-year-old could imagine living. Romanticised, of course. It would have to be attic rooms above a cobblestone street.

Thirty-odd years later and those same places still hold some of that appeal. And I am not alone. The Old Town square, wherever you might find one, may no longer be the city centre in the real sense for the people that live there. But for the visitor, for the tourist, the traveller, it is invariably the starting point, the place from which explorations begin and to which we will return time and again.

But however much they still attract us, especially when the streetscape boasts a feast of half-timbered houses and stone, with sleepy squares, domineering churches and a hint of attic rooms to which this forty-six year-old would still sometimes like to retreat, I know that most Old Towns are not exactly what they appear. How can they be, when tides of history have washed over them time and again? And especially in the part of Europe where I now live, a place defined as ‘Middle Europe’ by Marek Kohn in his book The Stories Old Towns Tell.

Kohn’s exploration of Old Towns in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania is a necessary corrective to simplistic romantic notions of what these spaces are, even if Kohn, like me, is susceptible to such notions as well. Kohn understands the seductive power of Old Towns, while exploring the complex realities behind the often picture-perfect facades. His book is part architectural and social history, and part meditation on authenticity and memory, examining how Old Towns across his ‘Middle Europe’ have been shaped as much by destruction and modern preservation and reconstruction efforts as by medieval craftsmanship.

On recent travels to Poland, I marvelled at the beauty of Warsaw’s Old Town whilst being fully aware that what might seem at first glance to be an ancient place, carefully preserved, is actually the product of twentieth-century reconstruction. Kohn tells the story of how Warsaw’s oldest quarter was meticulously rebuilt after its complete destruction in 1944. Using documents, sketches and plans, as well as some photographs that had survived the Nazi occupation and devastation, Polish architects created what has been recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. In its inscription, UNESCO recognises the cultural value of the architecture and the layout of the city, but with a specific nod to what the act of reconstruction represents. The citation runs:

To stand in the heart of Old Warsaw, where most of the buildings are younger than my father, is to be struck by the paradox of a place that is both utterly authentic and completely fake, true to the historical reality whilst being somehow displaced by centuries.

Another trip to Poland took me to Gdańsk and the reconstructed facades of the Long Market. Here too, wartime devastation had been followed by careful rebuilding, where the choices made around what was rebuilt and how seemed to tell as much of a story about memory, identity and belonging as the buildings themselves. In Gdańsk, rebuilders had chosen to emphasise the city’s Hanseatic heritage, whilst leaving to rubble elements that might have spoken of more recent, German times. Authentic or curated? A bit of both?

So what does authenticity mean? I doubt if there is an answer to this question that could be agreed on by all, just a set of ideas that are up for debate. If an Old Town faithfully recreates the appearance and spatial relationships of its mediaeval predecessor, does it matter if the stones are newly quarried? And given that cities have developed over time, layer upon layer, shaped by people and events, trends and regimes, culture and politics… how authentic can something actually be if we draw a line between the cobblestones and say “to here but no further”?

If anything, through travels of my own and those across the pages of Kohn’s book, I have become even more fascinated by Old Towns. They tell us about the past that lives in our collective imagination but also of the present. About versions of the history we want to tell ourselves. About what we think of as beautiful and what we reject. And about how Old Towns are home to multiple narratives, sometimes conflicting, sometimes in full view and sometimes hidden behind the carefully restored facades.

With this latest Letter from Europe, we are making available the full texts of three articles first published in print in hidden europe. These pieces relate respectively to three cities with striking streetscapes: Poznan, Odessa and Geneva.

Paul Scraton