The facade of the building has lighter areas - patched up bullet holes from the Warsaw Pact troops in 1969 and memorial set into the pavement where national hero Jan Palach fell, having set himself on fire in protest against those same troops.
I have no idea how non-museos feel about this museum, about how people who enter the museum as something to tick off a list: 'Prague - fortress, check. Josefov, check. Museum of some description...' would feel about this museum. I was fascinated.
The museum displays are undoubtedly old and outdated. I saw not a single interactive, no new media, no modern lighting techniques, most galleries contained text only in Czech. In short, the museum was like it had stopped in time (presumably around about 1993, when they switched labels referring to Czechoslovakia to labels referring to Czech Republic and Slovakia). The comprehensive geological collection is presented 'as is', beautiful dark wooden cases display row upon row, room upon room of geological specimen along with their name and location where they were found. You marvel at the colours, hues, shapes and visual properties of the various minerals, but with no interpretation. What does this mean for me, beyond now knowing that such things exist?
The prehistory section was enjoyable, but that too comes with a caveat. I loved explaining what the archaeological objects were to Wolfgang (who humours me and probably knows a good chunk of it anyway) and how I could tell, in lieu of more than cursory description in English (and it also looked quite scant for Czech speakers too). There was a mixture of original artefacts and reproductions and the makings of what could have been a really informative exhibitions and nice overview of Czech prehistory, just rather uninspiringly laid out in glass vitrines along a wall, grey or beige.
I really liked the anthropology section which had lots of skeletons, and descriptions (in Czech!) about the differences between males and female skeletons and aging techniques such as dental eruption and epiphysial fusion. But again, it's only accessible if you speak Czech, or have an (over-)enthusiastic Temperance Brennan wannabe (five years post archaeology graduation, which meant much of what was said was prefaced with, "now, I think...")
Now, to be entirely fair there is a new section of the museum in a different building, but we didn't make it that far. It seems strange that with the collection they have and the fantastic building it is housed in, that they would start on a new building and leave the old one to ossify at the main site.
Has anyone seen it? What did they think?
