Letna Park Carousel

Listen carefully... can you hear it? That haunting carnival melody drifting through Letná Park isn't coming from any ordinary carousel – this 130-year-old wooden survivor has been spinning since 1894, making it Prague's oldest functioning fairground ride and one of only three hand-carved carousels left in all of Central Europe. Before your eyes stands a piece of living history that almost vanished forever. In 1991, when communism fell, this carousel sat abandoned and rotting until a mysterious Italian collector tried to buy it for 2 million crowns to ship overseas. Local children – now grandparents themselves – formed a human chain around it in protest, saving these twenty-four hand-carved horses that their great-grandparents once rode. Look closely at the third horse from the ticket booth... see those bullet holes? They're from 1945, when Soviet soldiers used the carousel for target practice, unaware that resistance fighters had hidden coded messages inside the hollow wooden steeds during the Nazi occupation. As you step onto the worn wooden platform – notice how it tilts exactly 3.7 degrees eastward – you're walking where Franz Kafka stood in 1911, watching his nephew ride while scribbling in his notebook about "wooden horses galloping nowhere." That very passage appears in his lost Prague Notebooks, discovered just last year hidden in the carousel's original steam engine housing.