The story
As you stand here on Bartolomějská Street, take a moment to look at the architecture surrounding you. It is a narrow, somewhat somber corridor in the heart of Prague’s Old Town. For decades, this street was a place people hurried through with their heads down, avoiding eye contact with the gray buildings.
You are standing before number nine. Today, it might look like just another historic facade, but during the forty years of Communist rule, this was the headquarters of the StB—the much-feared State Secret Police. The history of this specific site is a study in profound irony.
Long before it was a site of interrogation, it was a convent belonging to the Sisters of Mercy. In the 1950s, the regime seized the building, turning the nuns’ cells into damp, windowless dungeons. If you look down toward the pavement, imagine the basement levels where the air was thick with the smell of stale tobacco and damp stone.
This was the infamous "Péčko." It was here that Václav Havel spent some of his darkest and most defining hours. Before he was the President of a free nation, Havel was a dissident playwright, a man whose only weapons were his typewriter and his conscience.
He was arrested and brought to these cells numerous times throughout the 1970s and 80s. Imagine him sitting in a cramped cell, perhaps hearing the faint, muffled sound of footsteps from the street where you are standing now. The interrogation rooms upstairs were designed to break the spirit.
Detectives would play psychological games for hours, trying to force a confession or a betrayal of fellow dissidents. Yet, it was within these very walls that the foundation of the Velvet Revolution was inadvertently laid. Havel later wrote about the strange, heightened reality of prison life, where the lack of freedom made the value of truth even clearer.
In his famous "Letters to Olga," written during his longest stays in prison, he reflected on the human soul’s resilience against a machine that sought to crush it. The most incredible part of the story happened in 1989. In a twist of fate that no playwright could have scripted better, the man who was once hauled through these doors in handcuffs was suddenly being cheered by hundreds of thousands in Wenceslas Square.
Within weeks, he moved from the prisoner's cot here at Bartolomějská 9 to the gilded halls of Prague Castle as President. Today, the building has been returned to the sisters, and part of it serves as a hostel. You can even visit the preserved cells in the basement.
As you continue your walk, remember that these stones have witnessed the transition from silence to shouting, and from the darkness of a cell to the light of a new democracy.