I went on a virtual Plague tour of Prague
It’s after dark, and I’m following a man with a giant beak through the empty streets of Prague. This isn’t one of those late-stage lockdown dreams, worthy of David Lynch, but it’s not quite real life either. I’m in bed, laptop sat on my boobs. From his bedroom in the Czech capital, a twentysomething bearded man named Thomas is live narrating – via Zoom – a pre-recorded video shot last year. Thomas, falling into one of the many new categories of person created by the pandemic, is a cross between a tour guide and a cam boy.
I booked my place on this virtual plague tour of Prague via Airbnb. Mushroom like, Zoom tours have grown out of the dead and rotting tourism industry. Thomas tells us they’re popular corporate bonding exercises, and he’s even had a group of doctors on one of his plague tours. The plague in question – I should probably clarify – is the Black Death. Pre-Covid, Thomas gave these tours in person. He now does them from the safety of his flat, because of an actual plague. During the Black Death outbreaks of seventeenth/eighteenth century Prague, curfews were enforced. In the tour video, which was recorded one night during a lockdown, the streets of Prague’s Old Town (a place usually thronging with stag nights fuelled by cheap Czech beer) are as empty as they would’ve been in the days of beaked plague doctors.
Including me and a friend, Mon (whose illustration is above) there are five of us on this tour. There’s a man from Spain, a woman from San Francisco, and even a man based in the Czech Republic who – having once lived in Prague – is apparently feeling nostalgic. There’s a unique unintimate intimacy to Zoom calls. On a real-life guided tour, your guide is someone you observe intensely for a couple of hours. You key into their body language and ticks. Maybe – if you’re anything like me – you wonder what they’re like when they’re not in semi-theatrical tour guide mode. Politely, you laugh at the jokes they’ve made for group, after group, after group. After giving this person a fraction of your undivided attention, you accept that you’ll probably never see them again. On this virtual tour, we can see inside our guide’s bedroom. It’s small and sparsely decorated. From my own bed, I’m on a live link to a stranger’s bedroom. And so are three other strangers. I wonder if they’re in their beds too.
In the video, we follow the person in the plague doctor costume from the gothic Charles Bridge to the Old Town square. In the time of mass vaccination against a virus that has killed nearly three million people worldwide, Thomas tells us about buboes. These are the dark lumps in the armpits and groin, caused by bubonic plague. Plague doctors would poke at them with sticks and – when they had a similar firmness to ripe avocados – the accompanying barber surgeon would drain them of pus. I feel my face scrunch. I miss this though – I miss being walked around pretty central European streets and being told weird and disgusting facts about the olden days by a charismatic local. Granted, pre-Covid, a year could’ve easily passed without a European city break. Maybe I just miss one off interactions with people I’ll never meet again.
We learn about archaic plague “remedies” like garlic-laced beer. Sometimes the video link shudders and cuts out. The dark fairytale streets of Prague freeze on my screen. Lit by streetlights, I see the many shuttered souvenir shops, clogged with novelty snow globes and beer tankards, now left untouched by grabbing hands from all over the world. Even during sporadic non-essential shop openings, who – in this time of disease and economic chaos – really wants a beer glass fridge magnet?
Next is the Jewish quarter. This is a place – we’re told – that, in the time of the plague, was walled off from the rest of the city. Disease was less rampant here, leading the Christian majority to the usual anti-Semitic conclusions. While tiny fleas spread far tinier organisms that wouldn’t be understood for centuries more, thinking turned magical. It was suspicious to the Christians that Jews were less affected by the Black Death, when – in reality – this could have been down to things as mundane as the Kosher practice of hand washing before meals. I think about the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories around Covid. The usual stuff about a global cabal of Jewry concocting death and destruction for their own financial gain. Well and truly, some things never change.
We thank Thomas for his tour, and for giving us a rare glimpse into a world far outside our bedrooms. Suddenly, I’m desperate for a trip to Prague. I settle for a beer.