The swinging arm
Twenty-three metres of red metal moving slowly above the city — a monument that glorifies nobody and measures time instead.
User:Aktron — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Bradley Weber — CC BY 2.0
No — it stops from time to time for faults or maintenance and can stand still for weeks. The site is worth visiting regardless, for the view and the historic terrace.
The world's largest Stalin monument, raised in 1955 and destroyed in 1962. It showed Stalin in front of a file of workers and soldiers, and Praguers nicknamed it "the meat queue". The present terrace is its original base.
Beneath it lie large tunnels and voids that have served at different times as a nightclub and an art space, and they are not always open. Check on the spot if you see an open entrance.
Make it the end of a Holešovice day: the National Technical Museum in the morning, a walk through Letná park, the metronome at sunset, then down the stairway to Čech Bridge and the Old Town.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
On a massive stone terrace overlooking the Vltava, a red metal arm some 23 metres tall swings slowly above the city: the Prague Metronome. The spot it occupies is not ordinary — between 1955 and 1962 this was the site of the largest statue of Stalin in the world, a colossal granite group showing Stalin leading a file of workers and soldiers, which Praguers mockingly called "the meat queue" because it looked like people waiting outside a butcher's shop. The statue's story is bleak: the sculptor Otakar Švec spent years on it and took his own life weeks before it was unveiled. Just seven years later, with de-Stalinisation under way, it was blown up with hundreds of kilos of explosive. The terrace then stood empty for some thirty years, an open wound in the city. In 1991, two years after the Velvet Revolution, the metronome was installed in its place. The symbolism is plain: instead of a statue claiming permanence, a machine that measures the passing of time. Below it today is a permanent gathering of skateboarders and young Praguers, and around it the best view of the city's bridges. Free, always open, and a natural part of a Letná park visit.
Twenty-three metres of red metal moving slowly above the city — a monument that glorifies nobody and measures time instead.
The original stone base of the dynamited statue — you are standing on the direct trace of a regime's rise and fall.
From the terrace edge, the Vltava bend with its succession of bridges and the Old Town behind — one of Prague's strongest views.
Skaters, musicians and students sitting on the edge — as close as you get to everyday Prague rather than the visitor version.
Letná terrace, Letná park, Prague 7