No one knows the artist who scrawled white-paint outlines of sprawled bodies on the streets and sidewalks beneath Nusle Bridge.
The artist is a nobody -- just like most of the nearly 400 people who have died by leaping from the deck of the huge concrete span, Prague's strangely inglorious suicide bridge.
Unlike scenic suicide bridges in other cities, such as the Golden Gate in San Francisco or the Butte Chaumont in a Paris park, the Nusle Bridge is a skeleton-grey hulk that looms over a depressed neighbourhood of dirty sidewalks and crumbling flats.
Almost everyone who jumps from the bridge dies on pavement from the impact of a 40m fall, and is suddenly transformed into a grotesque spectacle for those who are living in the bridge's shadow.
"Sometimes when I go home from school, I see blood on the street," said Petr Paukert, 15, who lives with his family in a building under the bridge.
As he spoke Paukert glanced down at one of the painted body outlines. He flashed a nervous smile and added, "One time my neighbor took home a part of someone's brain in a cup."
Nusle's square concrete legs and wide deck were designed in communist times and tested for strength with Soviet tanks.
It opened in 1973 with six traffic lanes on the top deck. On the second level is an enclosed, two-track passageway for subway trains.
As long as anyone can remember, the bridge has been a favorite for the suicidal. It's easy to reach, and a fall is almost certain to kill. The anti-suicide fences installed some years ago will slow but seldom stop the jumpers.
Prague's unfenced river bridges, by contrast, do not attract people with a death wish because their decks are only half as high as Nusle's.
Almost every week, and more often in winter, police and firefighters respond to calls from motorists who see a distraught person preparing to jump off Nusle. Or they're called by someone below who found a body.
Hundreds have died, but hundreds have been saved as well.
On a Friday night this August, for example, firefighters used persuasion and guts to rescue a man with a young woman standing on the bridge's edge. They had apparently planned to leap together.
Among those who've witnessed many less fortunate victims is Victor Maticka, whose newspaper and tobacco shop is under the bridge's center.
He said every year at least 20 bodies fall on the street, sidewalk or onto parked cars near his shop. "The worst is around Christmas," he said.
Maticka talks about the experiences with a matter-of-fact grin, staring out his shop door toward the bridge. "It's just like Niagara Falls," he said.
Occasionally a Nusle suicide makes headlines. That was the case last year when the 21-year-old son of popular Czech singer Dalibor Janda jumped to his death.
Paukert remembers that suicide. "My father and I saw him lying on the ground," he said with a hint of pride.
"But this," the boy said, pointing to a body outline on the sidewalk, "is just art. It's nobody."
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
RSS