The Prague policeman does not mince his words when he waves a truncheon and shouts at a shabbily-clad man bearing all the signs of a wasted life possibly beyond repair.
Seedy side is casting a shadow over facades
“Get the hell out of here, you bleeding junkie! I don’t want to see you here again,” yells the cop, prompting the man to shuffle off in silence.
Once a bustling horse market, then a beacon for anti-communist protesters and later a tourist magnet, Prague’s celebrated Wenceslas Square – a mainly commercial district with four-star hotels, banks and luxury restaurants – has now become the region’s largest open-air drug den.
“When it comes to narcotics markets, there’s no other place that compares to Wenceslas Square in the Czech Republic – or even in all of central Europe,” says Ales Termer from Sananim, a non-governmental organisation helping drug addicts.
“Our street workers are here for hours every day and provide clean syringes to about 150 drug addicts each time,” Termer says.
Dominated by the monumental National Museum and the no less majestic equestrian statue of the 10th-century St Wenceslas, the country’s patron saint, the venue is more a boulevard than a square, with its sprawling, 682 by 60 metre expanse.
Over the course of history, it became a hallowed site where Czechs congregate at critical moments.
In 1989, tens of thousands of protesters rallied here against the communist regime in then Czechoslovakia, which was toppled during the peaceful Velvet Revolution later that year.
More recently, the St Wenceslas statue served as an ad hoc memorial for onetime dissident and later president Vaclav Havel, dripping in wax from candles lit in memory of the anti-communist icon who died in December.
But the square’s seedy side – which also includes prostitutes, gamblers, pickpockets and unscrupulous taxi drivers – is increasingly casting a shadow over its splendid facades.
Even Prague City Hall – mindful of the lucrative tourism business in one of Europe’s most visited cities – has conceded the problem, a spokeswoman stating the situation “needs a quick solution”.