I'm Going Deeper Underground

It's interesting to see how many cities we've been to that have an underground tour. Prague is a city that used to be much lower and it turns out all the old buildings we've been wandering past on the street used to be the first or second floor.
In the old town square, and more specifically the old town hall, there's a room with large tiled mosaics on both walls. Mostly it's used for weddings nowadays but the door pictured leads down to some of the preserved buildings underneath the (current) street level.
Getting down there was much less involved than in Berlin as most of the rooms were used up until quite recently. That and they were never meant to be shelters of any kind, several rooms being used as store rooms or in some cases prisons.
The first room contained a giant burnt cross, one of the many religious symbols that had suffered at the hands of the many religious purges in Prague's history. When the citizens aren't busy throwing town councils out of windows that is. Also along the wall are statues of many of Prague's more famous and influential people including King Wenceslas, a great favourite among the Czech people.

As we continued down we passed through what was once the ground floor of the tower, and then through several old houses which had each been built with a common wall to save on building materials. This was not terribly successful when people had, as we saw in one room, large ovens in their houses and fires quite often broke out. The oven we did see was constructed by Italian immigrants and had several small bones peppered through the stonework. They had taken all the household animals that had died and incorporated them into the oven to keep the good luck in the house.
As we passed over a bridge between houses we saw what was once the original street level a few metres below us and discovered why this had all been buried. During Prague's expansion into a town from a little village on the river no town fortifications had yet been built. Add to this the problem of the river rising and flooding the town and both problems were solved in one go. When building a fortified wall around the town a moat was also dug outside. This earth was used to raise the level of the streets, essentially burying the first level of each house underneath the new streets.
We also saw an example of Prague's old heraldic emblem. The version we saw shows the gate of the Charles Bridge and this was later modified to include a sword in front of the entrance after the residents successfully defended themselves from an angry invading Danish army.
We also saw several replicas of various pikes and weapons used at the time and a measuring device which included scales and the standard unit of measurement in Prague.
All in all another fascinating tour with a lot of the history of Prague revealed and sights we wouldn't normally see just wandering the streets on our own.

We Can Be Happy Underground

One of the more interesting tours that we went on in Berlin was the Berlin Underworlds, a fantastic expedition into all the interesting remains of the various caverns, tunnels, tracks and shelters that lie underneath the city. Berlin, being built on a swamp, isn't anything like many other cities. For example, Rome is mostly built on top of Rome, whereas Berlin has one of the highest water tables in Europe which means you can only dig so deep. This also means that Berlin has very few tall buildings as the foundations can't go very deep and the few things that are underground are not very far down. Nevertheless there's still lots to see down there and our tour covered some 150 years of Berlin's underground history.
We began by taking a brisk walk from Gesundburnnen Station, down a large flight of stairs, across the platform, then up again into the daylight and across the road to an innocuous looking door on the side of the road. We descended down some much narrower stairs into a room with several benches and our guide gave us an overview of the whole tunnels and bunker systems telling us how they came to be built, their use in WWII as air raid shelters, and to their refitting for use as fallout shelters during the Cold War.
Our first stop was the past several radiation suits and through some more narrow twisting passages to see a part of the re-activated bunker from the Cold War period. Originally underneath the French quarter of Berlin after WWII this was turned into a fallout shelter after Stalin threatened to detonate a nuclear warhead over Berlin if the Allies didn't leave West Berlin. It turns out that this was somewhat of a crappy fallout shelter as the projected explosion of a 100 Kiloton nuclear device would have killed everyone in this particular shelter anyway.
Continuing on we saw more of the original tunnel system that was sued by the railways. This is what most of the bunkers and shelters in this location were before being used as air raid and fallout shelters. A decent amount of historic train memorabilia has preserved with the old station sign for Gesundbrunnen being donated by a household of students who were using it as a table.
The last part of the tour focused of the use of the tunnel systems as an air raid shelter during WWII. Again, it turns out to be security theatre as a direct hit on this shelter would have resulted in the top level or two of occupants being killed or badly injured.
A highly recommended tour, but unfortunately one in which photographs are not allowed.