For a trip to the real center of Prague, you must go to the Balkans
The inscription on the bollard on Friday in Žižkov was sprayed by the mayor of Prague 3 Jiří Ptáček (TOP 09) and the director of the Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) Ondřej Boháč, who is also the author of the idea for marking the Prague poles. If people go around all four sites and take a photo at them, they can pick up a badge at the gatehouse at the IPR.
“The main goal was to entertain people. I always thought that the navel of Prague was Prague 3, and now we have it down to a grain of sand. I really liked the project of marking the poles of Prague, and Ondřej Boháč gave me a kick when he told me that the center comes to us in the Balkans,” said Ptáček.
It was always clear to me that Prague 3 is the navel of Prague. But now we have it focused to the exact centimeter.
From now on, all signs in Prague pointing to the “city center” will point to us at the Na Balkáně children’s playground. So that we didn’t have to move the climbing frame.50°5’40.236″N
14°28’50.281”E pic.twitter.com/Ht3HeQF7w2— Jiří Ptáček (@ptacekjirka) June 4, 2021
The center of the city is at the intersection of the connecting lines of the Prague poles. “There are many ways to determine the center of an irregular body like Prague, but this is the intersection of the connecting lines of the poles. It is the only one of these ways where it is a publicly accessible place. That’s why we chose him,” said Boháč.
The Poles determined the ban on leaving the district
Marking the center follows on from the already marked poles of the city, i.e. the outermost body. The idea arose during the lockdown due to the covid-19 pandemic. “They told us to stay as far away from people as possible, and at the same time, we were not allowed to cross the district border. So I made up my mind that the children and I would go around the most extreme bodies. I put it on Facebook and people wrote to me asking me to give them the coordinates, saying they wanted to go there too, so we finally marked the posts,” said Boháč.
All four Prague parts are in publicly accessible places. Only the western pole, where the closest point of Prague extends into the airport area, and the eastern one, which is shifted by approximately 5 points closer to the tourist route, based on the request of the town halls of the surrounding municipalities, are not located exactly. The reason was that wild boars began to appear in the square in Úvaly, which, according to the locals, scared away tourists from the forest walking to the post marking the eastern pole of Prague.