Finding Francisco Skorina

In Belarus everybody knows the name “Francisco Skorina” the way everybody in America knows the name “Benjamin Franklin.” Like Franklin, Skorina was a self-published writer. I always thought he was the first to publish a book in the Belarusian language, but according to the sign near the statue he was the first publisher of any printed book in any Slavic language. I learned about him in the course of numerous lessons at the Minsk State Linguistic University, and I have several pictures of myself and my friends at the Skorina statue near the National Library of Belarus. He has become one of my heroes.

Having learned that there was a statue in his honor somewhere in Prague, I set out to find it. First I did a Google search in English, which resulted in a lot of useless hits. So I tried the same search in Russian, with the same result. Somehow during this process I discovered how to spell his name in Czech, which allowed me to find a photo of the statue on the Czech Wikimedia Commons page. Soon I knew where to look for the statue and we began planning our trip to a somewhat obscure park.

We really enjoyed our trip to this park. We took a long and beautiful walk not far from yesterday’s route but completely different in feeling and details. Mozart remarked that he could walk home from symphony hall in Prague by the same route every day and still discover something new each time. I understand why he felt that way.

We got lucky and entered the park right below the statue. We celebrated like any explorers might, with whoops, hollers and photographs. Not only did we enjoy a great walk, but we even felt a little surge of nationalistic pride as we admired the statue and read the nearby plaque.

Nothing else about the day proved to be quite so exciting or quite so challenging, but I think we were in the right place. Today’s temperatures in Minsk ranged from 5 to 10 degrees C. In Prague, however, temperatures ranged from 10 to 20. I think this means that Prague was twice as good as Minsk today. That’s pretty exciting in and of itself.