Kosovo is Serbia?

We have graffiti in the United States, some places more than others.  In general, however, the graffiti is usually just “C.M. loves B.J.” or an obscenity, basically nothing that means anything to anyone besides the graffitist.  These scrawled words and pictures usually just ruin whatever they were written on and are just a general distraction.  One of the first things I noticed when we took our first walk around Prague was the copious amount of graffiti, scrawled on everything from lamposts to benches to tram cars.  Although the graffiti here is just as unattractive as that in the States, some of that graffiti is actually making a political point.

On an initial walk around the city, one of the most interesting pieces of graffiti was “antifa” spray painted several times in a row along a wall.  Antifa is translated as antifascist.  Another was “fight state” scrawled across the side wall of an older building.  Finally on a jersey barrier on the Charles Bridge, “Kosovo is Serbia” is spray painted in bold letters.

Seeing these examples of popular public protest, even though they were just some words scrawled in spray paint, really made me think about the reality of life in Czechoslovakia under the former Communist regime. Although some are obviously not from before the Velvet Revolution, they all still speak of an underground protest movement, a political activism that people expressed the only way they could.  To me, that hits home much harder than just seeing a memorial or reading about the Czechoslovakian Communism.