The story of this place
After John Lennon was murdered in New York in December 1980, young Praguers began painting his image and lyrics on a wall opposite the French embassy, turning it into a shrine of longing for freedom in a locked-down country. The Communist secret police whitewashed it again and again, but each morning new verses, flowers and grievances against the regime reappeared, and the site fuelled clashes between students and police that officials mocked as 'Lennonism'. The wall became a rallying point in the run-up to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Owned by the Knights of Malta, it is now a legal, ever-changing canvas where visitors add messages of peace over layers decades deep.