Under my feet

I do enjoy telling people about my favourite places in Prague. Since I've been asked so many times it seems practical to do it here.
The pictures are from the Letná park in Prague, just the other side of the river from the Old Town and the city center. It is a lovely place to sit, from the stone wall you can see over the gorgeous city and the river Vltava meandering through Prague with it's bridges. The park is dimly lit so the moon and the stars, and the fireworks over the city on many unknown occasions show well. The warm summer winds sweep over the place and you can see the whole sky.
The park has a terasse and on top of it a modern art piece from 1991, by David Černy. It is a metronome as you can see and it moves. Before this piece of art there was the biggest Stalin monument of the world, built in 1955. The statue was 30 m high and had a queue of other communist figures behind it. The Stalin monument only stayed there until 1962 when it was blown up by dynamite.
The more bizarre thing still is that the terasse has a huge underground space of 7000 square meters. I was actually thrilled to the point of being silly as I found out about it in Prague Post, in an article by Zach Blaue. Have you read the book The Tombs of Atuan? It's written by Ursula Le Guin. The heroine of the book, a young girl wanders her days in an unmapped, unlit underground labyrinth of the temple she is the priestess of. Approximately, since I don't remember the details that well. It was the labyrinth that captured my attention when I first read it. It still does, the idea of labyrinths and secret passageways and empty houses and such undiscovered places.
In Letná there was a huge underground space under my feet all of this time and I didn't know! The doors to the chamber are very visible and it never even crossed my mind to wonder where they would lead. The whole space is 7000 square meters, and the biggest chamber is 5 m high. Part of the Stalin monument is still inside it.
Since being built the space has mainly been closed. During the communist era it was used for storing potatoes. For one year, from 1989 to 1990, it was a squatted and used as an art gallery, concert place and a radio station.
No one knows what all of that underground space was built for. Maybe it was just needed under the weight of the 14000 t Stalin monument. In the article of Prague Post an architectural historian, Zdeněk Lukeš, offered the theory that the place had been intended as a crypt for the Czechoslovak President of the era, Klement Gottwald. They could have kept him in a glass coffin after his death, as with Lenin and Stalin in Moscow.

Picture 1 by Anni Putkonen, 3 and 4 by Heini Granberg.
Art by the Metronome also here.