The Lennon Wall

What you see

A long garden wall, every centimetre of it layered in spray paint — lyrics, portraits, peace signs, declarations in a dozen languages, painted over each other so many times the surface has texture.

The story

The Lennon Wall is the garden wall of the Grand Priory of the Knights of Malta, on a quiet square in Malá Strana, and it began as something much simpler than a tourist attraction. According to people who remember, as early as the 1960s young people left messages here for the actor Jan Werich, who lived nearby on Kampa, and later protest slogans. In the seventies it was nicknamed the Wailing Wall, and it carried chalk poems, mostly love poems.

Sometimes they were painted over in white, and soon new ones appeared. The Lennon story starts in December 1980, after John Lennon was shot in New York. Someone turned an empty stone slab, apparently once part of a public fountain, into a symbolic gravestone.

An unknown person wrote in chalk For John Lennon and drew a cross above it, and people started bringing flowers, candles and photographs. Early in 1981 someone replaced the chalk with a stencilled text giving Lennon's life dates, together with a photograph, and soon graffiti inspired by him and snatches of Beatles lyrics began to cover the nearby wall. The place became known beyond Prague when an underground group called the Jazz Section published photographs of the little memorial in a collection about Lennon in the autumn of 1981, and some samizdat and exile magazines wrote about it too.

The communist authorities treated this as a serious matter. After the first painting-over in April 1981, the wall was repainted several times, in green and grey, but each time the next day the verses and slogans came back, now with a political edge, such as the phrase Palach would cry. When about fifty young people met on the first anniversary of Lennon's death, the eighth of December 1981, the authorities put up advertising boards on the wall, because painting over did not work.

The yearly Lennon meetings moved to a small square by the Čertovka stream and slowly grew into evening marches through Prague, which the police broke up. The press described the participants as drunks, mentally disturbed people and agents of the West, and called their activity Lennonism. In the mid-eighties, petitions were signed on Kampa against nuclear weapons on both sides of Europe, for the release of political prisoners, and for alternative civilian service.

Small spontaneous meetings grew under police pressure into the biggest protest gatherings since 1970, and they foreshadowed the street demonstrations at the end of the eighties. By December 1988, the secret police tried a different tactic. With the approval of the party leadership, the Socialist Union of Youth organised its own Lennon event, with a folk concert by the Čertovka, and one communist official even suggested putting up an official Lennon memorial plaque on the square.

A year later the Peace Club of John Lennon, which had begun in opposition, held its anniversary meeting in an atmosphere of euphoria, as the regime collapsed. After the Order of Malta got its property back, it decided to repair the wall, and on the suggestion of the Peace Club it had the painter František Flašar create a portrait of Lennon. The idea was that people would only draw flowers around it, but that did not happen, and the portrait was eventually buried under new layers.

In 2000 an art group painted the whole wall green with the word love in the middle, and a few months later the owner, on the instruction of the heritage office, painted it ochre. Then came the tourists, and the original idealistic messages were pushed aside by messages of every kind. In the autumn of 2019 the Order and the district reconstructed the wall with professional artists, and since then it has been an open-air gallery with rules.

Spray painting is banned, and you may mark only the designated white zones and only with impermanent materials such as pencils, markers or chalk. In 2021 a small museum about the wall, the Lennon Wall Story, opened in nearby Prokopská street. The wall has changed again since.

In November 2014, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, art students painted the whole wall white with the words the wall is over. In 2019 climate activists from Extinction Rebellion painted it almost white with messages about the climate emergency. Its message has also travelled: in 2014, during the democracy protests in Hong Kong, a similar wall appeared there, covered in colourful sticky notes.

Later in 2019 the Order of Malta renovated the wall with more than thirty professional artists, and a reflective metal outline of John Lennon was added.