In Czech, milada means "my love." I first saw the Milada squat from the Libensky bridge on the north side of Praha. It boiled my blood. A crumbling mansion in the shadow of monolithic glass skyscrapers, holding down a scrap of wild brush. I ran the rest of the way there.
The second time I went, it was night. The squat had no electricity, so I blundered into the sunken yard, pitted with contraptions that could have been booby traps, ruins, sculptures, or all of the above, and stood outside in the orange gloaming of a winter city night for a long time, studying that building, dense, mad, and morbid as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I've forgotten his name now, but with that dutiful hospitality I associate with anarchists and good Christians both, a young man came and took me inside and we went up to his room where we talked into the night, me attempting to use my dozen or so Czech phrases while he sallied bravely into English to meet me.
I was stunned by Milada. It was the antithesis of so much I hated. It was absolutely to the last speck of neon graffiti inimitable, savage, brazen, unconquerable, and palpably fragile. I listened in awe to the tales of Milada's past, victory after victory against the powers that be. It was a fortress literally held together by the violently creative force of its denizens, past and present, epic as Heorot and doomed as Troy. My host kept a little butter on the window sill, to keep it cool, and a dog to keep the bed warm. There was no running water, but his room was separated from the sky by a mere skin of tiles, so he caught rainwater in buckets and piped it down through the house. It was without doubt one of the most exquisite and terrifying places I have ever been.
Milada is no more. The government contracted a security company to remove the squatters, who were relocated after a long battle and negotiations to an apartment complex. Then they leveled the house.
Goodbye, Milada. May the ground you held remember you.
