In a city filled with stunningly beautiful monuments, a Gothic bridge of much atmospheric antiquity, a languid river, a sprawling palace complex, the John Lennon Wall is a bit of an anomaly. But there is no doubt about it: this wall dating back to the 60s is a historical record-of-sorts, replete with much drama and turbulence. Spanning a stretch of less than a kilometre, the compound wall belongs to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Catholic lay religious order. Every conceivable inch of it is covered with bright, even lurid, graffiti. Just off-centre is the familiar face, with its round glasses.
Alongside Lennon’s face run the words ‘All you need is love’. The face is almost fully covered with fresh drawings now, only the eyes watch steadily.
This is a wall of many avatars. This year on Earth Day, the Extinction Rebellion activists repainted the entire wall with slogans demanding action on Climate Change. People were asked to add their own messages and obliged with calls for action in several languages. This was done without obliterating most of the existing artwork.
Later, in a supreme act of irony, the Prague Municipality has announced that the wall will be monitored by TV cameras and graffiti will be strictly regulated. Police will constantly patrol the area.
The wall has been damaged several times. Parts of it have fallen, but it has always been repaired and quite like a brick and mortar phoenix, stands up again, to be covered with messages and artwork. It remains the only place in the city of Prague where graffiti is legal. In the 1960s, it was called the Crying Wall, and covered with protests as well as art. The authorities, of course, were having none of this, so they regularly painted over the graffiti and even appointed a guard to keep watch at night. To little avail. Every morning, there was a fresh outburst on the wall.
After Lennon’s assassination in 1980, someone painted an image of the singer-songwriter along with lyrics from The Beatles’ songs. This was at a time when ‘Western thought’ was forbidden in the then Czechoslovakia. Prague’s secret police swung into action. Arrests were made, surveillance cameras put up at the spot, the wall was painted over and a close watch was kept. But there was no quelling the steady appearance of more and more graffiti which, by 1988, became stridently anti-Communist.
In its third avatar, after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which ended Communism in Czechoslovakia; and also the Velvet Divorce in 1993, which created the separate nations of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Lennon Wall became the go-to site for calling out injustice, oppression, crackdowns.
In 2000, the wall was painted over in white with just the one word ‘Love’ written across it. In November 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the wall was painted over in pure white by a group of art students, with ‘Wall is Over’ meaning that the Lennon Wall was no longer a space for protest but was covered in messages of peace and love. However, the move was viewed as vandalism of what had become a piece of Prague’s cultural heritage.
The Knights of Malta, who had from the early 90s granted permission for graffiti on the wall, now filed a criminal complaint against the students, which they later retracted. After the flurry settled, ‘Wall is Over’ was replaced by ‘War is Over’, the famous Lennon-Ono composition.
Oh, the wall has an Indian connect too. Amid all the graffito, a Shristi and Sachin had scribbled their names boldly and blithely. Maybe this was their call to love.