In May 1911, after arriving in Prague to take up his appointment to the physics department of the German University, Albert Einstein wrote to his friend Michele Besso: "Incidentally, the city of Prague is wonderful, so beautiful, that it alone would be worth a journey." (Einstein and Besso 1972: 20). from Toman, J. (1995). The magic of a common language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, Mass; London: The MIT Press.

I came across this quote recently in a book by a Czech linguist on the Prague Linguistic Circle which  celebrated its 80th anniversary this year. It should also be added that Einstein who only spent three semesters teaching at the university, found it to be an "intellectual desert without conviction". This certainly wasn't the case 15 years later when Prague became one of the centers of world linguistics known today as the Prague school.

But Prague has gone through interesting Periods of being a center of learning and world affairs and a complete intellectual  back water. In fact, it was its status as a back water for most of the 18th and 19th centuries that preserved the magic of the city and made it the jewel of European architecture that it is today. What were the times of glory? There were at least three that Toman also described in his book (which is otherwise not concerned with Prague as such):

There is an old image of Prague in which the city figures as an urbane center of culture and learning. This is the Prague of Charles the Fourth [DL: 1300s], Prague the promised land of mediaval Jewry that Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle wrote about, the Prague of the Hapsburg emperor Rudolph the Second [early 1600s], the Czech-German-Jewish Prague of circa 1900. With Masaryk's Prague, liberal and integrating , one more instance of this image of ethnic symbiosis and intellectual tolerance was added. The Linguistic Circle was a product of this unusually rich era and a reminder that symbioses proceeds best with artists and scholars. (p. 103)

Of course, these periods were usually much more complex than it may appear from these simple iconic descriptions but when you zoom in on any period, things always get more complicated. And we should also not forget that each of these periods was usually followed by decades or centuries of insignificance, although the Czech lands were important  in one way or another  for most the 1300s and 1400s and then again in the early 1600s. We must not forget about Jan Hus and his pre-reformation.