Dr Suzanna Ivanic is developing a walking app of Renaissance Prague to reveal its rich multicultural heritage, bringing past and present voices together.
It might seem like a stretch to call Dr Suzanna Ivanic’s latest research project work. After all, she and her team have the enviable task of telling the stories of one of the greatest periods in one of Europe’s most beautiful and historic cities. Known by many nicknames including the City of a Hundred Spires, the Golden City and the Mother of Cities, Prague is at the top of the must-see list for millions of travelers. That worldwide interest spurred Dr Ivanic and her team to develop an app for walking tours around Prague. Their challenge is to cut through the clutter of the sea of travel apps to provide a more meaningful and memorable experience for the app’s users. ‘Culturally, it’s really different as a visitor’, Dr Ivanic explained.
For many people, Prague is about the castle or the astronomical clock — these specific medieval and early modern monuments. But how can the visitor put them back together to understand the Renaissance city as a whole? This app is designed to help you navigate the city in a very specific and historical way.
The team’s app will focus on the fascinating stories of Renaissance Prague while leading users through many of the city’s most awe-inspiring sites. Using historical documents such as inventories of possessions, the team have painstakingly reconstructed the lives of some of Prague’s early 17th-century inhabitants, including the renowned astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Doing so was no small feat because ‘much of the tangible history that created Prague and this colourful era of the Renaissance is hidden in archives and in museums and dispersed collections around the world’, Dr Ivanic said. The team’s efforts give the app’s users the choice of seven different stories and routes to retrace the footsteps of Kepler and Brahe or a Swiss clockmaker in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, a female English poet, a gem-cutter and others. Along each route, the app will show visitors historical artwork depicting events of the period such as markets and fairs as well as modern photos of the sites.
The project is a natural fit for Dr Ivanic, a senior lecturer of early modern history at the University of Kent specialising in Central and Eastern Europe. Through her research into cultural and social history, she works with the material objects used by people of the early modern period to assemble the stories of how they worshipped, travelled and lived.
Renaissance Prague Stories is funded by AHRC Impact Acceleration Account 2024.
