The reason several of last summer's Czech Radio interviewees referred in such charming and egalitarian terms to tourists as fellow denizens of the bridge is that they, citizens of Prague, were instinctively reacting as hosts. They assumed full responsibility for themselves, their cultural monuments, their city, their visitors, and their political lives.

Prague has a dozen sushi joints and counting. It might not seem extraordinary at first blush, but it's a culinary stretch for a landlocked Central European capital whose cuisine tends toward dumplings the size of babies' heads. But sushi is more than the expansion of the Czech palate: Raw fish is a brutal open-market commodity because it goes bad with such velocity. Its presence on a menu means that there is enough steady money in a wide enough segment of the restaurant-going public for the owners to fly in fish from around the world every day.

Tommy Sjöö, fifty-four, a Swedish expat, has a chain of fifteen restaurants in Denmark, Spain, and the Czech Republic, five of which are in Prague, including one of the city's prime Asian fusion restaurants, in the Jalta Hotel, a place called Hot. Hot serves excellent sushi.

"Prague is still a small town in some ways," he says. "So sometimes it can seem parochial, but when we look around, things are good. The people have money, they're working, they have nice cars now. But none of us here would have anything if it weren't for three people: Clinton, Mrs. Albright, and Havel. Thank God for Havel. Trust me, it would have been really different without him."

Sjöö is referring to the early and steady support from President Bill Clinton, who sent aid and specialists to help frame the Czech Constitution post-1992, after the Slovaks voted to dissolve the Czechoslovak confederation. In Clinton's second term, his Czech-born secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who in fact grew up in an apartment building across the square from the castle gates, was often in Prague. But most of all, Sjöö is alluding to Václav Havel's extraordinary feats as an anti-Communist dissident and his even more extraordinary thirteen-year run as president, which ended in 2003.

A banned playwright and a framer of Charter 77, the 1977 human rights proclamation co-signed by a collective of Czech scientists, professors, writers, musicians, and artists, Havel was repeatedly jailed between 1977 and 1989. His response, in jail and out, was to produce some of the best political and moral philosophy of the latter half of the twentieth century—Letters to Olga, The Power of the Powerless, and Disturbing the Peace. In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Civic Forum, the broad political coalition that moved the country to revolution. Eight months after being let out of prison for the last time, he was unanimously elected president by a freely elected parliament. But Havel's jail time can be seen in another way: His incarcerations were his passage into a state of democracy. He chose to become the first "citizen" of a theoretical country, one that was forbidden to exist because it was so at odds with the gritty Communist iteration that had his people in thrall.