Religion, anxiety and prejudice, all are semi-mute on the old Prague clock. Built over 600 years ago, the Orloj timekeeper gradually became a sign of distrust; there was something that had to be rejected, something called 'the Turk'. Affixed to the tower on the southern wall of the ancient City Hall in Staromstak Nmst, the Orloj bears a message conveyed with symbols.

We are familiar with this picture that seems to come from another continent: the poet, exiled from Kallipolis, threadbare, smelly, homeless, an insomniac, living with no schedule, and producing things whose function is unclear: poems. He rarely finds place within a structure. He is outside. Even if he wanted to return, Kallipolis would not take him back. Within the ideal city of Plato's imagination, the poet is an element whose function is only to praise the herowhich we know does not work because heroes are figures who freeze in obligatory odes. So there is some truth, albeit slightly exaggerated, in Alfred de Vigny's words of 1832, that poets are "the race always cursed by the powerful of the earth."

'The builder of Batavia' who is buried there was a man with a motto, as quoted in 1618: "Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us."