The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of east European tourism

Once upon a time, going to Prague would have been a bureaucratic nightmare, but today the city is flooded with tourists. From the Wild West-era to the Age of Irony, Mark Jones traces the three stages of post-1989 eastern European tourism

Budapest has become a popular destination for hen and stag dos (Getty)

I had a supervisor at university who’d travelled a lot in eastern Europe for the British Council. I can’t swear he was an ex-spy, but that was pretty much the perfect CV for an ex-spy in the early 1980s. One day, when we should have been deep in EM Forster, he started talking to a group of us about Prague: eloquently and at length. I can’t remember the exact words and this being a supervision I was probably only half-listening. But the overall message was: Prague is the most beautiful city in the world, and if you get the chance, you must go there.

This came as a surprise, as we’d assumed Soviet-era capitals were uniformly grey and Brutalist. Not that we ever would get the chance to see the place for ourselves: not unless we went into the spying business. Those last years of the Cold War were tense and nasty. In my second year, we were seriously worried about Margaret Thatcher introducing conscription as the threat of a Soviet occupation of Poland grew.

So at that time, we students would no sooner think of going to Prague (or Budapest, or Bucharest, or Tbilisi) than Timbuktu. The bureaucracy involved in getting to Timbuktu might have been more straightforward. But at the end of the decade, I did get behind the Iron Curtain before it was ripped down. My south London football team, the Racing Club de Blackheath (which come to think of it, may have had players with espionage tendencies), decided we’d had enough of predictable annual tours to nice places like Italy and France: we’d head to Poland instead. The Soviet tanks had not arrived: Lech Walesa had.