Out of the Czech Republic: Cafe Slavia struggles for Europe's fun-loving soul

PRAGUE - The battle of the Cafe Slavia has not happened yet. Perhaps it never will. On meeting Marek Gregor, I sensed that he might quite enjoy it if it did.

The Cafe Slavia is in a beautiful art deco building in Prague that has gone to seed after years of neglect. But what incensed Mr Gregor and his friends was that it suffered another needless 18 months of decline following its purchase by an American property developer, H N Gorin, which did nothing with it.

Last week, with a commando of like-minded friends, Mr Gregor gained entry to the building, and they are now running the cafe themselves, as the Society of Friends of Cafe Slavia. Lawyers hover; invective is exchanged; policemen wander by and occasionally seek to evict Mr Gregor. This week the legal battle begins, and Mr Gorin has sent an open letter to President Vaclav Havel complaining about the occupation.

The Cafe Slavia stands on a valuable and imposing site by the river. Just down the road is the place where the student demonstrations of 1989 began, the events that sparked the collapse of the Communist regime.

While the life has returned to many city centre cafes, a friend described them as just tourist traps; the real life of the city has gone elsewhere, he said, to the grubby back street bars or the cellar pubs where the smell of marijuana hangs heavy in the air.

Cafe Slavia is more the real thing. You can hardly see across it for dense clouds of cigarette smoke. Earnest young men and women smoke as though it was going out of fashion. The men wear leather jackets, a scowl and red jeans. The women are all pale and interesting.

The place is dimly lit, as many of the lightbulbs in the gold wall-fittings are not working. Occasionally it is illuminated by the blue flashes from passing trams. The heavy marble tables have seen better days, and the mirrors are dim. Junk is piled up in the entrance hall. Customers pay what they want for drinks, dropping the cash into a container on the bar. But above all, there is a struggle here, a protest, something a bit out of the ordinary.

At the centre sits Mr Gregor, passing effortlessly from telephone to cigarette to paperwork to tea to interviewer and back to telephone again.

Mr Gregor is a charismatic figure. He grins a lot in a sepulchural way, swearing about those who have let him down and musing about the future. He does not know whether he will win his battle to have the cafe properly restored.

This is not a great crusade, or an attempt to make a political point. The place is turning over good money, but Mr Gregor does not seem that interested in the possibilities of making money out of the cafe. He says vaguely that he would like to open a club here.

So what is this all about? Mr Gregor smiles. 'I am a scandal producer,' he says. 'I like to get people going, get something happening.' His friends say that is really what he is interested in - putting backs up, sparking some excitement, then moving on to the next thing.

It probably has something to do with a city that has always relished wit, conspiracy and satire. But Europe, not just Prague, desperately needs a laugh at the moment. It is a rather grim continent, with unemployment rising and the great historic struggles over for the moment. Stunts like this are in a good cause, but they are also plain fun.