The Kobky

Those arched openings carved into the embankment wall have a name: kobky. It means cells. A century ago, workers packed them with ice cut from the river. Today they house cafes, bars, and small galleries, and on a warm afternoon the smell of coffee drifts out where cold storage once sat.

The embankment itself was built after 1903 to bring order to what had become one of the most industrially intense districts in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Smíchov earned the nickname "Manchester of Bohemia" because of the Ringhoffer factory just behind you, which at its peak employed over 30,000 workers building railway carriages for emperors and trams for cities across Europe. The chimneys were relentless, and the streets stayed grey well into the 1990s.

The transformation was slow. The kobky sat empty for decades after the factories closed. Renovation stretched over 10 years, with the first units opening before 2009. There are now 14 of them along this stretch of the river. Where the Ringhoffer Works once stood, there is now a shopping mall, with a small monument marking what was there before.

The railway bridge you can see from here has been carrying trains since 1901. Some things, it turns out, are harder to replace than ice.