Duel in the Gothic Catacombs

Thirty feet beneath the foundations of the National Theatre, the flooded Gothic catacombs felt like the underworld of an ancient myth. Knee-deep glacial water, dark and freezing as winter ice, rushed through a labyrinth of Romanesque barrel vaults and ribbed Gothic crypts, fed by the swollen winter currents of the Vltava River. The air was thick with the suffocating smell of damp slate, sulfur, and centuries of river silt. Flickering…