Military History | Legiobanka, Na Poříčí, Prague — The Homecoming on the Parapet

The Bank of the Czechoslovak Legions — Banka československých legií, the Legiobanka — was set up after the war to hold the money the legionaries had accumulated in Russia. English-language accounts date its founding to Irkutsk in 1919; the Prague heritage guide says only that it began in the Štefánik barracks and then a hotel, before it had a building of its own. That building went up on Na Poříčí between 1921 and 1923 to Josef Gočár's design, in the rounded style called rondocubism: red and white, arcaded at street level, a copper cornice along the top. Above the arcade, along the parapet, runs a stone frieze by Otto Gutfreund — Návrat legií, the return of the legions. Men in greatcoats meet women in headscarves. There are handshakes and embraces, a child standing among the adults, men with sticks and bundles, and at the centre a seated figure with both arms out to the people coming from either side. Below, on the pier heads, Jan Štursa cut four groups of legionaries, standing for the battlefields the Legion fought on: the Italian, eastern, Russian Far Eastern and western fronts. One scroll reads DOSS ALTO; on the pier beside it the lettering runs away over a fold of stone and does not resolve. Under one group the stone is signed ŠTURSA. Gutfreund was in Paris when the war began and volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. Prague's Vojenský historický ústav and the English-language account of his life agree that he served on the Somme, in Artois and in Champagne, and that he was interned from 1916 to 1918 at Saint-Michel de Frigolet in Bouches-du-Rhône. They give different reasons for the internment — an open protest against a French law, or applications to transfer that were refused. He was back in Bohemia in 1920. The building is Palác Archa now, a bank at street level and a theatre behind it. The frieze is read from the pavement. 📸 Cover: the frieze and two of Štursa's pier groups above the Na Poříčí entrance. Ewwwa, 25 September 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: the DOSS ALTO group with the frieze above it. Jorge Láscar, 8 March 2009, CC BY 2.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.