Sawt Falasteen - TikTok drives 'bizarre' rush to Prague library's book tower

The "Idiom", a statue by Slovak artist Matej Kren, is a cylindrical tower of 8,000 books with a tear-shaped entrance and mirrors at each end, creating the impression of an endless tunnel.

Prague's Municipal Library installed it in its entrance hall in 1998, where it quietly sat until three years ago, when it suddenly became a social media hit.

"I found it on social media and wanted to take a photo," Thai tourist Pattapol Thongsaard told AFP after queueing for an hour with 100 other tourists, partly in the street, on a chilly evening.

He took a selfie peeping into the book pile before posing next to it with friends for another photo to post on TikTok and Instagram, he said.

- 'Bizarre' mania -

Library spokeswoman Lenka Hanzlikova told AFP that at peak times like Christmas and Easter, "Idiom" draws about 1,000 tourists a day, who queue for up to two hours owing to "TikTok algorithms" that made it a hit in late 2022.

"We'll have to deal with it in some way because working with tourist crowds is a completely different service from that we have provided up to now," she said.

"Most readers laugh about it and say it's bizarre, but we have had people who wanted to return books and joined the queue," Hanzlikova added.

The library has allocated one of its five entrances for tourists, and it is contemplating charging fees and employing custodians to organise the masses.

Kren told AFP he had exhibited "Idiom", symbolising the infinity of learning, in several cities worldwide before selling it to the library, always using discarded local books.

The statue also appeared on the cover of Science magazine and in Lonely Planet guides, but the current mania is "striking", he told AFP.

"I thought it would fall into oblivion, it was not designed for a mass presentation like this. I had no intention of creating a tourist attraction," said Kren.

Ghazal Nour, an Iranian living in Italy, hailed "Idiom" as "beautiful" after queueing for over half an hour, but she also thought the interest was exaggerated.

"It was very interesting, but not worth the line and the cold that we went through," she told AFP.

R.Shaban--SF-PST