There were probably no more than a thousand of them, but the anti-globalisation demonstrators in the Czech capital yesterday created a dramatic spectacle as they poured down the hill from Prague Castle towards the centre of the old town.
They were led by a group of local anarchists, some of whom bore the bruises from a skirmish the night before with right-wing skinheads, but the French communists at the back provided the most impressive sight with a flotilla of red flags.
One of the older policemen walking alongside the march shrugged genially and rolled his eyes towards the heavens when he saw the flags, summing up the attitude of many Czechs to this week's protests.
"Most of my Czech friends find it hard to understand why I'm taking part in this demonstration because they think that anyone who is on the left must be a communist and they know more about communism than they want to," said April Retter, who has lived in Prague for nine years.
Many of the city's residents have taken the advice of the authorities and cleared out of Prague until the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the protesters have departed. In fact, there has been remarkably little trouble so far and the police, although very much in evidence, have taken a relaxed approach to the demonstrators.
The authorities' strategy has been to prevent as many protesters as possible from entering the Czech Republic in the first place - some German activists have complained that they were turned away from the border on the basis of faulty car lights and similar trivialities.
A train carrying 520 Italian protesters was stopped at the Austrian border yesterday and when four demonstrators identified by border guards as participants in last December's protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle refused to get off, everyone was turned back.
"This is something that could never happen in America," complained Conrad, a young Californian activist who came to Prague for the protests.
At the conference centre where the IMF is meeting, sober-suited, delegates were making the same complaint when the computer system failed briefly yesterday afternoon. When a receptionist explained politely to one delegate that the technicians were trying to solve the problem as quickly as possible, he swore loudly into her face and stormed off.
The mood was a lot more cheerful among the protesters as they marched and chanted in the warm autumn sunshine. One group were dressed in G7 football jerseys as they kicked a globe around beneath a banner declaring "the winner takes all", leaving players identified as Mozambique or Zambia pretending to lie dead on the ground. Earlier in the afternoon, Jubilee 2000 staged a mock funeral to mourn the millions of children who die each year, they claim, because of the refusal of the international institutions to cancel all third-world debt.
Only about a thousand people joined this protest too but Conrad is confident that as many as 15,000 demonstrators will be in Prague for the main anti-globalisation protest tomorrow. "That will be a big one, the biggest," he said.