Good Friday at Rimov

Easter is a special time in the Czech Republic and it means a lot to me personally. As I said the first time I visited the country was around Easter and somehow since then I have often been in the country for the Easter celebrations.

A special place to visit at Easter is Rimov a few miles from Cesky Krumlov. The village has been a place of pilgrimage since the 17th century. The Baroque Loretto Chapel there is beautiful but my preference is to walk around the short trail (about 5 kilometres), which takes you past 25 small stations of the cross - the Rimov Passion. The stations are all very different - some are simple hand painted paintings in small wayside chapels, some are tableaux, some are more complex. My favourite is the one shown in the photo above - the statues in the Garden of Gethsemane, all life size and set naturally in the landscape. You are walking through a wood along a small stream set about with coltsfoot and early spring flowers and then on a brow of a low hill you see the first of the statues. Statues of the sleeping disciples lie prostrate, Jesus is in urgent prayer, he leans forward, his eyes fixed on an angel at the top of the slope who proffers the cross.

The trail combines gentle exercise with prayer - at Easter you will find families, couples and friends walking, talking or meditating. And if you aren't religious you can always raid the willows along the river for withies - now why would you need them?

Beginnings - fairies

So why am I sitting outside a cafe in Cesky Krumlov? What was it that brought me to this place? Well, I suppose there were lots of points at which this journey started. It was like a river - a multitude of sources all coming together. I don't suppose I can identify all of them. But over the next few posts, I' ll explore some of them.

Here is the first - when I was a child I loved fairytales (podhadky in the Czech). I devoured every fairytale book in the library - the Green Fairy Book, the Blue, the Yellow. And I watched the wonderful dramatisations of fairytales that were so much part of British children's 60s tv. Well looking back they were probably pretty rubbish, but I loved them. They were usually badly dubbed and produced in what was then refered to as the Eastern Bloc, including Czechoslovakia. I have seen some more recently, here in the Czech Republic where I am told they are rerun regularly. The Czechs love fairytales, it is part of their pysche. Grown adults will talk with seriousness about fairies and other little folk in the forest. When a house was being done up for a friend and a series of unexplained mishaps took place, the answer proffered was to put a small bowl of milk under the threshold for the fairies. And when I am here, I too find myself refering to the fairies. So when I come here, I am going back to my childhood perhaps.