Kvinterna Again

Back in May fellow blogger Karen of the Empty Nest Blog (see Related Czech Links) came to stay and was much taken with the music of local group Kvinterna. She asked me to post about them again and so here it is. In July this year I enjoyed a concert by Kvinterna at the Minorite Monastery on Latran. I was sorry that Karen could not join me, she would have loved it.

The video above is my own creation of local frescos and the music is a song called Planka from Kvinterna's album Landscape of Sweet Sorrow - an album of Sephardi songs and Moravian folksongs (click on the arrow to play the video). The juxtaposition of the two music types works brilliantly and is typical of Kvinterna's style. In their own words they "have created the instrumental element in a highly individual way derived from the technique of Gothic painting". For more on this, visit their website . This has inspired my choice of images for the video. By the way Planka is a Moravian song about a crab apple tree.

Jindrichuv Hradec

One of the highlights of the tour of historic South Bohemia that I am organising for this June will undoubtedly a visit to Jindrichuv Hradec. The town is east of Ceske Budejovice on an important ancient trade route. As a result of the wealth that came from the trade it has a splendid castle and a fascinating old town full of important churches and other buildings.

The castle has both gothic and renaissance buildings. We will be taking the Gothic tour. The tour climaxes (for me anyway) in the St George room. On its four walls in nearly fifty individual scenes the story of St George is told in some of the finest Gothic wallpainting you will see anywhere in Europe. Unlike many wallpaintings one sees in churches the series is complete and at eye level. You can get right up as close as the medieval artist did. The painting was painted in 1338 for the Oldrich III of Hradec and has a cartoon-like quality.

And as if that was not enough the tour ends with a visit to a complete black kitchen from circa 1500.

Vyssi Brod

Vyssi Brod is a small town to be found on the fledgling River Vltava just east of the Lipno Lakes and south of Cesky Krumlov. During the summer its banks are home to holidaying canoeists, in addition there are a number of tourists (many day visitors from nearby Germany and Austria) who come to visit the ancient abbey that dominates the town. And it was for this last reason that my husband and I made the short trip to the town.


The monastery was founded in the 13th Century but the current buildings date back to the 15th when the abbey was rebuilt following a disastrous fire. The monastery as the Czech guidebook has it "is the architectonic dominant feature of the town" - Czechs seem to be into architectonic dominants, as the phrase appears in several guidebooks - ie the building dominates the town.

Our first task was to get into the building. Visits to Czech buildings usually happen in guided tours, so you have to wait for one to go round, ideally one in English. Unfortunately for us we had just missed one, the next was in Czech and anyway was full up, so we had to wait for a German-language tour (we were given an English translation). This gave us an hour to waste, we therefore wandered into the main town, and away from the tourist trail. In the town square a children's theatre company were performing to a rapt audience. I wandered into the small tourist information office, where the staff looked shocked to see a tourist. They weren't expecting me, indeed every surface was covered with trays of cakes. Although looking for information was quite difficult, nevertheless I managed to find a leaflet about an industry trail which led from the abbey into the surrounding hills, - something I will blog about next time.

After a coffee we returned to the monastery and waited and waited. The coach of visiting Germans, who were to make up the majority of our party, had not arrived. Two hours after arriving at Vyssi Brod we at last stepped into the monastery sans German coach party. The highlights of the tour were for us the cloister gallery full of lovely gothic and baroque statues, the stunning library and the church itself. The Germans had arrived shortly into the tour and turned out to be a choir and were asked to demonstrate the church's wonderful acoustics by the guide. This they did and more than made up for the delay they had caused.


On leaving the church we stopped to look at part of the monastery which had not been restored. During the communist era the monastery had been allowed to decline into an appalling condition and we were shocked to see what had happened. Over the last two decades the monastery has been gradually been restored, often with money from Germany, as Vyssi Brod was very much a German monastery. On our return to the carpark I located the starting point for the historical trail, but that would have to wait for another day.