Skating on the Swimming Pond

I have blogged about the wonders of the Czech swimming ponds in the past – these man-made ponds where the villagers spend the hot summer days swimming or rafting. In winter they have another function. Last winter they drained the pond in order to clean it out and so I had been under the impression that this might be an annual occurrence. Not so.

As my husband and I walked past the pond on the other day, we watched a family putting on their skates and taking to the ice. They sat on the small jetty from, which in the summer people had jumped into the water, and did up their laces. The smallest child was first on the ice, ice-hockey stick in hand. The Czechs are internationally renowned for their ice hockey teams, but this young one has a lot to learn. The first thing he needs to learn is how to stay upright for more than a minute and once having fallen over how to get up again. Here is a photo of him, looking rather good, although the more perceptive amongst you will have noticed that he has missed the puck. He fell over when he tried to turn round to get it. Shortly afterwards he was joined by his big brother, who gathered up the puck and leaving the little one standing sped across the ice.

These long Czech winters in which the temperature seldom gets above zero combined with the many frozen ponds mean that children like our young friend are soon expert skaters and dreaming of joining the Czech ice-hockey team. I of course being English will never get past the stage of spending most of my time sprawled on the ice.

Carping

In town squares all over the Czech Republic there are large tanks full of carp. Carp or capr as they are called in the Czech Republic are the centre of the Christmas meal - the Czech equivalent of turkey. Shoppers buy the live fish and take them home, even keeping them in the bath until the time comes to kill and eat them.

To feed this love of carp over the years the Czechs have built man-made fishponds across the plains of the Republic. The largest complex of such ponds - or rather lakes (they are that big) - is to be found around the South Bohemian town of Trebon. The area is well worth a visit - it has UNESCO-protected area status and makes a good area to explore by bicycle. The ponds were created by Jakub Krcin, the master pond-maker to the Rosenbergs, who had a home in Cesky Krumlov. He may have been a genius when it came to building ponds, but like so many landscape transformers on behalf of the nobility he was a complete bastard when it came to dealing with the peasants whose homes he destroyed and whose labour he abused. So vilified was he in life and after his death that there are a host of ghost stories about him, including one where he is cursed every night to ride in a carriage drawn by two giant cats.

When our Czech house was a the home of a German-speaking farming family before the 1945, the yard featured a carp pond. The pond was fed by a stream, which flowed from a well behind the house through a channel in the barn. From the pond the stream flowed on under the gate and down the hill. Under the ownership of the Czech family that succeeded them the well fell into disrepair and the pond was replaced by a septic tank. As for the stream its way blocked it made its own way through the granite bedrock and into our cellar.