More on Winter in the Czech Republic

Yesterday we woke to bright sunshine, sparkling snow and frost flowers on the exterior window pane. This is the type of winter weather that first helped me fall in love with this country. Bitterly cold but divinely beautiful, so beautiful that it stirs the soul.

Today the weather was even more beautiful. The temperatures had fallen further and so every surface was covered with hoar frost. The trees were iced with white crystals. When we came to drive the car into Ceske Budejovice, we found it covered with crystals like snowflakes growing out of the paintwork. As you can see from the photo above they were nearly at right angles to the car's surface. I grabbed the camera and snapped. This picture does not show the brilliance of the crystals as they are semi-transparent and have taken on the colour of the car's metallic paint.

As we drove off, the temperature guage was indicating a temperature of -17 degrees at 10 am. Goodness knows at what temperature in the night the crystals had formed, but it would have been very low indeed.

Drowning Morana - the End of Winter

I always spend March in England, for a number of reasons including being with my mother on Mothering Sunday. For this reason I have never seen the Czech traditional ceremony that marks the end of winter. But my friend Hannah has and she gave me this photo of the ceremony taking place in a small village a few miles from my home.

Morana was the Slavic goddess of winter and so her ritual destruction towards the end of March every year marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. The girls of the village create an effigy of Morana out of straw and branches, dress her in old clothes and drape a necklace of eggs around her neck. On the day of the drowning, she is processed through the village to the river, to the accompaniment of songs and music. There she is set on fire and hurled into the river.

It is obvious that this ceremony predates the arrival of Christianity to the Slavic lands and may at one time have involved a human sacrifice. In this country, in which winter can be very harsh and where we do not have the early wildflowers that act as harbingers of spring in England, a sacrifice might well be thought needed to secure the death of winter. Nowadays of course no other reason is needed than the excuse to have a party.

Diamonds in the Snow

I keep writing about diamonds in the snow in the Czech Republic and my British friends and family nod and say "Yes, how lovely". But until you've seen them, I don't think you really can know how remarkable these ice formations are. Even in the recent snowy British winters I have not seen anything like them. They are not just the occasional flash of light against pristine winter snow. They are large crystals that grow in formation as the result of a succession sunny days followed by bitterly cold nights. The UK just doesn't get that sort of weather - a couple of bright days if we are lucky, before the grey presses in once more.

They are inevitably not easy to photograph - so my apologies that my efforts here do not do them full justice. But perhaps they might give you, dear reader, a glimmer of the pleasure they bring me.

Wood

Winter will soon be upon us. Already the first sharp frosts have turned the grass in the orchard white. The Czech winter can be long and white – with snow lasting from early December into March. The Czechs have been getting ready for it all summer. Even as I was picking redcurrants in the garden I could hear the sound of chainsaws in the village. Whatever the carol (about the Czechs' saintly king) says the Czechs like to get their firewood well before the snow is deep and thick and even.

All around me whole walls of logs have been assembled in the gardens, ready for when the logs will be split and sawn to length, then they are stocked high against the house walls, where they are protected from the weather be the overhanging eaves. Still the chopping and sawing continues. The family across the way from us have been disappearing off on an old tractor, only to reappear with a trailer piled high with old wood. As I write the head of the family and his brother are using a remarkable machine to split four foot long logs. My other neighbours came back from their weekly visit to the supermarket yesterday with a new chainsaw.

I too have my store of wood piled against the wall near to the front door. Believe me when the snow comes I would not want to have to transport it any further. I hope it is enough. Last year winter was longer than is usual, with snow first appearing (and disappearing) in October, and it caught some of my neighbours out. They have no intention of it doing so this year. I am using up my supply from last year, when we cut down some trees in the orchard and cut up some old rotten beams. But if the worst comes to the worst I have my plans – the remnants of the floor downstairs may be for the chop.

I really should be stocking up on wood for the 2011-2012 Winter, laying down cheaper unseasoned wood for the future. I know some of my neighbours are doing just that. But somehow I can't just bring myself to look at more than one cold Czech winter at a time.

Birdwatching

One of the advantages of the snow and the Czech winter is that you can actually see all those small birds you could only hear during the other seasons. Flocks of birds swoop into the bushes outside our house where they chatter and fight. The need to feed on whatever berries and seeds remain overrides any fear they have of humans. Instead of flying off as I draw near they ignore me. The other day I opened the bedroom window to watch as two blue tits raided the eaves for insects. They were so close I could have reached out and touched them.

The bare trees and hedges reveal their secrets such as this nest. Nests are so well hidden in the summer that you can pass within a few feet and not see them. But now the little hat of snow highlight their existence, so much so that it is now one of my pastimes on the train journey to Cesky Krumlov to count bird nests in the trees that line the track.

More on Snow & Frost

Czech winter means snow and frost. And one of the most wonderful of its shows is when a freezing fog settles on our little valley and turns everything white. And so it has this week. The water droplets freeze on everything even cobwebs in the woodshed. Then if you are lucky there are few more nights of fog and slowly the ice grows. The trees on our walk to Horice Na Sumave stand like white ghosts in the fog, covered with long needles of white - now an inch long. Crystals get crystals on them. The seedheads of Autumn flower again, but this time with intricate petals of frozen water.

Then a miracle can happen. The sun comes out and suddenly all those ice crystals start to sparkle. In the low shafts of winter sunlight, the water vapour turns to tiny silver specks, dancing in mid-air like the spirits of winter. At such a time and in such a place it is hard not to believe in magic.

Getting Ready for the Czech Winter

I've been spending my last few days ensuring we are ready for the Czech winter. It gave the north of the country quite a shock in October by arriving two months early and bringing transport to a standstill as cars and lorries, still on summer tyres, slithered to a stop on snowbound roads. But here in the south we have avoided it, so far, but not for much longer.

I gave up on a load of old roof timbers which I had been keeping under tarpaulin for a time when I might need them. They were showing signs of woodworm and some had a bloom of fungus. So I got two nice guys to appear with their chainsaw and cut them up along with the sycamore trees we cut down in the summer. That was three weeks ago and I have been splitting and stacking logs ever since, helped by the purchase of a heavy splitting axe from an ironmongers in Trebon. There is a huge pile of logs outside the front door, as I know from experience that I will not want to be fetching firewood from the snowheaps when they arrive in the yard.

The patio outside the front door was rebuilt this summer. The previous structure was a typical product of the previous owners - an awful lot of rather badly laid concrete (which probably fell off the back of a lorry). During last winter the concrete steps up to it were lethal, as they sloped in the wrong direction taking water into the foundations of the house where it turned to ice and then broke up the concrete. Result? I slipped on the ice and hurt my ankle. My lovely Czech builders found large granite sets beneath the surface of the patio, with which they rebuilt the steps and partly surfaced the patio. Everything now slopes in the right direction (I have been checking with jugs of water). And today the builders came to measure up the loft for insulation.

So are we ready for whatever the Czech winter will throw at us? We shall see; it has a habit of producing a few surprises.

Thaw?

I was enjoying a cup of tea with my friend Salamander on Tuesday when there was a thump as a large lump of snow slid off her roof and fell past the window of her study and on to the street below. The thaw appears to be arriving and Czechs should either avoid walking under the house eaves or keep an eye skywards. Some Czech buildings have spikes set in the tiles presumably to break up the snow and prevent these avalanches. But mine and hers do not.

Here in our village we are higher than Cesky Krumlov where she lives and so the thaw has been slower in coming. But on Thursday night it did, the first sign of it was a loud metal crack which woke me with a start. This was followed by more, heralded by a rumble as a slab of snow (a foot deep) slid down the roof. The metal gutter would take the strain for a while until the weight of snow overwhelmed it and with a crack similar to that of a rifle it deposited the snow onto the ground below. I was sleeping in the backroom where the gutter is very close to the window, so you can imagine the sound. This happened intermittently through the night, usually when I had just got back to sleep.

In the morning I went in to the yard, on the yard-side of the house half a roof's worth of snow had come down (see above). After much work the yard steps had been clear of snow the previous evening, alas no longer they were piled high. This year has been particularly bad, as it has not stopped snowing for days on end and the snow is very thick. Not as thick however as my first winter here when it was at least twice as deep and caused real problems, in particular breaking my old roof timbers. I remember a huge slab coming off the roof of the house opposite and my neighbours having to dig themselves out of their front door. Well, it was my turn this Winter. Shortly after taking the photo above, the rest came down with a terrible crump and the roof now looked like the photo below. If I had thought the snow in the yard deep before, it was literally doubly so now . Now that I no longer needed to worry about more avalanches I set about clearing the steps of at least two to three feet of snow plus a path to the gate. I had been thinking of going into Cesky Krumlov that morning, as I was leaving for England early the following morning but the snow put paid to that, instead I was up to my knees in snow.

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.

Diamonds in the Snow

Yesterday I went for a walk with my friend Salamander. We took the path up to the woods above my house, the weather was perfect – sun, snow, a clear blue sky, a deep blue I have never seen in England. We are having extremely low temperatures at present -20 degrees last night. It is as they say too cold to snow, the water vapour stays in the air and forms snow-like crystals over everything. On Saturday morning you could even see the ice hanging in the air where the sunlight shafted down, minute crystals would flash in shimmering clouds, a glimpse of the spirits of the Czech winter working their magic. Now we reaped the benefit of their work, we walked through ankle-deep virgin snow, broken only by occasional animal tracks. On the snow's surface flowers of ice crystal bloomed and shone in the sunlight. The branches of the dark firs at the forest edge were picked out by white.


We walked through woods, now bereft of the birdsong which had accompanied my mushrooming forays in the summer and autumn, the only sound being the crunch of the snow and occasional branch crack. Ducking under an electric fence we followed the edge of the forest down a steep slope – in the distance the Klet was bathed in sun, but with a scarf of low cloud around its shoulders. Crossing a frozen stream we regained the path and returned to the house and warm mugs of tea.

As dusk fell Salamander departed and I settled down with a book whilst the woodstove chugged in the corner. Then the phone rang – it was Salamander. “If you can, take a look at the moon.” I walked into the yard at the end of the orchard the moon full hung just above the old apple trees – large and orange. The light was so bright, the orchard was lit up as if in daylight. This morning I left the house at 8am to walk to Horice na Sumave to catch the bus into town. The sun was rising and the sky was coloured. As I walked I watched the sun turn the white snow yellow and the ice on the trees a peach colour. My house stood glowing in the light on the other side of the village. And just to finish off the enchantment across the fields as bold as brass ran my fox. I had not seen him since my return from England at New Year. He looked across the field at me, sniffed the morning air and darted into the cover of the woods. The dawn sun had turned his coat a dark auburn. By the time I got to Horice the world was white again.

Czech winter

Over the last week the area around our home has been transformed. We have had snow followed by a cold several degrees below freezing. As a consequence we have a wonderful winter landscape of bright white together with beautiful blue skies. It has been so cold and still that the water vapour has been unable to form into snow. Instead it crystallises on the branches and the plants and is nothing so like those magnetised iron filings one played with as a child, only white of course. On the ground through a process of slight thaw and then severe freeze the surface of the snow is covered by white feathers of ice, which catch the sunlight and dazzle like diamonds. There is such a magic in these Czech winter days, that it makes your heart leap with joy.

PS I don't usually put up large images on this blog, but have made an exception this time - click the photo to see enlarged version, a view towards Horice na Sumave from the hill above our Czech home.

Czech weather

It is nearly Easter and it is snowing. Over the last few days the snow has fallen at night only to melt during the day, but yesterday the snow stayed in our village in the foothills of the Sumava Mountains. In Cesky Krumlov the snow melted, but here a couple of hundred metres higher there has been no such relief - the snow is six inches deep and rising. The other thing that is to be noted is the wind, which drives the snow nearly horizontally at times. A wind is a rare thing in this landlocked country and is frankly one thing I miss from the UK. In Britain there is nearly always a wind blowing off the Atlantic, bringing a succession of weathers and affording the British the one thing they can comfortably talk about to strangers.

Czech weather used to be reliable – cold in winter with snow and warm in summer. Now that seems to have changed somewhat. Less snow, more rain (even in summer) and on occasion as today a wind. In the old days the Czech winter came from Siberia, now it comes from the west, indeed from the UK and the Atlantic. Is this a sign of global warming or a meteorological reflection of the new political situation? Time will tell. At least by the time the weather gets here from the UK the gaps between the isobars have widened and the intensity of the wind has lifted somewhat.

My first winter in the house 5

Towards the end of my first stay in our Czech home the weather changed dramatically. The temperatures rose and the packed snow, which had held the house in a grip of icy iron, began suddenly to melt. As I sat in the house I would hear the occasional thump as a sheet of snow, like a chunk of a small glacier, slid off the roof and crashed down. But it was not thawing evenly, where the low winter sunlight did not reach it (as was the case at the back of the house) the snow remained as thick as ever.

I decided to check what was happening to the roof. In the barn the forces of the uneven thaw was causing real problems - the front slope of the roof was now free of snow, the back was weighed down and under the uneven pressure some roof timbers were gaping. It looked as though the situation had been made worse by the previous owners, who clearly had raided the barn for timbers and so some key uprights were missing. Worried I returned to the house and went up in to the loft. Here there was another problem, cack-handed guttering meant that the melting snow was flowing into the brickwork of the side wall. At this point my friendly local carpenter turned up and I in faltering German explained the problems. For the gutter he constructed a Heath-Robinson solution of old corrugated iron, which though hardly an architectural feature did the job. He also pointed out that the water had rotted a major supporting roof beam. In the stable he just said "Kaput!"

I had been planning to spend a couple of years camping in the house, saving up the money and getting to know the place, before I did any major work. The hard winter of 2005-2006 put paid to such well-laid plans. The old house needed work doing and she needed it doing as soon as possible. Like the old lady I imagined her to be, she was banging her stick on the floor and demanding my attention. But at the same time she was a charmer - despite everything that was wrong, in the five days I stayed there my love had deepened for the old place.

But my time in the house was up. I packed everything in to bags and put them in the attic. Then I sat drinking my last mug of tea, watching the dying sunlight reflected on the farmhouse across the valley and waiting my lift back to Cesky Krumlov and somewhere which had hot water and a toilet.

My first winter in the house 4

On my first morning in the house I put my nose out from under the two duvets on my bed. The woodstove had long since gone out and I discovered my blanket had even frozen to the wall. I reminded myself that the next time I stayed in the house we would have central heating. I got up quickly, lit the stove and climbed back into bed for thirty minutes until things warmed up a bit. Then I put the kettle on and made some porridge (very British and very good for cold Czech mornings).

My next five days revolved around the needs of the stove and not allowing it to go out. This meant that I could only leave the house for a maximum of a couple of hours - enough to walk through the snow to the nearby town of Horice Na Sumave but not a lot further. It also meant regular trips to the stable to chop wood and bring it in. I now realised why Czech houses in the winter are surrounded by walls of chopped logs. I also realised how rubbish I was at chopping it and I hoped none of my neighbours saw me. My day was determined by the length of daylight, for although I had electricity the night sent the temperatures plummeting and after a while it made more sense to go to bed. In other words I no longer had control of my time - the pace of my day slowed and I found it, despite everything, relaxing. This is how it would have been in some previous age.

Occasionally my day would be disturbed by visitors. The local carpenter came over regularly to chop wood for me, to plane the door down so it fitted more snugly and to measure up the windows, which he was to repaint and repair for me (although not necessarily in that order). He would ski over from Horice, carrying his tools.

I also had visits from a Czech lady, whom my puppeteer friend had introduced me to, who was helping me with translation and negotiating with Czech lawyers and civil servants. She was shocked by the conditions I was living in: "I admire you - you are brave." She could have added "mad", and I could see it in her face as she looked around the room.

On one day she drove me into Cesky Krumlov to sort some house insurance and to return the landtax form. This latter was a good example of Czech disorder in matters bureaucratic. In all sorting the landtax must have taken several hours of speaking to different officers, only for us to go back to having to do what we were told to do in the first place. Ironically after all that, the landtax (the Czech equivalent of the community charge) amounted to less than £10 a year and probably cost more than that to collect. One Czech I know commented when asked what killed communism - "It strangled itself". Here was why. Afterwards the lady took me to a restaurant near the castle carpark, where she made sure I had a large hot meal. Then she drove me back to then house and my routine.

My first winter in the house 3

On the first day in the house I was delivered by my friend together with a few bags of basic belongings. Most of these were her hand-me-downs - an old duvet, sheets, and cooking pots - and some of those in turn had been given to her by her mother when she returned to Czecho. And I was extremely grateful for them. There had been more snow over night and I had to clear my way through the snow in the yard. The door was frozen shut and I had to use all my weight to open it.

My first job was, as it was to be on every day of my stay, to set the fire going in the stove. I then put the kettle on for a proper English mug of tea. Whilst it brewed I used some of my friend's old tea-towels to block the drafts in the faulty double-glazed windows. Having drunk up I went into the bathroom to discover a large hole where the bath had once been. The local carpenter had set about preparing for the fitting of a stopcock. This was a bit of a shock as I hadn't agreed to it, but he had adopted me and there was no arguing about it, even if I could speak Czech it would have been rude and the Czechs take such things very personally. Upstairs he had even been whitewashing one of the bedrooms!

I went outside to the stable to bring in some more wood for the stove. It was glorious - in the orchard the top layer of snow had melted yesterday, only to be frozen again overnight into bright diamond crystals which flashed in the sunshine. Across the snow I could see the trails of the wild and domestic animals who shared the garden with me - deer, the local cats and others I did not recognise.

And so I pottered about for the rest of the day setting up home in the one room that was warm. I was happy, despite the cold, despite the absence of water in the bathroom, I was at last at home in my Czech house.

My first winter in the house 1

As I said in my last post Czech winters have a special place in my heart. One reason for this is the fact that the first time I ever stayed in our newly purchased Czech home was in the terrible winter of a couple of years ago. All over central Europe roofs were collapsing under the weight of impacted snow. We had bought the house a few weeks before the winter had begun, when we had sat in shirt sleeves in the warm late autumn sunshine. By early February the landscape had changed utterly - the snow was several feet deep in the yard and the house was completely frozen.

We hadn't had time to do anything to the house to make it winterproof and certainly not for one of the worst winters in living memory. The family who sold it to us had assured us that they hadn't had any problems with frozen pipes, and we poor suckers believed them. When asked where the stopcock was, they had taken us out of the yard and up the hill for several hundred metres to the farm above our house. There was the stopcock - but unfortunately for us it was also the stopcock for the water supply to the farm and half the village, so there was no question of cutting off the water to the house.

Now in February with the temperature about minus 15 I arrived for my first stay in our new home. We had arranged that a lady from the nearby town go to the house each day for the week before, light the woodstoves and start the process of warming the place up in time for my arrival. I arrived at my puppeteer friend's house in Cesky Krumlov in the evening. As we sat down to a mug of tea, I noticed something was up. "How are things?" I asked.

"Well since you ask, the toilet exploded this morning!" My friend went on to explain that the poor woman had arrived at the house and stoked up the stove, when the pipe leading to the toilet exploded spraying a fountain of ice cold water into the bathroom. She had run into the village and the neighbours had run to her aid - one, a retired plumber, had spent an hour fighting the torrent and getting soaked. My friend had been dreading my reaction. I just started to laugh.

"Why are you laughing? It's not funny, the poor man will probably get pneumonia." I explained that I was very sorry for the man (I would get him a bottle of rum by way of thanks) and for the poor woman. I felt sorry too for my friend who had clearly been worrying about my reaction all day. But I deserved what had happened, for believing the family in the first place - wishful thinking in the face of what was obvious. The old house was getting her own back on us. Although the Czechs don't think of their houses as female, to my mind ours obviously was - an cantankerous elderly aunt who you ignored at your peril: "You think you can disappear off to England and leave me here unloved and uncared for, I'll show you," she was saying.

My friend, relieved, pointed out that there was now no water in the bathroom and so no toilet. That combined with the problems of heating - the house had barely got above freezing meant surely that I would not be staying in the house this time. No, I still wanted to, it was important to me. It would be "an awfully big adventure" I told her. She laughed, "How very British of you. Your neighbours will think you are mad."

Smoke

The other night I was walking down the street and was struck by the scent of woodsmoke on the frosted air. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am, I just have to smell woodsmoke and I am in the Czech Republic and in particular in Cesky Krumlov’s narrow renaissance streets on a Winter night. Somehow scent is the most powerful of the senses for triggering memories. I only have to smell new-mown grass to be taken back to the playing field of my secondary school, and the smell of earl grey tea transports me to my college rooms at Oxford. Woodsmoke on a winter night takes me to my second visit to Krumlov.

It was January and a very hard winter. I stayed with my friend in Prague, where the Vlatava river was part covered with ice so thick we walked on it. She suggested we take the train down to Cesky Krumlov, where she had a small house, and stay a few nights. I had already visited the town in the previous summer and loved it and so accepted the invitation eagerly. My previous visit had not prepared me for the impact of Cesky Krumlov in winter. Gone were the tourists, I was virtually the only non-Czech there. The town lay blanketed in snow. In the wind-less streets the smoke from the wood-fired stoves hung and diffused the light from the street lamps. It was totally magical and I was hooked.

Czech Winter Sunshine

I adore the Czechs' bright winter sunshine – this time of year the light can be quite golden, playing off the grass deadened and yellowed by snow. The red and yellow stems of dogwood almost seem on fire against the dark green of the firs. The white bones of the silver birch trunks are picked out by the sunlight, everything speaks of the life beneath the skin. It doesn't matter to me that there is little snow this January, although that brings its own joys and combined with the winter sun is quite wonderful.

The Czechs are complaining that the weather is wrong – not enough snow to ski, not warm enough for spring, a few clouds in the sky so not a perfect blue. They should try England's endless grey, the oppressive threat of rain, the cough and splutter of winter fog, they would never complain about this Czech winter again.

Irony of Ironies

I return to the Czech Republic tomorrow and my friend emailed me on Friday to warn me that the weather was changing there. The snow was melting, so no skiing. The ice on the lakes likewise so no skating. She and her partner, along with the rest of the population of the Republic had been enjoying both. Now the weather had turned remarkably spring-like, just in time for my return. Although not a skater or a skiier I had been looking forward to the lovely cold bright days of the Czech winter.

The irony was that the email arrived the very day I had taken three hours making a one-hour journey (from Oxford to Winchcombe). The reason for my long journey was a blizzard that swept in from the west, first there was torrential rain causing floods and then as the day turned night it turned to snow. I was caught by surprise - the slippery roads impassable I ended up in a ditch. When I finally got in I emailed my friend back, that maybe I was not so keen on snow after all!

Snow

Well, it has arrived - Winter and with it heavy snow. They are saying such a large amount of snow so early hasn't happened in living memory. After last winter snow's virtual no-show this is great, and the Czechs are flocking to the ski resorts. Although I do hope we are not about to have another hard winter like the one in 2005/2006, as there are a lot of old Czech roofs which will not survive it, including one on a barn down the road.

The really annoying thing about this is that I am in England at the moment facing English November rain instead. Darn it!