Czech Food shopping for Brits

I am now in the UK and will fly back to the Czech Republic just in time for the New Year celebrations. I would love it if my parents were able to visit our Czech home, they helped in its purchase and I know they would love to visit too. However elderly knees will not take the journey and so all they can do is read this blog and look at our photos. I therefore decided to give them a taste of Czech cuisine (albeit cooked by a Brit - me).

It used to be the case, when first we started going to the Czech Republic and indeed even when we bought our Czech home, that you could not get Czech ingredients in the UK. With the influx of Czech and Polish workers into England, following their countries' entry into the EU, came foodstuffs and foodstores geared up to the new arrivals. Suddenly on the Cowley Road in Oxford where I worked, you could buy chleb (Czech bread), klobasa (spicy sausages) and the ubiquitous pickled vegetables. Most of it came from Poland, but the other day I came across the Czechland Food Shop in Gloucester, which offers more Czech groceries than usual, including importantly the different grades of flour. I have even found that crucial ingredient tvaroh - a cream cheese used in strudels and buchty (Czech doughnuts) - in our local Morrisons.

I will have to tell you in my next post how I fared in my attempt at cooking a Czech meal for my parents. Meanwhile I shall just help myself to a Pribinacek (a vanilla cream desert and comfort food) which I bought in Gloucester.

The Ales South Bohemian Gallery – Collection Of Medieval Art

The other day my husband and I decided to play the tourist and go on a trip to the Castle at Hluboka, well not the castle as such but the Gallery which is to be found attached to it. So we joined the hoards of German schoolchildren as they wound their way up from the town below. The zigzag way offered good views across the Vltava and the fish ponds towards the blue hills and mountains of the south. The castle is built in the English Gothic style of Windsor and other Victorian palaces, a white confection of crenellations and faux gargoyles standing in beautiful gardens again of the English style. Unlike the Germans our way took us to the left into a conservatory of flamboyant cast iron and glass, then left again and into the Collection of Medieval Art of the Ales South Bohemian Gallery.

The collection was a revelation and one, which had it been say at the Tate in Liverpool, we would have made an overnight visit to see and thought it worth the money. There were two large galleries filled with medieval statuary (calvaries, saints, Madonnas with and without child, and pietas) and religious paintings from altar screens. The pieces had been gathered from all over South Bohemia, and featured the work of both local craftsmen and others working in nearby Bavaria. What was particularly striking to us was the familiarity of the places from which the art works had been taken, not only were they from large wealthy towns and abbeys such as Ceske Budejovice and Kajov, but from small local villages and churches such as Boletice and Novosedly, a sign of the wealth perhaps of this fertile region at the time. The oldest exhibit is a statue of St Bartholomew from Horni Drkolna from before 1300 – the saint is simply but effectively carved from a lump of limewood with a head out of proportion to the body. The Gallery allows one to move through the development of Czech Gothic art from that simple piece. As time goes by the artistic style evolves, developing more natural proportions, and even movement. The facial features change and vary, some show the influence of Byzantine art, others the become individualised.

Throughout our visit we were alone in the Gallery apart from the two gallery attendants that followed us round. The tourist hoards clearly preferred the excesses of 19th Century English Gothic to the sublime purity of the original medieval Gothic of Central Europe. It is a shame that this is so, this is a collection of international importance.

And the Monkey

Following on the last post and Hannah's request, here is the fresco of the monkey in the window of my favourite house in Na Louzi Street.

Lady at the Window

Some of my favourite frescos in Cesky Krumlov are those to be found on the facades of 54 La Nouzi Street. This lovely renaissance house was reputed to have been the home of the agent of the Rosenbergs. The frescos I am referring to are those jokingly showing the 16th century inhabitants at their windows, including one of a pet monkey sitting on the window ledge. One is of a woman looking straight at you. It is as if she is watching the world go by without any reason other than being nosey. She has been doing it for nearly four centuries.

On the square where my friend lives there is a block of flats. An old lady lives in one of them and I often see her looking out of her first floor window as I come and go. She can be there for hours, the passing world offers such fascination. I have got into the habit of smiling at her and nodding as I go past and she smiles back. Her face is lined and broad and when she smiles her eyes disappear.

Road Accidents

I was walking the road from Kajov to Chvalsiny, taking advantage of a cold brisk day with a gloriously bright sun, when I took this photo. The road is a not atypical one for these parts, lined on both sides by parades of trees and on an embankment that slopes steeply away into the river or the water meadows. This layout has its perils, the road is too narrow, barely wide enough (if at all) in places for two cars to meet each other and certainly not with a pedestrian in the road too. The road deceives the drivers into going too fast – something most Czechs do anyway – and on occasion into overtaking when one cannot see far enough ahead – again something Czech drivers do regularly. If one is unfortunate to meet such stupidity coming towards you, the closely planted trees and the embankment mean there is nowhere for your car to go to avoid an accident.

In all I counted three wayside memorials to lives lost on the four kilometre stretch I walked and numerous trees where the scarred bark told of other (hopefully less fatal) accidents. The memorials were marked with plaques and flowers. All spoke, as in this one shown here, of young lives cut short. And yet as I walked the cars still went too fast, several times I had to jump on to the verge. I do not doubt that there will be more memorials added to the road's deadly tally over the years. There are some calls for the trees to be cleared from the sides of these roads, but they are not fault, the drivers are. The trees have been there long before the speeding cars. And would removing them actually stop the accidents or might it even encourage more speeding?

What Every Tourist Needs!

I was walking down a street in Ceske Budejovice, when I passed this notice. A few yards on I stopped and looked back, unable to believe what I had read in passing. I then walked back to the notice and took this photo to share with you. I even went into the shop to check and yes you can buy books, maps, cards and.... altar wine. What every tourist needs indeed!

Edith Pargeter - Czechophile

Many people will know the English writer Edith Pargeter by her pseudonym Ellis Peters, under which she wrote the very successful Brother Cadfael books. What then is she doing in a blog about the Czechs? Well, she was a great Czechophile, who almost single-handedly was responsible for bringing Czech literature to the attention of people in the UK.

Pargeter had first got to meet and enjoy the company of Czechs during the Second World War, afterwards she took advantage of an International Summer School in Czechoslovakia to visit the country she had come to love through meeting its people. The visit took place in that brief time before the Communist takeover of the country and inspired Edith into increased admiration for Czech culture. She taught herself Czech and began to translate Czech literature into English. This activity allowed her the opportunity to continue visiting Czechoslovakia on an almost annual basis, she worked with the state-owned publishing house Artia and even kept her earnings in the Communist country to fund her trips. It is apparent from her writings that she had to walk a very fine line – she was very much against the oppression that she saw, but needed for her Czech friends' sake and for the sake of her work not to upset the communist authorities - “I was continually walking a tightrope in order to avoid harming people I wanted only to serve.”

A bibliography of her Czech translations shows huge breadth, including modern classics (as yet unheard of in the “West”), more established writers and even Czech legends. Indeed it reads like a who's who of Czech literature – Neruda, Toman, Styblova, Nemcova, Bor, Seifert, Klima, In total she translated sixteen books. It is a tribute to her skill, that some of her translations are still in print. In 1968 Edith Pargeter was awarded the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations Gold Medal for her services to Czech Literature.

The more I have read of Edith Pargeter's relationship with this lovely country and its people, the more I find myself at one with her. Much of what she loves and recognises here, I love and recognise too. I will therefore leave the last word to her, here is her description of Neruda's Tales of the Little Quarter, she could have been talking about the wider nation: “He made a book the image of himself, high-spirited, amusing, compassionate, occasionally startling us by a flavour of astonishing bitterness, but having at its heart and ground an uncompromising affirmation that life, bitter and sweet together, is to be accepted with ardour, and humanity, in all its folly and imperfection, to be loved without reserve.”