A Small Furry Housemate

As you may have read in a previous post I do have problems with mice (mys) in the house at this time of year. With fields and orchards behind the house it is to be expected. However this year there has been no sign of them, so the traps have been left unset.

You can imagine my frustration therefore when I woke to hear rustling in the corner of the bedroom. I turned on the light, nothing. In the morning I checked everywhere - the worksurfaces showed no tell-tale signs of mouse droppings, the bread and potatoes remained ungnawed. I decided I must have been mistaken. The following night - rustling. Again I searched - no sign of mice activity.

Then the other evening I was sat writing at my computer when a small mouse-shaped creature ran across the floor. I set the traps and waited. I watched as the wee animal, as bold as brass, investigated the living room floor. It approached the trap, I braced myself for the sound of another mouse meeting its doom, but nothing happened. I got up and looked. The animal was near the trap and was totally ignoring its contents. Then it pounced on something on the floor. Puzzled I looked more closely, this was not a mouse, but a shrew. I am used to the small variety of shrew we get in England, but this was definitely its larger Czech cousin.

I am fond of shrews. I like the little feisty critters, who will take on all comers, even animals their own size. They need to, they have to eat their body weight in food everyday to survive. I unset the traps and read up about them. This one is I think one of the white-toothed variety. I read that it is solitary, does not climb, does on occasion live in houses and most importantly is carnivorous. What does it eat? Why! Spiders, flies, beetles, cockroaches and mice. My little brown friend can definitely stay!

Snow at Both Ends

Over New Year my son and his girlfriend joined us in the Czech Republic for a week. It was a delight to have them in the house and nice to see them so relaxed. It is my hope that they will feel that they can come any time, whether or not we are there. We stood together on the terrace of Cesky Krumlov castle as the clock chimed the New Year in and the sky exploded with fireworks. We took them to Cesky Krumlov, Ceske Budejovice and Lake Lipno and were tourists again. We ate out a fair bit, including a meal at the Old Gaol where my son renewed his acquaintance with their steak roasted on an open fire.

My son had talked up the possibility of snow to his girlfriend and the weather duly obliged. Unfortunately it was also depositing snow in England. I took them and my husband to Prague Airport and left them to catch the Easyjet flight home to Bristol. On the underground train to the coach station I overheard an English couple talking about a flight cancellation. I lent across and asked them about it - it was the Easyjet Flight to Bristol. They thought it was canceled but they weren't sure. I sat on the coach back to Krumlov worrying, my husband had left his Czech phone at home and so I had no way of contacting him.

Later that night my mother rang from England. Had I heard what had happened? The weather was terrible, airports closed all over the place, roads impassable. My husband rang her from the hotel in Prague, where Easyjet had lodged them, and so I was able to ring him. They had booked themselves at great cost on to a British Airways flight only to hear from someone in the hotel restaurant that that too had been cancelled. Now they were not able to get away for another three days. I stood at the window watching the snow falling on my Czech village.

On the Saturday my mother rang again. Had I heard? What was happening? If they did make it to England ,the roads to Gloucesterhire were awful. She was under the impression, that my husband was keeping me up to date, wrongly as he had better things to do. I contacted my Czech friend and got her to check the internet for flights to Heathrow. Two flights had managed to get away that evening, but were they on it? I did not know. I did not know until Sunday evening, when my husband rang me from our English home. As he wrote in an email to "Phew!"

Statues at the Monastery

After my last post about Czech religious art, I though I might share with you some lovely statues we found the other day.

In the gardens of the Dominican Monastery next to the Church of on the Sacrifice of the Virgin in Piarist Square (Ceske Budejovice) is a series of wonderful statues of religious figures. Sometimes the gate to the Garden is closed, but my husband and I found them open yesterday and wandered in. Here are some photos of what we found.

Including this rather severe St Anne!

Czech Church Art

One of the more frustrating things in the Czech Republic is that every time I try to visit a church I find it locked. Being British I expect to walk in and look around or at least go to a nearby house to collect a key. On a walk with a friend I discussed why this was and she told me about the problem the country has with thefts from churches. As a result churches have to be locked up and visitors like myself denied.

Now Ceske Novinny has run an article on the problem which shocked and appalled me. Apparently 90 per cent of religious buildings have been burgled since 1989.

In the article the diocesan heritage preserver to the Prague Archbishopric is quoted as saying "About a half of Gothic and Renaissance works of art and roughly one-third of baroque artifacts have disappeared (from Czech churches) in the past 20 years."

The culprits are often organized gangs linked to specialist foreign art traffickers who take the stolen artifacts across the border to Austria and Germany. The situation has been exacerbated by the relaxation of the border with the creation of the Schengen area. It is a terrible thing that these precious artifacts, which have a religious and cultural value which exceeds their monetary one, managed to survive atheist communism only to fall foul of black market forces under democracy.

Themes in the Blog - Czech Customs and Culture

As the blog gets larger I thought I might help readers interested in certain topics by creating some pages which list the blog's content by theme. I promise to update the pages as new posts are added.

The themes are: Czech Nature, Czech Customs & Culture, Places to visit in South Bohemia, Buying and Restoring a Czech House, Czech History and Politics, Day to Day Life in the Czech Republic. This post covers Czech Customs and Culture, click on the links above for the others.

CZECH CUSTOMS AND CULTURE

• Kvinterna Again
  
• Concert Hall for Budejovice
  
• Music
  
• Mayday 2010
  
• Jiri Barta
  
• Czechoslovakian Folkdance
  
• Jindrichuv Hradec
  
• Statues at the Dominican Monastery, Budejovice
  
• Czech Church Art
  
• Czech Art
  
• Czech Weddings
• White Hairs
• Art Nouveau Architecture
• Timber
  
• Jiri Trnka Filmmaker
• Jiri Trnka Illustrator
• Gingerbread House
• Festival of the Five Petalled Rose
• Witches and Maypoles (May Day)
• Bohemian Baroque
• Masopust in Cesky Krumlov (Shrove Tuesday)
• Masopust in Horice na Sumave
• Krtek the Mole
• Rococo Treasures
• Czech House Pixies
• Twelfth Night
• New Year 2009
• Carp Czech Christmas
• Edith Pargeter Czechophile
• Czech Cafe Culture
• St Hubert's Hunt
• Czech Maps
• Closely Observed Trains
• Water Sprite
• Rotating Theatre
• Masopust at Cowley Road Carnival
• Czech Folk Dance
• Tatra Car
• Iva Bittova
  
• Czech Slippers
• Dressing Up As Angels
• The Plague Column
• Bringing Masopust To Oxford
• Stifter Trail
• Visible World
• Kvinterna
• New Year's Eve in Krumlov
• Bears in the Moat
• Carp Ponds
• Czechs and the Devil
• Jan Svankmajer
• Horice Na Sumave Passion Play
• Czech Graffiti
  
• Czech Coffee and Tea
• Svejk or Kafka
• Gardens and Gardening (Karel Capek)
• Alchemist's House
• Maypoles and Witches
• Crosses and Shrines
• Easter in the Czech Republic
• Puppets
• Celts

Egon Schiele and Cesky Krumlov

When it comes to local artists none is more famous than Egon Schiele. Schiele moved to his mother's hometown Cesky Krumlov in 1911 with his girlfriend and model Wally Neuzil. He had been visiting the town since his childhood and had been inspired by it to do some of his earliest work, including his earliest landscape - of the Budweiser gate. Although his life in the town came to an abrupt end in the face of the anger from the local burghers, who were shocked by his use of young girls as models, he returned to the town time and again for short stays to sketch the architecture, often from the hills above.

Now of course all is forgiven and Cesky Krumlov celebrates his work. The Egon Schiele Centrum is a major attraction - a large art gallery offering a small celebration of Schiele's life and work together with large visiting art exhibitions by different artists. The exhibitions vary in their interest, but it is always worth checking what is on at the Centrum if you are visiting Cesky Krumlov.

Czech Art

I have just been enjoying a fascinating post on the blog Adventures in the Print Trade about Czech Graphics of the 1970s. As I indicated in a previous post on Jiri Trnka - a visit to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Trade Fair Palace in Prague first opened my eyes to the wealth and creativity of Czech artists that was hidden by the Iron Curtain, and it is good to see Neil of the Print Trade blog making the same discovery.

One of the delights of discovering Czech art and especially its graphics is for me the influence of fairytales - another reason why I am not surprised that it has struck a chord with Neil, who is an authority on the subject. Fairytales seem to have infused Czech life in a way that is very special. So often people coming to my part of the world will comment that Cesky Krumlov is a fairytale place. And whilst visually I can see why people might say this, I think it is something more profound, something deep in the Czech pysche, that is calling.

Czech graphics are distinctive. There is something playlike about them, they have a humour that can be dark (like many a Grimm fairytale) but also are light of touch. My Czech puppeteer friend who first introduced me to this place is also, among her many accomplishments, a wonderful artist. In particular I like her prints. She was always being told when she was living and working in England how unusual her art was. Without in anyway diminishing the standard and originality of her work I now can see that it is rooted in the graphics of her homeland.