Tabor

A few days ago I was in the South Bohemian town of Tabor. Tabor has to be one of the most remarkable historic towns in the Czech Republic and I realised that I had not blogged about it, so here we go.
 

Two names dominate the history of the town - Jan Hus, the church reformer who died at the stake before the town's foundation but who wrote some of his most important works in nearby Kozi Hradek castle and Jan Zizka - the one-eyed military genius who turned the Hussites into a fighting force to be feared. Zizka's statue stands in the main square and another of Hus in a neighbouring square. Both men deserve posts of their own, which I will give them soon.

Tabor is above all the town of the Hussites, created by them in the fifteenth century as a fortress town and soon the centre of their religious and military movement. Their presence is to be felt at every turn. On the main square stands the Hussite Museum - newly refurbished and hugely informative it is a must for any visitor. The Museum also allows access to some of the enormous network of underground tunnels built by the Hussites and extended over the years. Other attractions include the Tabor Treasure exhibition, the city fortifications including the Kotnov tower and the lovely Deanery church.

 When I visited last week the place was relatively quiet - the market on the square was just closing and there was hardly anyone around and certainly no tourists. I was able to view the beautiful facades and gables of the medieval and renaissance burgher houses at my leisure.

 
When I return the place will be transformed. We will be coming for the three days of the Tabor Meeting (Taborska Setkani), when the town celebrates its Hussite past. There will be a  torchlight parade through the town, fireworks, medieval market, the Old Bohemian market, performances by Czech and foreign ensembles, street theatre, concerts, children’s activities and a lot more. The Sunday will be devoted to European Heritage Day, when the doors of normally closed historic buildings are opened.

This is a major event in the European living history calendar made even more important by the fact that this will be the 20th Tabor Meeting. Every hotel room in the town will be full. And I  will be there.

Harvests

I am told the Czech news has been full of doom and gloom about a failure in fruit this year - no cherries, no plums, no apples and pears. But they clearly haven't been in my orchard.

The branches on my early cherry tree have been weighed down with deep red fruit or they were until I and the birds relieved them of their treasure. The freezer is now full of bags of cherries and in the cupboard jars of cherries preserved in a mixture of gin and sugar are sitting waiting for my return from England in August.

Then there are the strawberries - my friend Hannah loved her strawberries and grew them both at her Krumlov riverside house and the house she was restoring by the lake. I have keeping an eye on both houses, as the slow business of Czech probate proceeds, and I pay myself in soft fruit - strawberries and raspberries.

But the greatest of fruits are the ones that no one plants or tends. They have a special richness that comes from God or Nature being their gardener. The wild strawberries are magnificent this year in their size and abundance. Usually there are too few even to survive the trip to the basket and certainly not to the house, but this year there have been so many that there are bags full in the freezer.

And what shall I drink with these fruits? Of course it is a drink made from another harvest. I have two bottles of elderflower syrup sitting in my cupboard. An easy drink to make and a delicious one that speaks of early summer. My method is simply to layer the flowers with sugar in a jug and leave for a day or two, then simply add bowling water and hey presto - elixir.

Green Guerilla Strikes

In a covert operation Cesky Krumlov's very own Green Guerilla has struck a blow for all those who opposed the Town Council's and River Authority's destruction of a verdant island in the middle of the Vltava near the base of the castle cliffs.

In the early hours a few days ago the Green Guerilla in an action similar to that of the old Milk Tray advert hero scaled natural and man-made barriers to plant willow trees in the silt near the artificial island installed half-heartedly in response to the many protests of local people. It is unclear whether he abseiled in from the bridge or even a helicopter or whether he forded the roaring torrents, but unseen by drunken passers-by he planted a total of eight willows. Earlier reconnaisance missions (from the windows of a nearby shop) had revealed that despite the Council's vandalism of last year the river is already beginning to reinstate the island in full as a silt bank builds in the centre of the river. The willows' roots will aid this island's formation. His work done the Green Guerilla disppeared into the shadows.

"All because the lady loved her duck island"

The Voice of a Bird - Iva Bittova

Firstly my apologies for the slight break in my posts. I have been busy running a Czech arts tour for a lovely bunch of Australians and so have not had time to blog while I was doing that. I will be putting up a number of posts about the tour - we did some fab things, even if I do say so myself.

But today I will blog briefly about what I did last night by way of a reward and that was to attend a concert by Czech singer and musician Iva Bittova in Ceske Budejovice. It took some doing - no one in the information centre knew anything about it nor in the main music shop. Eventually I found the box office for the venue only to discover that its opening hours were restricted to Mons to Fris 4pm to 6pm. As I arrived on a Saturday I was forced to come back on the Monday, the day of the concert. I arrived at 4pm to make sure of a ticket. But I needn't have bothered - even though the venue must have had a capacity of about only 200 and Bittova is a major international artist when the show began there were still empty seats. So I found myself with a central aisle seat six rows back!

I can honestly say that the hour and half that followed were some of the most enjoyable of my life. Listening to Bittova on cd or even watching videos is nothing to seeing and hearing her in person. She so clearly enjoys what she is doing that there is an excitement that spills into the hall. Although she can do emotion (just listen to her singing in Godar's Mater), there were also some wonderful moments of Czech whimsical humour. I don't know of any other singer who can use their voice as completely and in so many ways as she does. Just watch this video - and see how she has the voice of a bird as well as that of a human.

So powerful was the impression on me that I found myself crying with delight, something that has never happened to me before at a concert. Although I confess that my tears were also for my friend who loved Bittova and who had wanted to come with me next time Bittova played locally.

Birdwatching At Home in the Czech Republic

Our area of the Czech Republic is rightly famous as a destination for birdwatchers. There are several internationally recognised areas where ornithologists can see many unusual and common European birds. I am going to do a post or two about my birdwatching trips, but I actually don't need to go anywhere as the birds just come to me.

I am surrounded by birds and birdsong every time I work in the garden and orchard. The most common bird is the redstart (shown here in photo taken from Wikipedia) and it is as cheeky as any robin. In fact it is so friendly that the other day one arrived in my house, fluttering around the living room and bumping into the window. Then a few days later a swallow expertly flew through a crack at the top of my window, took a swing around the house, decided there was nothing worth investigation before equally expertly flying out again.

Other regular avian visitors to the garden are treecreepers who explore the rough granite stone walls of the barn for insects, woodpeckers (green, spotted and the non-British grey-headed), fieldfares, nuthatches, wagtails, tits, finches of various types,(including serins, siskins, and bramblings) and the ubiquitous magpies. A friend of mine has had the stunning scarlet rosefinch in her garden, but she lives closer to the forest edge.

Birds of prey are also to be seen from my garden. As I have said in a previous post we sometimes see black kites here and buzzards (common and rough-legged) are usually circling somewhere. The other day I saw three birds of prey being attacked by one brave magpie. The two larger birds (buzzards) ignored it, but the smaller of the three suddenly responded with a hurtling dive at the pesky magpie. You could almost hear the magpie cry, "Shit!!! It's a sparrowhawk." as it fled. 

Toilet breaks

I was driving along a country road the other day behind an old Skoda. The road was typical of many one gets in the Czech countryside - built at a time when there were no cars and few carts and so narrow enough to make overtaking difficult. And as is the case with many such roads it was lined with fruit trees which made overtaking even more dangerous, so there I was - stuck but philosophical. Then suddenly the car in front started to indicate - I could see no side road down which it could be turning and sure enough all the Skoda did was pull up. I  could do nothing but stop behind the car as the road rose to brow just beyond the parked cars.

What was the matter? Imagine my annoyance when the male driver and his passenger jumped out of the car and walk away. Then in clear sight they proceeded to pee against one of the fruit trees. When they had finished they walked nonchalantly back to the car doing up their flies.  

I have observed such behaviour regularly - Czech males peeing in public. On any car trip of length you are likely to see this (and not just on car trips). As a Brit I still find this lack of embarrassment strange. What is it about the Czech male? Is it, as I suspect, a cultural thing? A friend of mine once told me "I do enjoy peeing in nature." Getting back to nature certainly has a great appeal to the Czech psyche, maybe this is a reason. Or is it related to the copious amounts of beer Czech men drink?

Sharing the Garden

 

Having spent so long doing up my Czech house I am at last turning my attention to our enormous garden. Well, I say 'garden' it's really an overgrown orchard - very overgrown. As long-standing readers of my blog will be aware I started the hard process of mowing some of it a few years ago. At first my only option was to hand scythe, but each year I have managed to get more of it to a point where my electric strimmer can take some of the strain off my shoulder and arm muscles.  

The improvement is such that this year I decided to start planting some shrubs. My friend Hannah had always urged me to improve the garden. She was a great one for planting decorative shrubs and plants with edible fruit (very Czech) and what little was left of her busy life was spent gardening, including removing snails from her strawberries and throwing them over the fence. I pointed out that that was all very well if you are in the Czech Republic all the time, but I am not and so the battle against pests would be lost almost as soon as it began. Now with Hannah's death I found myself rethinking my position. With a large population of snails and ground riddled with mouseholes it was a no to strawberries and runnerbeans but more substantial shrubs might be possible.

I returned from the garden centre (Czech garden centres are very different to English ones - less flowers and more trees) with an aronia bush, two sea buckthorns (male and female to allow pollination), an edible amelianchior, raspberries, thornless blackberry and cranberry. After a day's digging the shrubs stood proud on a bank half way down the garden, where the blossom and bright fruit will be visible from the window by my desk.

A few days later I inspected the plants to discover that someone/thing had chewed the bark of my aronia. This was unexpected - snail damage on the raspberries yes, rabbit attack on the blackberry - but not a large shrub. Look closely at the photo above and you will see the culprit - a deer. I knew they regularly strip my plum trees of fruit on the lower branches, but I was not expecting them to eat bark in early summer. During the day I never see them in the orchard (this photo was taken at dawn from the window hence the lack of clarity), but I do see their droppings.

I checked the internet and discovered that the answer to this problem was human urine. Apparently they are scared off by human scent. So urine it was. I leave you to work out how it was delivered to the aronia bush!