The Last Mushrooms

And so at last we come to the end of the mushroom season. The last mushrooms are to my mind some of nature's best - wood blewits with their lovely lilac gills, floral scent and firm flesh. They arrive when the first good frosts turn the other mushrooms to a brown mush, in fact they seem to need the frosts to fruit.

I picked these in the woods above my Czech home, but have picked them among the gorse bushes on Cleeve Hill in the Cotswolds. I was alone in the woods apart from some wild boar snorting in the undergrowth and making me jump and a herd of maybe a dozen deer. Many Czechs are not aware of the blewits, indeed I have been told categorically by neighbours that blewits are not good and even poisonous. It was a delightful walk - the air crisp and still, sunlight glancing through the trees. The blewits were a nice extra, a surprise even because I thought they might be over, but there they were nestling around a fallen fir tree, pushing up through the needles which they clinged on to as I tried to pick them.

But now I think they are over. It snowed last night (more of that in my next post) and there's more to come.

In Praise of Czech Windows

It has been freezing lately - see photographs of frost in my previous post - but my room is as they say in Britain 'toasty'.

One reason for this warmth is the wonder that is my wood-burning stove, of which I have blogged in the past. But another reason is Czech windows. In a Czech winter you need serious windows with serious double-glazing. The traditional windows in an old house like mine are made up of effectively two windows, each with its own handles, about four inches apart.

This arrangement has various advantages apart from keeping out the cold. One is that you can open the outer windows should you wish and leave the inner closed (or vice versa) which is useful for getting rid of condensation and cooling the place down a bit without having a breeze. Another is that you can put flowers in there - useful for deterring flies. And the last is that the space makes a brilliant fridge, allowing you to avoid having to go downstairs for the milk (see photograph above).

Sometimes a Picture...

We have had freezing fog for two nights (-5 degrees yesterday early evening) which covered everything with sharp points of frost. Then this morning I woke to find the sun pouring through the windows. Under the warm sun the ice was already falling from the trees like snow, so I grabbed my camera and walked over the hill to Horice na Sumave. Here is a collection of photos from that walk. Half an hour when I returned it all melted away.

Calendar

I came across this calendar in a Czech second-hand bookshop or antikvariat. It dates back to 1975 and features the art of Cyril Bouda. Each month is decorated with traditional Czech scenes for the month in question. Above we see Cervenec (July) - note the delighted mushroom finder at the bottom and the woodsmen bringing a raft of logs down the river to the sawmills. In the centre is a list of name days for the month.  And below is Brezen (March) with easter celebrations, the traditional execution of winter and the arrival of the stork heralding spring.

What I love about the calendar is that it features both customs that still are alive and some traditions which have died out.

As for the artist: Cyril Bouda was one of the best Czech twentieth-century draftsmen and illustrators. A student of Kysela and Švabinský, he was famous for his illustrations (such as The Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini or Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift) but he was also known for his tapestry designs. His motto was “Not a single day without a line”, attributed to Apelles, an ancient Greek painter and he kept to it, by the time he died in 1984 he had produced thousands of works of art. This means you can collect examples of his work relatively easily - why you could start with some of the 30+ stamps he designed!

Trebic Jewish Quarter

After our visit to Slavonice and the 1938 bunkers (see previous post) my husband and I drove to Trebic, where we stayed in the old Jewish quarter. The quarter is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list, being one of the few well-preserved Jewish gettos left in Europe. I have discovered a wonderful hotel in a building which dates back to the 17th century. The hotel must be unique in having an ancient Jewish ritual bath (mikveh) in its basement. 

Having offloaded our bags in our room, we went for a walk around the quarter. The first place we visited was the Jewish cemetery, which sits on the hill above the Jewish quarter. There are over 3000 gravestones (we didn't count them) set on a steep slope and thousands more unmarked graves. You see two memorials as you enter the cemetery - the first is a large memorial to the men of the community who gave their lives in World War 1 (presumably fighting on the side of the Germans), the second a simple memorial to the 290 Jews who were victims of the Nazis. In the museum in the old synagogue you can see a list of their names. Family names appear on both.

The one hundred and twenty three houses and two synagogues of the Jewish quarter are squashed on to a slope between the river and the hill along two roads which go nowhere, but are linked by alleyways, some of which go through the houses. Now relatively quiet, the area would once have been vibrant and noisy, full of industry and a large Jewish population (1500 in 1890). The Jewish community was already in decline by the 1930s, but as the gravestones tell noone was left after 1945. It is a remarkably atmospheric place, as yet undiscovered by tourists. As we walked the empty streets back to the hotel in the falling dusk, the ghosts of the past walked beside us.

Bunkers in the woods

Czechs view the events of 1938 very differently from us Brits. For them British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's betrayal at Munich (where he agreed to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland) still galls and is one of the most important "what ifs" in modern history. We Brits have been led to believe that there was no point in supporting the Czechs in resisting Hitler, they lived "in a far-away country" with "people of whom we know nothing" (Chamberlain 1938) and needed British help to fight - help we could not provide. But if you explore the forests and mountains that ring the Czech Republic you will find evidence to the contrary.

Near Slavonice in South Bohemia my husband and I visited some of the bunkers, which Czechoslovakia had been building for Nazi invasion for several years upto 1938. The bunkers were approximately every 100 yards apart, giving a continuous field of fire. In front of the bunkers were barbwire and anti-tank defences. These fortifications went all the way along the border. The little Czechoslovak nation was mobilised in 1938 - the army that would have faced Hitler's troops was nearly as large as the Nazi's. And as the Czechs will tell you they were prepared to fight for the country that they had so long been denied and they will also tell you that they could have won. What would the history of the twentieth century have been like if they had?

Gypsy Devils in Krumlov

My husband and I visited the St Wenceslas celebrations despite not being dressed for the drop in evening temperature with the sudden arrival of Autumn, we found ourselves transfixed by a performance by the Ciganski Diabli (Gypsy Devils) who give a gypsy flourish to adaptations of some well-known classical music.

The local Roma population was out in force for these wonderful ambassadors for gypsy musical virtousity. The younger members were at the front with their reversed baseball caps, whilst senior members stood or sat behind. They were joined in their enjoyment by a large number of other Krumlov residents and some foreigners such as ourselves and a group of Japanese who watched for a while before moving away. We might have been freezing (you could see your breath), but we weren't going anywhere until the last note had been played and the audience had risen to its feet to applaud.

If you want to know more about the group, visit their website on www.gypsydevils.com.