The Venus of Dolni Vestonice

The most remarkable Czech archaeological site is at Dolni Vestonice and the Palava Hills, where archaeologists discovered the camps of Paleolithic mammoth hunters protected by a layer of dust blown over the site by glacial winds.

My husband and I visited the small museum in Dolni Vestonice. From the outside it seemed that there will be little to see, but the museum was like the tardis. This is no local museum, but one dedicated to one of the most important paleolithic sites in the world. Archeaologists have been excavating the sites around the town and neighbouring Pavlov since 1925 and thousands of objects have been discovered, including stone tools, animal bones and several burials.

Traditionally it was believed that "advanced" technologies - firing ceramics, polishing stones and weaving - didn't appear until 20,000 years later with the Neolithic revolution. That was until finds at Dolni Vestonice proved otherwise. Impressions of woven fabric on clay revealed that the mammoth hunters were already weaving (probably nettle fibres used by the Czechs for some traditional fabrics).

Archaeologists discovered approximately 2,300 clay figurines which had been fired in the hunters' fire. The animals are recognizably lions, mammoths, bears, and wild horses. The most famous figurine is of a woman - the Dolni Vestonice Venus. Dated to 29,000 to 25,000 BC and discovered in 1925, the figure is the oldest ceramic representation of the human figure discovered. In 2004 a scan of the figure discovered a finger print of a child in the clay. Suddenly you are transported back to a hut made of mammoth bones, branches and hides where a child picks up a still damp figure that one of the adults has just sculpted. Perhaps the child is told off, the figure is probably an offering to the gods. Later as night falls the hunters gather around the hearth and place the venus into the fire and the fingerprint is preserved.

Kutna Hora - Silver Mine Museum

Kutna Hora was quite literally built on silver, the hill on which the old town stands is riddled with mine shafts and galleries, where men toiled to in the darkness to dig out by hand the precious silver ore. You can read about how hard their work was and think you understand, but it takes a visit to the mines to really bring it home to you. By the time you finish you will understand why their life expectancy was 35.

You are kitted out in a white coat (similar to those worn by the miners), lamp and protective helmet (which the miners did not have) and then you walk a few hundred metres uphill to where you enter the shaft. The first part of your visit consists of climbing down several flights of stairs to the first level of the mine. The miners would have had to climb or slide down thin ladders. It is a long way down to the first level, there are four more below you.

A medieval miner was a lot shorter than a modern man – only 1.5 metres high – and so you are warned to watch your head as you walk along. You soon are grateful for your helmet. You are also grateful for your lamp. At one point the guide asks you to switch off your lamps and you are plunged into darkness, s/he then lights a torch and placing her hand over the light tells you that that is the total amount of light available to our medieval forebears. For that reason touch and feel were used to identify the ore deposits. Once a vein was found it was followed into the rock, some of the tunnels being so low that even a medieval man would have to crawl.

Having hacked the silver from the rock it was then carried or dragged back to where it was raised to the surface (via the horse-powered winch you saw in the museum or by a man-powered one). Human beings had no such luxury, the only way back to the surface was a long climb in the dark. Fortunately for wimpy modern visitors the exit to the mine is via a door lower down the hillside.

This is not a tour for people with claustrophobia (the mine-shaft gets so narrow at points that I feared I would get wedged like Winnie The Pooh in Rabbit’s hole) nor is it for people with mobility, heart or breathing problems. But if you can, it is well worth doing - an extraordinary experience.

Guest Post - How I Put a Goddess in The Maidens’ War

In my new career as a writer, I have met some fascinating writers on the web, a number of whom share my love of all things Czech. I therefore plan to introduce you to some of them over the next few months. In today's post I welcome writer,  Lynne Cantwell, whose book The Maidens War is inspired by the Czech legend of the same name. I asked her to write about this post for you about how she came to write her book...

I am a third generation Czech-American.  My mother’s parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia with their parents around the turn of the 20th century, then met and married here.  My mother was the third of their six children.  Of course, they spoke Czech at home.  As a child, I would hear words and phrases in Czech when we visited my mother’s side of the family, and I always intended to learn the language.

Decades passed.  Eventually, I found a reasonably-priced language program offered by a Czech-Slovak heritage association and began taking classes.  At about the same time, I came across an English translation of Alois Jirásek’s retelling of “The Women’s War” from his book, Legends of Old Bohemia.  I learned later that I was not the first person to be entranced by the story.  But Šarka’s tale struck me.  I remembered how Disney had changed the story of Pocahontas for its animated movie, morphing the real child into a nubile young woman who dove off waterfalls in a primeval forest (I lived in Tidewater Virginia for many years, and I am here to tell you that neither grand waterfalls nor primeval forests exist there), and I wondered whether Jirásek hadn’t done a similar disservice to Šarka.  What if she hadn’t been a man-hating vixen?  What if she had been coerced into trapping Ctirad?  And what lessons would she be mulling over while trapped for centuries inside her mountain?

It was clear to me that Šarka deserved to be freed from that mountain; she deserved to pass on her hard-won wisdom to someone.  So rewrote her story, and then I invented the character of Maggie, an abused girl just starting college, who could benefit from Šarka’s advice.  I titled my novel The Maidens’ War.

To write the book, I did a fair amount of research into early Czech civilization, including some on the pagan Slavic pantheon.  I settled enthusiastically on the figure of Mokoš, an earth mother goddess who, I thought, was a prime candidate for leading Šarka into her mountain, and wrote her into the story.

I was nearly done writing The Maidens’ War when I decided to look up the Slavic pantheon in Czech on Wikipedia, just to be sure I had the names spelled correctly.  I noticed the Czech entry for Mokoš was a lot shorter than the one in English, so I read it as best I could. Then, in dismay, I printed it out and did a better translation.  Alas, the result was the same both times: the article said there was no evidence that Mokoš had ever been worshipped in the Czech lands.

But the good news was that I was writing fiction.  So in my book, Šarka has a Ukrainian mother who brought her worship of Mokoš with her to the Czech lands, and the nascent worship of the goddess among Czech women is crushed when Děvín falls.  Problem solved.

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Lynne's book is available on: http://www.calderwoodbooks.com/#/the-maidens-war/4540053928 and on Amazon.

Kutna Hora St Barbara Cathedral

I've now visited this cathedral three times. No doubt I will visit it again and will rejoice to do so, because this building must be one of the great medieval ecclesiastical buildings of Europe.

Many people visit Kutna Hora as a daytrip from Prague. Some take one of the many minibus tours that speed between Prague and Kutna Hora and the more canny take the train and save themselves money. The best way to approach St Barbara's is to walk up the hill from the train station and turn left to go past the Vlassky Dvur and St Jakub church and so come on a viewing platform, from which you will get the best view of the cathedral with its extraordinary roof line (above). Then follow the lane up to the Hradek and approach the cathedral along a walk lined on one side by statues and beyond them vines and on the other by the Jesuit Seminary now an important art gallery. 

Inside the cathedral lives up to the expectations raised by its spectacular exterior. The vaulting is utterly unlike any you will have seen in the west, a pure example of the style known as Bohemian gothic, with the ribs flowing from the columns. Along the gallery huge wooden sculptures look down on the nave. If you get a chance pay the small fee and go up to the gallery to see the statues and ribbing up close. 

That this is a cathedral for the silver workers of medieval Kutna Hora is evident throughout the building. Miners in their regulation white coats appear as statues and in frescos, minters sit striking coins and others are counting. In fact the cathedral's frescos merit repeated inspection: I was still finding new elements on my third visit. The frescos are remarkably realistic and human. But then the building is human too, as large in footprint as a large church, which makes its wonders all the more impactful.

Gingerbread workshop & a song

Last summer I took some Australian friends to an old mill near to Cesky Krumlov, where we were given a wonderful workshop in painting traditional Czech Easter eggs and making gingerbread. But the highlight was something I hadn't planned. Here's a video of what happened.

Traffic Light Artist

On Saturday David Hons, better known as the artist Roman Tyc, was released from Prague's Pankrac prison in Prague. The artist spent 30 days in jail after refusing to pay a 60,000 crown fine for defacing public property.

In 2007 he "amended" 48 road crossing lights in the Czech capital city, to show the normal red and green figures in a number of unusual positions, including walking the dog, urinating, drinking etc. The above video shows the man in action.

In protest at Tyc's imprisonent Czechs started to behead figures on traffic lights by placing black stickers over the heads, while others baked cakes for him. Many people were shocked by the severity of his punishment, especially when President Klaus refused to grant a pardon to the artist, even though the President has over the years pardoned a number of people found guilty of serious corruption and fraud. But then what did they expect from a president that steals pens?

Why I'm here. Part 2

I had two reasons when I bought my lovely derelict Czech farmhouse. The first as I said in my post of the 9th March was my friend Hannah Kodicek, the second was to create somewhere I could write.

The two reasons were not unconnected. Hannah always encouraged me to write. I think we really became close friends when she read a long poem I had written. She had known me as a manager, something that she respected but didn't love. At the time of the house purchase I was managing an inner-city regeneration programme working with the most disadvantaged. It was worthwhile work and I would have argued then that it allowed me to be creative in other ways than producing poetry that no one read. But Hannah begged to differ, she saw better than I did how one side of my personality was dominating the other, driving the poet and mystic underground. But when I came to visit her in the Czech Republic I found that side of me welling up in response to the landscape and history of Bohemia.

So I bit the bullet and bought the house. I said I wanted a hut in the forest, something that didn't need too much work, but my subconscious saboutaged that and I bought a huge farmhouse needing lots of work. I spent the next few years working hard at my job and pouring the money I earned into restoring the house, but still I did not write.

Things came to a head when one day I found myself crying in Hannah's study. It was soon apparent that I could not continue working in my wonderful but high pressured job. I said goodbye to my old career and came over to the Czech Republic and started to write. Not poetry but a children's novel. I loved the process. Even if my first book is now in a drawer in my desk never to see the light of day. The second one's there too. I am now on my fifth book. All of my books have been written in my Czech house.