Chata and Chalupa - Cabins and Cottages

During the communist era it was not possible for Czechs to travel abroad easily and so many Czechs had second homes in the country. My Czech friend argues that the authorities actually encouraged this as a means of reducing anti-government resentment. Every weekend the family would pile into their cars and disappear to their base in the country to grow vegetables, sit round the barbecue, drink beer and sing into the night. And of course the Czech pastimes of fishing and mushroom picking are also associated with the trip to the chata.

There are two types of second home - the chata - a cabin built for the purpose of recreation, and the chalupa - a cottage (though sometimes a large farmhouse or similar) which once was a residential property. They can range from the very basic - some chata are merely sheds made of whatever was at hand - to the luxurious. One development that helped fuel the growth of cottage ownership in the period following the Second World War was the availability of empty ex-German homes in the Sudetenland. Another was the rise of a back-to-nature movement, connected with the scouting movement and influenced by the pioneers of American Wild West - you will even find the occasional totem pole outside a chata!

The house we bought had been used as a chalupa - although it had previously been the family home. It is a large farmhouse of the German style and is set in a village where probably 40% of the houses are second homes. For Brits looking to buy Czech property chata and chalupa offer a chance to buy somewhere in beautiful setting. They vary considerably in state of repair - sometimes they are their former owners' pride and joy, sometimes they have been the victims of the Czech obsession with do-it-yourself and sometimes they are old buildings which the Czechs have effectively camped in, not having the money to restore.

However such is the affection in which the Czechs hold their country cottages and cabins that many would not consider selling them - they are part of their best family memories - and many that do do not go through an estate agent. It therefore helps to have someone with local knowledge to assist you in finding your dream house. We found ours with the help of a local company which helps Brits find property in the area of Cesky Krumlov - we recommend them. Check out their website on http://www.czechpropertysearch.co.uk

And Gathering

In my last post I talked about the Czechs as a nation of hunters and in previous posts I have talked about the Czech obsession with gathering mushrooms. In both cases they are very unlike us Brits. For the Czechs hunting is something done by all classes, unlike the British class-ridden approach. Whilst for mushrooming the contrast is even starker - going mushrooming in the Czech Republic is something that starts young, in Britain it doesn't start at all, unless you are unusual. A Czech child will take their little basket and go with their mum or granny into the forest and learn what to pick and what not. My mother, like most Brits, regarded all mushrooms with suspicion unless they were field mushrooms and I was told very clearly never to pick any fungi - they were dangerous. Now unusually I do collect mushrooms. Thanks to the instruction of my Czech friend I now recognise, collect and most importantly eat over 20 types of fungus.

A year ago I had an experience which sums up the differences perfectly. I was in the Forest of Dean collecting mushrooms - being late in the year I was on the look out for the purple Wood Blewits. I was rummaging about in the undergrowth beside a track, when a group passed by close enough for me to hear their conversation. "What is she doing?" "Looking for something, I think." and so on. I carried on and collected a reasonable trawl of purple treasures (blewits are one of my favourite mushrooms).

After a while the group came back, and again the speculation started as to what I was doing - something that would never happen in the Czech Republic as everyone would know what I was up to. For one woman in the group curiousity got the better of her and she broke away from the group and joined me. "What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Mushrooms" I replied, "Would you like to see them." I opened the bag and she looked in. She looked back at me askance. "It's all right," I assured her "They are quite edible."

"Well I hope you know what you are doing, otherwise you won't be around to do it again." She said. I assured her that I did. And she returned to her group and went her way.

When I tell this story to my Czech friends they are amazed that the British should ever be surprised at someone mushrooming, and even more so by the fear of mushrooms that she betrays. Then I tell them about her group - it was made up of a man riding a camel, and three people leading llamas. Of course to a Brit such eccentricity is taken without batting an eyelid, indeed she and her fellows regarded me as the weird one. To my Czech audience this stretches the credulity to breaking point - those Brits are weird.

Hunting

When we moved into our house we found two boar skins lying in the straw in the barn, in the house the walls of the stairwell were decorated with skulls of deer and a stuffed bird. In the local restaurants you can eat wild boar, rabbit and venison. We love it - game is a favourite food of ours. The Czechs are great ones for hunting - and it seems to be something enjoyed by all classes (unlike in England). Czech men are often dressed in the typical Czech huntsman attire - second-hand army fatigues and boots.

Across the countryside you will find hides like the one above. They look out across groves in forests, fields near to the wood edge, anywhere that deer will come to feed. Sometimes you will find a block of rock salt nearby to help attract the deer.

Yes, the Czechs are great nation of hunters..... and gatherers.

Czech Dogs

The Czechs are very fond of their dogs. The above photo shows a typical Czech dog - in other words low slung with short legs, curled tail and perky demeanour. On seeing your Czech dog you have the fun of trying to work out its mixed parentage (and grandparentage) - bit of dachshund, bit of labrador, a touch of corgi perhaps! You will find signs in the Prague warning against dog fouling in parks graphically showing a cartoon of just such a dog with curly tail raised doing its business.

Horice Na Sumave Passion Play

Horice Na Sumave is famous for its passion play. The play is performed each summer outdoors in a theatre created in a natural arena just above the town. The audience is under cover, the actors not so. The 50 performers are local amateurs and when we first saw it a couple of years ago, Jesus was performed appropriately enough by our carpenter. The play is delightful, even if we hardly understand a word, in a way only amateur productions can be, and the play has the added piquancy of the devotion of the performers.

The play has been performed since the 19th century with a break during the Nazi and Communist regimes. It even used to have its own theatre, which was destroyed by the communists. Originally it was performed in German up until the Second World War, after which the German-speaking population were expelled to Germany and a new Czech population established. Thus when the passion play was revived in 1993 it was rewritten in Czech.

As a postscript when we first moved to the area, the town used to have a hotel innocently called Hotel Passion. There was a sign for the hotel on the main road just before you came to the turn off to Horice. I note that they have now renamed the Hotel Stare Skola, no doubt because of the unwanted attention the hotel used to receive.

For more about the history of the Horice Na Sumave Passion Play - check out the dedicated page on the Cesky Krumlov website from which we have borrowed the above photo.

Chanterelles

A friend of ours, who works on the North Sea oil rigs, has just bought a forester's cottage in the woods. The house is sited right next to the forest as you would expect and there is even a small private gate from the garden that takes you immediately into the trees. To get there you climb a winding forestry road out of Cesky Krumlov, on which you will occasionally meet large forestry lorries laden with trunks coming down in the opposite direction – not something to enjoy on the narrow road, but which mean that in the winter the road is kept clear of snow.

Alongside the cottage runs a track which after a brief spell among the trees takes you to an expanse of upland grassland and spectacular views across the Sumava mountains all the way to Austria. That is of course if you get that far. The woods behind the little house are a first-class place for collecting egg-yolk coloured chanterelle mushrooms in the moss covered ground. My friend's partner being Czech born and bred has of course discovered this fact and moreover in the spell after the rain did not even make it to the garden gate and into the forest before her basket was full of these treasures with their slight scent of apricots. I do wonder however whether having mushrooms reliably on your doorstep will not in some way reduce the enjoyment of the hunt. We shall see.

Seashells in the Czech Republic

As you may recall in an earlier post as part of my decorations for our Czech house I brought over some seashells collected on a beach in Kent. I thought they would be very English objects for my Czech home, a bit of the seaside in landlocked central Europe. I very carefully washed them (so as not to smell) and placed them in a bowl of tap water on the windowsill, thus showing off their colours and patterns. There they sat for a few weeks; they sit there no longer.

The local man, who had first found the house for me two years ago, arrived one morning on my doorstep with his three children. I was pleased to see them and invited them in. Fruit tea and cola were offered and accepted and we settled down to an awkward silence. He is a man who never uses a sentence when one word will do, and often not that. My Czech was not able to sustain a one-sided conversation, and our attempts at broken German were equally short-lived.

The little lad made up for his father's silence with a running commentary in Czech on anything and everything. His father produced a small plastic toy which had come out of a chocolate egg - it was an octopus. We counted the legs - first in Czech and then in English. I had no toys to keep him occupied, but then I had a brainwave. I took the shell bowl from the window, drained off the water and showed the shells to the children. All three children including the teenage eldest daughter were totally caught up in looking at the shells. The different shells were looked at in detail, held up to the light, the razorshell became a false finger nail, the small empty crabshell scuttled again, and the shells were used to make pictures on the floor. Of particular note were the two fossilised shark's teeth, which had come from the same beach, and were suitably violent for a small boy's imagination. I suggested that the children could choose some to take away with them and a long process of selection took place. The older girls chose a few pretty shells, but the little boy found it impossible to stop - "To mam" he said over and over - "I have that".

They left clutching a bag of shells. It was fascinating to see how something that we Brits take for granted was so wonderful. These children will not have seen the sea, let alone walked on a beach collecting shells. So now the bowl is nearly empty and I will have to return to the seaside to replace its contents. There are more children in the village.