Beginnings - the house

I wasn't looking to buy a house. I was looking for a cottage or hut in the woods - a chata as the Czechs call them. I wasn't planning to do any work on it either. But I wasn't reckoning on the way a building can get its hooks into you in an instant or the way something deep inside of you responds to its call. So instead of a small undemanding hut I bought a large farmhouse in need of restoration.

The house is of a type common in the area around Horice na Sumave. It is the house bit of an old courtyard farm. We also own a derelict, two-storey, balconied barn that runs off at right angles to the house. Both had belonged to an old lady, who had not had the money to make any major changes or improvements to them. When she died the farm was left to her children who used it as a holiday home and again had not the money (or inclination) to do anything with it. It was therefore in need of work, but had not been spoiled by do-it-yourself zealousness.

So what attracted me? The sun pours in at dawn and the light at evening is equally stunning. The granite walls are over 2 feet thick and built onto granite bedrock - it is almost as if the house has grown out of the hillside on which it sits. Everywhere there is granite - huge granite slabs laid as a path, granite cobbles, granite walls. The barn has its original brick vaulted ceiling downstairs and upstairs a large open space with large exposed beams. The proportions and layout of the house are large and perfect. It is set in an ideal position overlooking a small village, which has not been spoiled (as so many have been) by concrete monstrosities built by the communists.

This is a village we remember fondly from our childhoods, one in which children play in the street - outside my house my neighbours' kids have chalked a hopscotch grid. And that I think was a large part of it. When I was a girl I had a friend called Paul with whom I explored the fields and woods around my Cotswold home town. We made dens and dammed streams. And on some weekends and holidays Paul's mum would borrow a cottage that nestled under Humblebee Wood overlooking the valley and I would go too. I've wanted one ever since.

That evening I rang my husband in England "Hello lovely, you know I said I was buying a hut. Well I've bought an old farmhouse." There was a pause at the other end of the line.

Home from Home

I am back in England now. It is all very strange to leave our house in Czecho, to come home from home.

It was almost as though the weather knew I was returning to England, for after two months of sun and no rain the weather broke. It was heralded by the cows calling in the fields. Usually at night in our village you are struck by the silence, perhaps you will hear the occasional dog barking or an errant blackbird heralding the dawn prematurely, but normally all things are quite silent. But that night the cows were lowing with an unnerving cry, almost as if in pain. I lay in my bed wondering what was wrong and then the rain began. I could hear it thundering on to the rusty corregated iron sheets in the yard. In the morning it continued, the sack of dehydrated whitewash in the yard was breached by the torrents and bled white over the ground.

By the afternoon the rain had stopped and the birds had started singing again. I locked the gate and walked up the lane and past the rocks to the nearby town and bus stop. From there I travelled into Cesky Krumlov, where I spent the night at my friend's house. In the morning a taxi took me to the station at Ceske Budejovice. As I sat on the train to Prague, I suffered mixed emotions. Drifts of wild lupins were breaking in to bloom along the track, deers started from pastures that edged the forests. This place had become very much a home for me, had in some strange way always felt like home and I was leaving it. But I was leaving it to go home.

In England instead of lupins there would be seas of bluebells, bluebells which were deeply embedded in my understanding of the seasons. When I was a little girl we lived in a house near a millpond in the Cotswolds. Beyond the pond, where I fed the swans my toast crusts, was the wood, here my mother would take me walking among the bluebells. I was three when I left the millflat, but the wood, the pond and the bluebells are deep in my memories together with my mother saying "Look, Zoe, can you see that flower" or "What do you think that root looks like?" "It looks like a witch, mummy. She's got a big nose." Ponds, witches and the dark wood, no wonder the Czech Republic feels like home.

Why buy a house in South Bohemia

We heard a few days ago that the airport at Ceske Budejovice has got the go-ahead to become a full-blown international airport. This is great news for us personally and for the economy of Sothern Bohemia generally.

The nearest airport to Cesky Krumlov at the moment is over the border in Linz just over an hour's drive away. Otherwise it is fly to Prague and travel by either car or train down. The Prague journey is pretty easy and goes through some great countryside. And it is getting quicker with major track and road improvements happening as I write, but it does currently take about 3 hrs. An airport at Ceske Budejovice would change all that, especially one served by one of the British budget airlines. Suddenly the whole of Southern Bohemia could open up. We have been in the vanguard of Brits investing down here, but this news could mean that we will be followed by many more.

Why would one invest here (well why did we):

• this has to be one of the most beautiful parts of Europe - lakes, mountains and forests, and some great historic towns, of which Cesky Krumlov is the most famous
• there is skiing in the winter and walking, biking, climbing and canoeing in the summer
• you can buy a large run-down old farmhouse for about 25,000 pounds and still have change out 80,000 when you have done it up or you can get a cottage for less
• cost of living is cheap - you can buy the real Budweiser/Budwar (made in Ceske Budejovice) for about 25p in the local Tesco's
• you are right in the middle of Europe - under 5 hrs drive from Italy, less than one from Austria and Germany and 6 hours from the Med
• and of course you could do what we did, which is fall in love with this wonderful country.

On second thoughts - forget everything I have said. I think I'll just keep it the way it is - don't want everyone knowing about it. It can be our secret.

More on Maypoles (& Witches)

In my previous post I talked briefly about the maypoles that are the centre feature of many village greens in this part of the world. It doesn't take much scratching of the Czech modern veneer to find the ancient and pagan beneath. Maypoles may have become a thing of the past in England or at least a quaint custom with school children dancing rather tweely, but here in the Czech Republic the tradition is alive and strong. Today I took the train from Prague to Cesky Krumlov and it gave me a good vantage point to spot the maypoles in the villages and towns along the route. It is clearly a matter of pride to erect (and protect) the largest maypole, created from a very tall and straight fir. The maypole stays at the centre of the village for the year's length until the new replaces it, by then of course the brightly coloured ribbons at the poles tip have faded at best or been whipped away by a winter wind, but with the dawn of the new summer a new maypole springs erect.

On the last night of April in some places the custom of burning the witch takes place. We have yet to see the ceremony although we caught sight of her on her broomstick in the town square at Prachatice. This year we were invited to a party. The wine flowed, meat was barbecued, a witch turned up together with cat on her shoulder and was welcomed into the group and our friends sat around a log fire singing Czech folksongs to the accompaniment of the local priest on accordion and a herbalist on a guitar. As it grew dark and the turn of the season approached we women jumped over the bonfire to ward off evil spirits and then we all danced in a circle around the flames. Clearly these were Beltane celebrations - a throwback to our common ancestors the Celts. But there was something wonderfully makeshift about them, things just happened as someone in the party took a mind to it, but it felt all the more the genuine for that.

The arrival of Summer

A couple of days ago we were sat on the terrace outside our house drinking tea in the warm Czech sunshine. A breeze came up and suddenly the air was full of the petals of the cherry tree in the orchard. My husband commented that it was like being married once again only with cherry blossom instead of paper confetti.

All over the countryside the trees are full of blossom: in the forests and on the apple trees that line the roads and give the traveller sustenance as well as shade. The cliff that forms one roadside on the route out of Cesky Krumlov to Ceske Budejovice is covered with the purple of wild lilacs. All the pastures are bright yellow with dandelions and the water meadow beside the lane to our small village is full of marsh marigolds. Summer is arriving with a flourish and as if to confirm its presence a cuckoo is calling in the woods above the house. To honour the change of the seasons in villages across Southern Bohemia huge maypoles have been erected and bedecked with ribbons of many colours.

Crosses and Shrines

When you start to explore the area around Cesky Krumlov, one of the things that strikes you as a protestant Brit is the number of wayside shrines and crosses. Although you will find them in the centre of villages, these crosses are not just in the places you would expect but also in the middle of fields and on footpaths through forests. They mark old trails and processional routes. They are a sign of the country's devout Catholic past, but in some places, as in England , these crosses are sited on older pre-Christian religious sites. If you are interested in identifying the sites of such shrines, you can find them on the large-scale maps.

But there are not as many shrines and crosses as there once were. Under the Communists many crosses were desecrated and destroyed. Some Czechs sought to save the crosses from destruction, removing the metal Christ figures and putting them into storage. Some friends invited us to a mill they have near Cesky Krumlov - there in the yard was a pile of Christ figures (above). The vision was like one of those photos of naked dead bodies at concentration camps, brutal and strange.

Sudetenland

Where we live near Cesky Krumlov in Southern Bohemia the ghosts of the area's former German residents are everywhere. Prior to 1945 you were most likely to hear German spoken on the streets of Krumlov (German: Krummau). You will find remnants of this on walls and signs, such as the one above.

The area is close to the German and Austrian borders. Until 1918 the whole of the Czechoslovakia was part of the Austrian Empire, but after defeat in World War 1 and the collapse of the Empire, the new independent state of Czechoslovakia was formed. In 1938 Hitler's troops occupied the Sudetenland, claiming to be liberating the Sudetenland Germans from Czech tyranny; this was followed by the conquest of the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, betrayed by the British at Munich, entered fifty years of oppression.

Many of the Sudetenland Germans welcomed the Nazis - after all over half a million joined the Nazi party and so it was not a surprise that in 1945 a massive backlash took place. It was not a surprise but that does not disguise its savageness. German property was confiscated and the German population was forced out of the country. To give you some idea of the scale of this forced movement - at the time of the 1921 Census there were over 3 million Germans in the country; by 2001 there were just 40,000.

The house we own was once owned by Germans. It is typical of the area with its courtyard and orchard. The German farmers were proud of their homes and loved the land. Under the Czechs and the Communists the house fell into decline and disrepair. An old neighbour remembered the German family - "If they came back now they would be in tears," he said, "to see the house now." Others, whose homes lay nearer the border, would find nothing at all if they came back. The Sumava became the frontline in the Cold War. The Iron Curtain ran straight through it and so whole areas and villages were cleared to remove any cover for asylum seekers trying to cross to the West. All that remains are the metal crosses and wayside shrines and silent orchards and gardens gone wild.