Jiri Trnka - Illustrator

I recently bought an old book from a second-hand bookshop called Legends of Old Bohemia. It was published by Paul Hamlyn in the UK and by Artia in the former Czechoslovakia, where the book was printed and designed. The book appealed to me on three grounds - firstly of course the subject matter, secondly it was translated by Edith Pargeter (see my blogpost on her) a favourite author of mine and finally the illustrations were by Jiri Trnka (illustration from book above).


I had first come across Jiri Trnka , when I was working at the Puppet Centre in Battersea. There I had come to admire Jiri Trnka as a designer and maker of animated films. In my next post I will give talk more about his animated films. But he was a man of many parts and created some wonderful book illustrations. And this book is full of them.


I also have a copy of Grimm's Fairytales (again published by Paul Hamlyn) illustrated by Trnka, and again absolutely wonderful. The last three illustrations are from it - very Trnka and very Czech.

Collecting Berries

I was very amused this summer to see on the BBC's coverage one of the RHS garden shows (Chelsea or Hampton Court) an enthusiastic presenter singing praises of a berrypicker. "You can get it in the plastic version or a deluxe wooden version." The plastic pickers' prices began at about £8. At this point I nearly choked on my cup of tea. Goodness knows what a deluxe wood version costs!

My shock was because this wonderful new device has been on sale in Czech ironmongers for centuries. And you can bet they don't cost very much at all and they are made of wood. At the Museum of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice I saw a lovely film from the late 1940s of lorryloads of Czechs hitting the Sumava forest with buckets for the fruit and berrypickers. They were picking bilberries and cranberries. So my advice is if you want a deluxe berrypicker take a cheap flight to the Czech Republic, better still get several for presents for Christmas. You might get your money back and you get a great holiday as well.

Fox

Just over a year ago I blogged about my meetings with Czech foxes I wrote then of how they are meant to be lucky. My meetings with our local fox have continued, often I will see it making its way across the fields as I walk up from the bus or down from the woods. And I have come to associate it with creativity, one of my favourite poems is Ted Hughes' Thought Fox, which is for my money the best poem about the writing process I know.

As some readers of this blog will be aware one important reason why I bought my Czech home is that I needed somewhere to write. It is so to speak my den, my dark hole, built into the hillside, a hill called Fox's Lair. Over the last year I have indeed started to write again, and not just this blog, and superstitiously I have partly put it down to my fox companion. Even when I do not see him, I hear him in the woods above the house, tormenting the village dogs. "Ha!" he seems to be saying, "You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat. I have the woods, all the roots and dark places as my kingdom." And at this the village dogs go mad with vain barking.

I have put his face on my door in the form of a brass knocker, he hangs on the wall as one of a set of horse brasses, I have drawn him in oil pastels. And the more I find out about him and his place in folklore and superstition, the more I think I have found the right familiar. A month or so ago I was telling my husband about this, and how strangely although I had been writing almost continuously, my fox had kept out of sight. My husband stopped me at this point "Look, look," he said. There in broad daylight no more than a metre away from the window my fox was strolling across the grass in the direction of the neighbours' chickens.

Bark Beetles

I was disappointed to see, when I made my visit to the forest above our village, that there has been a lot of tree felling. Swathes of forest have been felled and some of my favourite spots for mushrooms disturbed in the process. Then I noticed these strange boxes on poles.

They are cause for concern, they are bark beetle traps. The bark beetle has been responsible for major damage in the Sumava National Park, sometimes called the Green Roof of Europe. Opinion is divided between those who wish to fell and dispose of infected trees and those who see the beetle's damage as part of a natural process. Direct action has happened with protesters literally hugging trees.

I am normally in the conservationists' side on issues such as this, but find myself in a quandary. I am sufficiently old to remember the destruction wrought by the dutch elm disease in Britain. I have a vivid memory of a fine line of old elms that stood on the top bank of a local field, one of which housed a rope down which the local boy scouts would slide. And I remember running and catching the leaves as the sick trees suddenly let them fall. For a few years the barren corpses of the elms stood until unsound they too fell. England lost a major natural feature, its elm trees, in a matter of months and they have not come back properly. All because of a bark beetle and the fungus that it carried. I would hate to watch the same happen here.

Airport Security

The recent conviction of terrorists who were targeting commercial airlines reminded me of an incident at Prague Airport. I noticed a large plastic bag, unattended, next to a bank of seats by the Relay newsagents. Being a Brit and thus having had to be aware of potential bombs since the IRA's attacks in the 1970's I immediately went into bomb alert mode.

Fortunately walking towards me and the bag were two Czech security police, so I walked on confident that they would see the bag and deal with it. Fifteen minutes later I walked back and there was the bag, the security police had walked straight past it. I decided that I would report it. The two policemen were now on their return patrol and so I walked up to them and told them. They hardly responded and I watched in amazement as they sauntered in the bag's direction. I do not know if they acted on my information, my flight was being called.

I cannot say how shocked I was by their attitude. Of course I knew that in all probability the bag was completely harmless, but it needed to be treated as if it wasn't. In the UK it would certainly have been dealt with efficiently and without fuss but nevertheless seriously. The Czech Republic has soldiers in Afghanistan - it is a potential target, as indeed is every country in the West. I pray to God that the Czechs do not have to deal with terrorism, as we Brits have done over the decades.

Dawn in the Woods

I mentioned that I have been wandering round our local woods at dawn. Well mushrooms aren't the only reason for going. I love the misty Czech dawns – the view across wooded hills towards the Klet mountain, the light coming through the trees picking out countless dew bejewelled webs, deer crossing my path and the song of birds.

The Early Bird Catches the Mushroom

I was up and out of the house at 6am this morning. This was partly because the weather is so hot that to attempt anything physical after 10 is foolhardy and I wanted a walk in the woods. Of course this was not just any walk but a mushroom-gathering one, and in order to get the best one has to be up early. Already there were two women in the wood rummaging under fallen pine branches. On the road on the other side of the hill several cars were parked, including this one which had illegally been driven up the track to gain a few yards on its owners' mushrooming rivals.

Well I was lucky and got a good basketful. This year is a spectacular one for chanterelles. They are huge (four inches high) but the moss in which they nestle is likewise tall, so it is very easy to miss them. In addition I got some sheep's polypore, hedgehog mushrooms and russulas. So that's my supper sorted for a couple of days.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I share in the Czech obsession of mushrooming and how in England I am often met with disbelief when I assure people I meet in the forest that you can eat what I have collected. I would like to think that my eccentricity on this is seen as normal in the Czech Republic. But this is not always the case. Czechs are taught what to collect by their parents and grandparents, they inherit a repertoire of mushrooms that they collect and often this is not large. I was taught mushrooming by a Czech with a large repertoire and I have additionally made a great study of mushroom books (so much so at least two are to be found next to the loo in both my Czech and British homes).

Today a fellow mushroomer (a Czech) stopped me in the woods, and she busily told me that the charcoal burner (a russula much prized in Britain) was not edible and wrongly identified the sheep's polypore as a field mushroom. Tut, tut, tut, she went as I showed her I was confident enough to nibble some, and away she went shaking her head. Another Czech friend with whom I occasionally go mushrooming was shocked that I collect blewits (great favourites of mine and ones which are now commercially cultivated) or fungi that grow on trees. She will however collect the blusher – which you will find often listed as poisonous in English books, but which is very popular in the Czech Republic.

So there you go, I can't win. By the way I have eaten blusher – it's okay but not worth the fuss the Czechs make over it, especially as you go through a polaver to cook it.

PS. In response to Karen's comment - here is a photo of my basket of mushrooms. The egg yellow ones are chanterelles, the charcoal coloured one is (you guessed it) charcoal burner, the white ones with the beige tops are sheeps polypore, and the large brown one is a boletus.

Update - Riverworks

My last but one post dealt with the changes that have taken place whilst I was away, however one thing remains as it was - the state of the riverworks. This is probably for the good. Just before I left Cesky Krumlov, I met with an excited friend of mine, the owner of a restaurant on the river below the castle. “I heard it on the radio,” he said, “UNESCO are coming for a visit. Because they have had letters from people about the island and the river. Bloody marvellous!” And he shook my hand.

This coincided with a rise in the river levels due to summer storms. The unstoppable riverworks stopped. And they have not started again, even though the levels are down again. The town is agog, what has happened? What has UNESCO done and said? No one knows.

On Friday I met my restaurant friend again, “What has happened? You heard what happened in Dresden.” I had heard that the UNESCO world heritage status had been removed from the Elbe landscape as a result of a bridge being built there. However I explained UNESCO have a sort of football referee system, yellow card first and if you don't mend your ways you get the red, quite a lot of places have yellow cards and very few are taken off the pitch (like Dresden/Elbe). If the UNESCO visit found, as we all believe there to be, failures and irregularities in developments in Cesky Krumlov, then the town would probably go on the at risk list, the yellow card. We must wait and see.

Meanwhile the diggers lie idle on the banks, a temporary throroughfare of smashed rocks and rubble is still in the centre of the river waiting their return. And life goes on, the island is turned a canoe park and even as in this photo a beach for bathers. The ducks are back.

PS Readers of my previous posts on the subject might be interested to know I never did get a reply to my letter to the Mayor, even though he was obliged to give me one within so many days. No surprise there then.

More Swallows

What is it about this beautiful place that allows me to find nature's treasures? I am sure that it happens at home in England too, but that my ears and eyes are stopped by the roar of modern life.

I spent an hour today watching the swallows. I blogged about them last time and the spectacle is just getting larger. It is as if all the area's swallow population has descended on our small village, hosts and hosts of them. Sometimes they gather on the phonewires, sometimes in the silver birch by the village cross, and then most spectacular of all are the times when they pirouette over the roofs and orchards. This is freeform flying, they dodge and circle, drop and rise. They skim the surface of the village pond, dipping their wings. I have been here three summers and never seen anything like this.

Salamander came to visit me and as we left the village we had to stop the car by the cross to gaze at the swallow hordes. On the side of one house swallows were dotted presumably clinging to the rough plaster, the telephone wires were like the stems of my neighbour's red currants heavy with little black and white birds, while more far more swirled overhead. We went to the village near Salamander's lake house, it felt quite empty, there were only three or four swallows to be seen.

How Little Things Grow

It is strange to come back to the Czech republic after a few weeks away in the UK. Everything has grown, the grass I so carefully scythed is now at least knee deep. The baby swallows, which when I left were still chirruping at their frantic parents from their nests in the barn, every morning now perch on the telephone wires like strings of black and white pearls. A few still have some downy feathers, but all can fly and swoop. I presume they probably can catch flies most of the day, but the telephone wires act as a feeding station in the morning, with the parents diving in and hovering in front of their young one's open beaks.

And then there is Salamander's cat Lilly. A few week's ago I held her easily in my hands, now she is long and lean and quite the little princess. She comes and goes and is absolutely certain that the world revolves around her and she is not wrong. After a false start she seems to have recognised me again, and sucker that I am, I spend a lot of time stroking her and scratching her under her chin. After all what else have I to do with my time?

The Gingerbread House

Deep in the dark forest Hansel and Gretel came upon a small cottage made entirely from gingerbread with a roof made of cake, and the windows were made of clear sugar. The local children call this chata the gingerbread house and ask their teachers to bring them here.

The chata belongs to a friend of mine and I was as pleased as any child to be invited there. It was built by her father and it is just perfect. The chata sits nestled into a bank, in front is a wide lawn down to a small river. All right, there's no plumbing and one electric point, but in some ways that is part of its charm it forces you to relax. And that's what I did. My friend and I sat outside , drinking tea and eating cakes and watched the world go by.

Lipno Sunset

I can't remember if I have blogged about this in the past, but I make no apologies if I have. I have developed a taste for sunset chasing.

Sometimes when there are enough but not too many clouds in the sky, I get this overwhelming urge near dusk to get in the car and drive to Lake Lipno and sit in awe as the sun goes down. I have dragged my sisters and my husband on these trips, but mostly I go alone. I simply cannot get over how lovely the sunsets are here. I have a photo album full of Lipno sunsets. Here is one of the most recent photos.

More on Czech Cakes

Further to my last post about making buchty, I hope your appetite is whetted for more about Cezch cakes. As I said Czech cafes often offer a wide and wonderful selection of cakes. Indeed I had a whole lesson with my Czech language teacher learning the various names of Czech cakes, and very useful it was too. Some are clearly drawn from the Viennese style - wonderful cream and fruit jelly confections called zaluseky, which demand the use of a spoon and fork - but others more obviously Czech in their origins.

One of the most common and most popular is the honey cake – medovy dort, although often named by the dominant brand Medovnik. This is is a light honey and walnut sponge, which sometimes comes with either extra honey or cream. Strudel (both apple and cream cheese) is also common, often coming with cream. Biscuits are called susenky, whilst piskoty are the type of biscuit you use in trifles. Sometimes you will come across a cross between a meringue and a biscuit shaped like a shortbread finger which is eaten with coffee and is called a coffin (after its shape). At Christmas you will find iced gingerbread hearts, houses, devils and anything else you can think of for sale on street stalls and in shops. Whilst at Easter there are the special Easter cakes – including a sponge cooked in a lamb-shaped mould.

The Czechs have a line in dough-based confectionery, these include the buchty of course, the plaited vanilkovka, and zavin (a longer version of buchty which slices). These make an excellent sweet breakfast.

I have only scratched the surface of the wonderful world of Czech cakes, you will just have to come here and try them for yourself.

Making Buchty

I am very fond of Czech cakes. And the Czechs are very good at making them, after all this is a country which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so in addition to making Czech cakes are adept at Viennese cakes too. They are part of the Czech cafe culture which I have blogged about in the past.

Cakes are an important part of the Czech social scene. Visitors to the house, especially female ones, will often arrive carrying a tin or plastic box saying "I've been baking and I thought you might like one too." You open the box and there is enough cake to keep you going for weeks.

After three years in the country I decided it was time I had a go. Only I cheated and bought some cake mixes. I don't feel too guilty about it, there were an awful lot of cake mixes on the shelves at Tesco's in Cesky Krumlov, so it looks like many Czech woman cheat too. The first cake I made was a thin sponge with blueberries, which I have been given on several occasions by friends. The cake mixture is poured into a baking tray and the fruit (whatever is available - raspberries and red currants work well) is simply sprinkled on top. The cake is then baked in the oven until brown and cooked. The combination of fruit and sponge is lovely.

Encouraged by this simple success, I moved on to a more complex cake - the Czech buchty. The mix requires the addition of yeast and then being left to rise, which it did to rather alarming proportions. I then carefully flattened the dough out and cut it into squares. I put some apricot puree into the centre of each square, folded in the corners and rolled and pinched it in my hands to make a ball. These balls were put in baking tray and allowed to rise further. When they were ready I put them in the oven and baked them until brown. The result can be seen above. These, like the sponge, soon disappeared. As my husband pointed out: they needed to, they would only go dry!

Vyssi Brod Walk

Before I got distracted by Czech mushroom figures I was blogging about Vyssi Brod and promised to talk about a historic trail which starts and ends in the town. It starts next to the major tourist carpark and follows along the edge of the Monastery complex. It took about two hrs to do the walk, the guidebooks say one and half; well thanks to a summer storm there was a tree down on the path so I had to retrace my steps at one point which added time.

The trail takes you past a number of historic industrial features such as a quarry, water hammer, iron mill, and the water channel for the abbey. In addition there are a number of natural features such as a spring and the beautiful St Wolfgang waterfalls - a complex of small waterfalls in the woods above the town.

A Czech Obsession

I was amused to see that the Czech Ministry of Agriculture has just announced that in 2008 Czechs collected 2.7 billion crowns worth of wild berries and mushrooms from their forests. And 2008 was a bad year! I have blogged before of the Czech obsession with mushrooming and how I too have caught the fungus collecting bug, but the Ministry's figures certainly bring home the scale of the obsession - this is equivalent to 20,000 tonnes of mushrooms, 9,000 tonnes of blueberries and however many of blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries.

Back home in the UK, where mushroom collecting is a hobby indulged in by a small minority who are regarded as eccentrics with a dangerous hobby by the majority population, some conservationists have expressed fears that a small rise in British mushroom hunters will result in endangering British mushrooms. The Czech experience completely gives the lie to this. Here the forests are crawling with people with a whicker basket in one hand and a mushroom knife in the other and yet I have observed that Czech mushrooms not only spring eternal but also do so in far greater numbers than in the UK. My not very scientific evidence is supported by experiments carried out by scientists which have shown that mushroom numbers actually rise in areas which are harvested. I am therefore determined to continue to do my bit, both in the UK and in the Czech Republic, to help sustain the mushroom population (purely for conservation reasons you understand). Now where did I put my basket?

Vyssi Brod

Vyssi Brod is a small town to be found on the fledgling River Vltava just east of the Lipno Lakes and south of Cesky Krumlov. During the summer its banks are home to holidaying canoeists, in addition there are a number of tourists (many day visitors from nearby Germany and Austria) who come to visit the ancient abbey that dominates the town. And it was for this last reason that my husband and I made the short trip to the town.


The monastery was founded in the 13th Century but the current buildings date back to the 15th when the abbey was rebuilt following a disastrous fire. The monastery as the Czech guidebook has it "is the architectonic dominant feature of the town" - Czechs seem to be into architectonic dominants, as the phrase appears in several guidebooks - ie the building dominates the town.

Our first task was to get into the building. Visits to Czech buildings usually happen in guided tours, so you have to wait for one to go round, ideally one in English. Unfortunately for us we had just missed one, the next was in Czech and anyway was full up, so we had to wait for a German-language tour (we were given an English translation). This gave us an hour to waste, we therefore wandered into the main town, and away from the tourist trail. In the town square a children's theatre company were performing to a rapt audience. I wandered into the small tourist information office, where the staff looked shocked to see a tourist. They weren't expecting me, indeed every surface was covered with trays of cakes. Although looking for information was quite difficult, nevertheless I managed to find a leaflet about an industry trail which led from the abbey into the surrounding hills, - something I will blog about next time.

After a coffee we returned to the monastery and waited and waited. The coach of visiting Germans, who were to make up the majority of our party, had not arrived. Two hours after arriving at Vyssi Brod we at last stepped into the monastery sans German coach party. The highlights of the tour were for us the cloister gallery full of lovely gothic and baroque statues, the stunning library and the church itself. The Germans had arrived shortly into the tour and turned out to be a choir and were asked to demonstrate the church's wonderful acoustics by the guide. This they did and more than made up for the delay they had caused.


On leaving the church we stopped to look at part of the monastery which had not been restored. During the communist era the monastery had been allowed to decline into an appalling condition and we were shocked to see what had happened. Over the last two decades the monastery has been gradually been restored, often with money from Germany, as Vyssi Brod was very much a German monastery. On our return to the carpark I located the starting point for the historical trail, but that would have to wait for another day.

Monsters in the Wood

As I was walking in the woods above my home I came across these two monsters. I walk there regularly (especially in the mushroom season) and had not seen them before, so their appearance seemed quite magical. Maybe it was just my state of mind, which led me to find the fantastical. First there was the dragon hiding in the bilberries with that self-satisfied sneer, as if he has just finished eating an unfortunate mushroom picker..


As for the witch, she fair made me jump. I was walking along a familiar track and there she was, her arm raised. She was formed, when the main body of the tree was snapped off probably by a wind leaving a ragged half stump. I walked along a bit and looked within a few paces the witch was gone and all there was an old tree stump. I retraced my steps and she magically appeared once more.

How appropriate to meet them in a deep, (and not so) dark wood in this home of fairytales.

Finsterau Museum of Sumava Architecture

As I think I said a while back my husband and I have had fun behaving like tourists. As any one who, like us, is doing up a house will tell you, all your spare time is taken up by home improvements, so much so that one forgets what brought you to this country in the first place. So after three years of working on the home, we decided to spend a fortnight going to all those places we kept saying we would go to and never did.

One such place is the open-air museum in Finsterau just over the German border. Here we found a wonderful collection of farms and farm buildings (including a smithy, inn, woodworking workshop) drawn from the German part of the Sumava Forest (Bohmerische Wald). These are kitted out as they would have been in the earlier part of the last century. It is a fascinating museum and gives an insight into a way of life that was devastated by the sudden fall of the Iron Curtain, which split the Sumava in two and destroyed communities.

It of course had particular interest for us, as it gave us some idea about how our house and its outbuildings would have worked. There was not a house exactly like ours, perhaps partly because ours is entirely made of granite, while the majority of the Sumava houses are of timber. Of particular interest was to see the barns in working order and not covered with the debris of neglect as ours are. It gives us an idea that under the layer of earth and compacted manure are stone-floored stalls. We were also particularly interested to look in the cellars. Perhaps we too had a stone trough which held the spring water for use upstairs at one time. Then there were the design of the doors and their furniture etc.

We had lunch in the restored inn – a bowl of goulash soup eaten at a long table that we shared with a family of Germans. Interestingly the waitress, as with the man in the ticket office, did not speak English. We had rather assumed that they would. However, I thought, I have A level German I will understand. Not a bit of it, my German teacher was from Berlin, these people were from Bavaria, the accents were as different as say Glaswegian and Zumerset. The vowel sounds were transformed, something akin to being spoken by a cow.

The Devil's Wall

As I am in the UK at the moment I have decided to write a few posts about some of my favourite walks and other sights around Cesky Krumlov.

At a place on the road from Lipno to Vyssi Brod, a little way after you pass Loucovice, you can pull into a carparking area called The Devil's Wall. This remarkable piece of geology sits at the top of an oxbow in the young River Vltava as it makes its way down from Lake Lipno. It is a large cliff of granite slabs left there during the Ice Age by a glacier and nothing is going to move it, not even modern engineering.

Having an afternoon free I decided to make a walk around the area. I parked at the car park but resisted the temptation to stand on the top of the cliffs, that could come as a climax to the walk, instead I followed a path indicated by red lines on the trees down through the forest to where Lake Lipno II (the smaller sister of the larger Lipno to the west) sat in the valley. I followed the path (now a small road) into Vyssi Brod and then took the circle route which runs back first along the northern edge of the lake and then along the northern bank of the River Vltava. The route enters a steep canyon where the giant slabs of granite lie in the riverbed and line the sides of the path.

I crossed the single-track railway line and left the cycle route to enter a nature reserve. The walk had been lovely up then but here it was stunning. Here the path runs right alongside the river which rushes and gushes its way, forcing its path through large granite boulders. This part of the river is called Certovy Proudy, the Devil's Torrents, and with some cause. The river is utterly impassable by canoe here and a sad tribute can be seen to one canoeist who presumably tried and failed. The woodland floor was covered with lily of the valley and other woodland flowers.

Having walked back along the road from Loucovice (a rather sad dull place dominated by its paper mill) towards my car, I took the short track to the top of the Devil's Wall. It was already dusk, but the views along the valley and of the trees clinging to rock were still impressive. I walked back to the car park, delighted to have another lovely walk to add to my collection.

Stopped by the Czech Police

Czech Police regularly do roadside checks, flagging down vehicles they fancy. A few weeks ago I was flagged down. This turned out to be a very good natured affair with a great deal of laughing. The first thing that happened was they realised that they had to change where they were standing, as I was of course in a British right-hand drive car. That done they asked for my papers, which I produced (you are required to have your licence, insurance and registration documents with you at all times). The licence was not a problem – it was a photo one and I was clearly driving. Then they came to the insurance and registration documents. There was a great deal of joshing and banter going on as two of the three policemen were clearly saying to their colleague - “You pulled over a British car, now you read the documents.” One held a paper upside down and laughed. It was obvious that I could have given them my shopping list and so long as it looked right they would have accepted it. Then they realised that my car registration number was on the documents as was my name, so they checked those. Then with a big grin they waved me on.

Goodbyes

On Monday I drove back to the UK from my Czech home. I can't tell you how it feels to have two places with so much hold on me, it is as if both have strings attached to my heart. I am sorry to leave Czecho always, but I always also love to come home to the UK. I have developed something of a routine when I leave, which of course includes tidying up but also a farewell walk in the woods above my house. On the walk I collected the first chanterelle mushrooms of the year and wild strawberries, on which I feasted on Saturday evening.

I also went for a short walk in the Vysenske Kopce nature reserve, where I had been watching the martagon lilies. On my previous walk these treasures had been in bud, now I was glad to see them with their dainty pink turban flowers. These lilies are so rare that they are a protected species in the Czech Republic and grow in only a few places.


The other farewell I needed to make was to Salamander's new kitten (see Krumlov expats for the kitten story). I had been the driver when the kitten dashed across the country road and into our lives and I had looked after her when Salamander had been away for a few days. She therefore very much feels like my kitten too. It was very hard to leave this spirited and delightful little cat, but leave I must.

I drove back to my house at about 9pm and was just opening the front door when I noticed what I at first took to be some embers in the garden. But as I looked I became aware that these were moving, flying around - little fairy lights floating around the orchard. I realised then that I was watching a display of fireflies. I have never seen them in the garden before, the house had kept this piece of magic till the night before my departure. I just burst into tears.

Celebrations of the Five-Petaled Rose - Sundry

As my final post on the Celebrations of the Five-Petaled Rose I wanted just to talk about the many other activities that happened. These included historical reconstructions, such as medieval jousts, a Thirty Year War reenactment group, firing cannons and muskets.


There was a show based on some of the characters that appear in the frescos in the Masquerade Hall in Cesky Krumlov Castle (one such is above).


Clowning, juggling and puppet shows for the children (and adults).


Then there was the opportunity to take part in such things as ponyriding and archery. There were falconry displays in the Castle Gardens. On Saturday there was a huge firework display over the town at midnight ( but I being exhausted had already retreated to my bed). And then of course there was all that eating and drinking that goes on all over Cesky Krumlov. The Celebrations may have suffered from a unusually bad weather this year, but they must have brought millions of euros into the local economy. Great stuff, I am looking forward to next year's already

Celebrations of the Five-Petalled Rose - Markets

In the first courtyard of Cesky Krumlov Castle throughout the Celebrations of the Five-petalled Rose you would have found a wonderful market offering the very best of local crafts. These included a wide range of pottery, jewelry, clothing, wickerwork, toys and woodwork.

I went twice to the market on Saturday and on Sunday. In the first case I went to get a present for a niece with an 18th birthday, but there was so much that I liked and was very reasonably priced that I went back the day after and bought several Christmas presents. Yes I know, I confess I am one of those annoying people who buy Christmas presents whenever I see them. Though I am not as bad as my Granny who bought her presents in the January sales! I won't describe the presents here, as I know this blog is read by people who will be receiving them.


Also on sale in the market were a variety of foodstuffs - cheese, herbs, wine, mead (medovina), jam, nougat. I bought a large bottle of medovina for half the price in the shops.

For a blog on last year's festival visit our sister blog "Krumlov Expats"

Celebrations of the Five-petalled Rose - Music

The Cesky Krumlov was full of music for the Celebrations - concerts, buskers, music in the processions. The Town Square featured prominently a stage from which amplified music (not entirely to my taste) blasted out, there were some indoor venues for classical concerts, and music as I have already mentioned in my previous post played an important part in the processions.


But my favourite music was what one might call "found" music, music which one just comes across when doing something else. This was very easy to do. In the case of the bagpiper he was tucked between stalls in the craft market in the Castle Courtyard. Then also in the Courtyard on a green in the centre there was an area where children were entertained and entertained, here I watched this recorder troupe from a local school (sorry my only picture of them is in the procession) and I must say they were very good given the age range in the group.


The last found music I want to blog about was perhaps the most fun. I was walking past the Koh-i-Noor artshop when my attention was drawn to an open window on the first floor of a building nearby. From it on a string hung a saucepan, into which a man at the window was urging the crowd in the street to put some money. When someone in the crowd paid up, music was struck up and a quartet of musicians passed one by one by the window, like the horloge on Prague Townsquare. The music was traditional Czech folktunes and the crowd cheered its approval.

Celebrations of the Five-Petalled Rose - The Procession

A highlight of the Celebrations was the procession which wound its way through Cesky Krumlov's twisting streets. I waited for nearly an hour along with many others to see it pass, and it was worth every minute's wait.

The procession was enormous with people in costumes from throughout Cesky Krumlov's long past - from the middle ages to the 19th century. Many costumes were exquisite as you can see from the photograph above.

It was noticeable how as in this picture just wearing the costumes resulted in the wearer changing their bearing. It was hard not to act the part when one's costume is that of nobility.


Also in the procession were bands of musicians, soldiers, knights on horseback, foot soldiers, jesters and jugglers, an old carriage, and a lady in a palanquin.


As if one procession was not enough there was another torchlit procession in the evening.

Celebrations of the Five-Petalled Rose

Every year at the end of June Cesky Krumlov celebrates its history with a three-day festival, but as 2009 was the town's 700th anniversary, this year's event was special. Some 2000 people were dressed in period costumes, some were participants in the celebrations (in the processions, performances, markets, and other activities) and some were simply part of the audience; you get in free if you dress up. I, being British, and therefore reserved, chose instead to pay for an armband that gave me access to the town centre.

The event and the celebrations were so large that it was quite impossible to see everything. Everywhere I turned there was something happening (either in the programme or spontaneously). One surreal pleasure was the feeling of timewarp; as people from the past supped beer from plastic cups and chatted to friends in 21st century clothes. I even saw one renaissance lady remove a ringing mobile phone from her cleavage!

The event was so large in fact that I cannot do justice to it in one blog, so I propose writing a whole series of posts over the next few days on different aspects of the event. Watch this space!

A visitor to the local pond

I know I have mentioned the arrival of the storks several times already this year. They are such a sign of summer and given their size and liking for building their monster nests on prominent buildings (churches, mill chimneys etc) they are very noticeable ones at that. However I realised I had not featured a photo of one on the blog. So when this chap started prowling the edges of our local swimming pond looking for frogs in the waterlogged grass I had to take a photo for you.

A walk in the woods

In my last post I told of my discovering (and eating) wild strawberries on a walk in the woods. Well, they were not the only thing that caught my eye. My walk was one I regularly take (frequently take in the mushroom season), it leads up across the fields and into the woods, where it loops and even does a figure of eight if the mood takes me through a mixture of coniferous and some deciduous trees, past an old and now overgrown quarry together with pool, down to the road to Kvetusin and Olsina.

June is a lovely time for wildflower lovers in the Czech Republic; the sun has not parched the soil and turned the foliage brown. The field was full of meadow flowers – clover, buttercups, ox-eye daisies, speedwell, ragged robin, harebell to name but a few – and they hummed with bees and small beetles with bright, metallic-coloured coats. As I walked, clouds of butterflies billowed before me. I identified painted ladies, various fritilaries and small blues.

On entering the woods my eyes were drawn to two orchids – a lesser butterfly orchid and another barely open on a slender stem with spotted leaves. Under the eaves of a dense conifer plantation I spotted what I hope will be a hellabore close to opening. I will be returning with my flower book in a week's time to check. Here too were hosts of butterflies, woodland ones my English eyes are not used to recognizing. However mental notes were made and I can now report that at least one was a banded grayling and another a brown hairstreak.


On the wood's edge I passed this plant, at first I took it for the common (in the Czech Republic) wood ragwort, but on looking closer I realised I was mistaken. I looked it up in my book, but am still unable to identify it. I wondered whether I had found the rarer arnica montana, which can occasionally in the woods round here, but the leaves look wrong. Ideas welcome. But nevertheless what a climax to a lovely walk! Maybe some day these Czech flowers and butterflies will no longer fill me with such delight. I only pray that that day never comes.

First Fruit

I ate my first fruit of the season yesterday. First there were the early cherries from our orchard. I spent half an hour collecting a large bowlful from the first of our two trees. In a few days it will be a bucketful and I will be resorting to freezing them.

Then whilst on a walk in the woods above our house I came across a bank of wild strawberries. The bank was in full sun and the plants were way ahead of the other strawberries I had passed which were in flower and such fruit as there was was small and green. No, here on the bank the fruit was red and glistening with that “come and eat me” sheen. I duly obliged, savouring each little berry as its flavour exploded in my mouth. The intense taste of wild strawberries is so far removed from those waterlogged Spanish monsters that one gets in British supermarkets as to make one believe them to be totally unrelated.

My feast finished, I walked on through the woods past slopes covered with bilberry plants and raspberry canes. The first boletuses were pushing their velvet crowns through the loam. I made a mental note to bring mushroom basket next time.

Miracle After the Storm

One afternoon I was sat with Salamander at her house looking out across the river when suddenly a thunderstorm formed. The sky went black and river was soon a cauldron, as large raindrops shattered its smooth surface. The storm was over as suddenly as it came on. I drove home. The road up to the village was a river; my yard was white with hailstorms.

The following morning Salamander rang, “I haven't woken you, have I?” It was 7am, she had not. “But the mist this morning is amazing, grab your camera and get out here. It will disappear soon.”

I have spoken before of the mists that lie in the valleys after summer rains, of the way it sometimes appears that the trees are breathing smoke. That morning these were indeed spectacular. I drove past Lake Lipno where the mist was so thick I could see and photograph very little. So I drove up on to the hills above Horni Plana, where the mists were folded between them. From there I took the road to Lake Olsina, where ghosts of mist rose from the surface as if Vodnik, the watersprite, had his stove on in his house under the water.

When I returned, I called in at a favourite spot of mine, near the ferry at Horni Plana. Now Lake Lipno was clearer and a deep blue against the orange of last year's reeds, and beyond that there were wooded hills with a scarf of mist.