A Wedding at Hluboka

Hluboka Castle is one of the Czech Republic's most popular tourist attractions. It is a 19th Century white wedding cake of a castle, the sort of castle Walt Disney would dream up. Inside the then chatelaine, Eleanor Schwarzenberg, spared no expense in decorating the interiors, as she too lived out her dream.

You have to join one of the frequent tours of the castle if you want to look inside and even then the sheer number of visitors may mean that you will not be able to see it as well as you would like. Or you could live out your childhood fantasy and get married in a castle. I came across this oriental couple having their photos taken in the garden, when I visited the other day.

My contact at Castle Stekl, which is part of the complex of castle buildings, tells me that weddings are very popular with their Japanese visitors and other nationalities. It seems strange to me that you would want a Czech civic wedding when you are from the other side of the world and a totally different culture. But the idea of a wedding in a castle is not so strange. My husband and I got married in the chapel of our local castle in England and I can vouch for the experience.

Guess whose exhibition was on at Spilberk Castle

I have to admit that, despite having visited Brno, I hadn't made it to the city's Spilberk Castle. I don't know why; it was always on my to-visit list and it is in the city centre. This month I at last made up the short hill to the formidable building.

Spilberk Castle is home to the city's museum and an art gallery, which features local artists in a permanent exhibition and international artists in a temporary gallery. As I walked into a castle courtyard I encountered a huge blown-up soup can. Yes, Andy Warhol's amazing graphics are on display in the temporary gallery.

The gallery was busy, but as I have observed elsewhere in the Czech Republic not so much that I could not enjoy the artworks fully. I doubt that it would be the same if the exhibition had been on in Britain. I had a rather limited view of Warhol's work based on his most famous works, but this exhibition showed Warhol to be more than just a showman, to be a brilliant artist.

If you want to see a larger permanent exhibition of Warhol's work you can either go to New York or you can go to to the Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce in Eastern Slovakia. When Warhol was asked where he came from, he replied "Nowhere", suggesting that he created himself. He, of course, reinvented himself. He changed his name from Andrej Warhola to the anglicised Andrew Warhol. His parents were Czechoslovakian immigrants from a little village close to Medzilaborce. They were ethnically Ruthenian, an ethnic group related to the Ukrainians from that part of the Carpathians.

Warhol practiced his parents' Orthodox Catholic religion and towards the end of his life started to paint icons. The first artworks he would have seen as a child would have been the icons on the walls of his mother's room. Knowing that suddenly we see Warhol's prints in a different light - in some ways he was always creating icons - of Marilyn Monroe and soup cans. It turns out that Warhol didn't come from nowhere after all.

The strange obsession of Max Appeltauer

As I passed through the wine country south of Znojmo on my way to Vienna, I stopped at the village of Satov. Here I was told by my friends at the Znojmo pension was a treasure: a wine cellar decorated with folk art.

I don't know what I was expecting as I descended into the cool of the cellar. What I found was just magical and rather weird. The whole of the cellar had been decorated by its former owner, Max Appeltauer. Both walls of the main hall and the walls of the rooms that lead off it are covered with naive images of landscapes, country folk, mermaids, and dwarfs.

Every Sunday for thirty-six years Max Appeltauer would descend into the cellar to carve and paint his designs by a candlelight. Nothing could stop the obsessive Mr Appeltauer, not even losing an arm in the Second World War. What his wife and family thought about it, one can only guess.

I assume this picture is of the long-suffering Mrs Appeltauer. I also assume that she didn't make it into the most obscure room, which is adorned with images of naked ladies!

Buttercups and Memories

Early April is a special time for me in the Czech Republic. Winter is losing its grip, warm sunny days are interspersed with cold grey ones. In the woods and fields the first flowers are appearing - the Alpine Snowbell, little cowslips, violets, and these purple buttercups. A few days ago I took a walk to the wooded hill of Ptaci Hradek (Bird Castle) which stands behind Krumlov's castle gardens. The ground was so covered with buttercups that the wood floor was in placed purple.

As I stood admiring the flowers, I was reminded of the first time I saw them on another April. It seems many years ago. I was taken there by my friend, Hannah. I suspect she knew that I would fall in love with the little flowers, as we shared a sense of awe for the little miracles of nature. I remember that as she was dying, Hannah expressed a regret that she would not see Krumlov's spring flowers that year. She died in early April. So as I followed the path we had followed  I enjoyed the flowers and thought of her walking with me through the trees.

Hannah on my first walk among the buttercups.

Cesky Krumlov Travel Guide

At last! My travel guide to Cesky Krumlov is now available on Amazon. It has been a year in the making, but I think the hard work has all been worth while. This is the first in a series of travel guides to the Czech Republic that I am planning.

You can buy it here:
For UK purchasers:   http://www.amazon.co.uk/Insiders-Travel-Krumlov-Republic-Guides-ebook/dp/B01DQ20A12
For US puchasers:  http://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Travel-Krumlov-Republic-Guides-ebook/dp/B01DQ20A12

It is also available on the Canadian, Australian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Indian, Dutch, Japanese, Brazilian and Mexican Amazon stores

If you do buy a copy and enjoy it, please leave a review on Amazon.

Subjects covered in the book: 

• How to get to Cesky Krumlov from Prague and other locations
• How to get around on public transport (trains and coaches) and private trips
• Take a tour of the Cesky Krumlov's Castle (the Czech Republic's second largest castle)
• Take a guided walk around the historic streets of the ancient town
• When to come to Cesky Krumlov (weather, festivals, when to avoid the crowds)
• Secret Krumlov – how to find the Krumlov most travellers never see
• Children's Krumlov – how to have a great Krumlov holiday with kids
• How to explore the lovely countryside surrounding Cesky Krumlov, including the Sumava National Park
• How to see some of the castles, abbeys and historic villages near the town
• How to shop for essentials and souvenirs
• What and where to eat in Cesky Krumlov
• How to find and choose your holiday accommodation
• Useful Czech words and phrases
• Useful information and websites

Drowning Morana - the End of Winter

I always spend March in England, for a number of reasons including being with my mother on Mothering Sunday. For this reason I have never seen the Czech traditional ceremony that marks the end of winter. But my friend Hannah has and she gave me this photo of the ceremony taking place in a small village a few miles from my home.

Morana was the Slavic goddess of winter and so her ritual destruction towards the end of March every year marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. The girls of the village create an effigy of Morana out of straw and branches, dress her in old clothes and drape a necklace of eggs around her neck. On the day of the drowning, she is processed through the village to the river, to the accompaniment of songs and music. There she is set on fire and hurled into the river.

It is obvious that this ceremony predates the arrival of Christianity to the Slavic lands and may at one time have involved a human sacrifice. In this country, in which winter can be very harsh and where we do not have the early wildflowers that act as harbingers of spring in England, a sacrifice might well be thought needed to secure the death of winter. Nowadays of course no other reason is needed than the excuse to have a party.

Creating an e-guidebook to Cesky Krumlov.

I am currently working on my guidebook to Cesky Krumlov, ready for publication at the end of the month (I hope). The text is written and edited, so nearly everything is done. The cover has been mocked up (see above). But I have a dilemma and I would welcome your feedback.

The book is designed as an ebook. I have observed that a lot of visitors to the town come with ipads and other electronic readers and so thought that there was a need for a downloadable guidebook.

This choice of book format offers opportunities and problems.
The opportunities are that:

• with an ebook I can incorporate active web-links in the book, allowing the reader direct access maps, bus timetables and other resources
• I can update the book easily
• it does not take up space in people's luggage
• the book is easily searchable.

The problems are that:

• ereaders reformat the page to fit the screen, so there is an issue about the look of the page and in particular the position and size of images
• the size and quality of images have to be limited 
• Czech characters such as in Český do not convert easily into an ebook format.

To resolve the first two problems I will create a gallery of photos that readers can access if they want to see more images of Cesky Krumlov.

The third problem is the one I would welcome your thoughts on. It is possible to code the book to feature Czech characters using HTML, but I am not sure I am capable of doing it and more importantly I am not sure that I should. My readers will be English-speakers, readers and writers, using devices with a standard English keyboard. By using Czech characters I will probably be reducing their capacity to interact with the book. So what should I do?

More Decorative Details from Prague's Obecni Dum

  

In a previous post I talked about my tour of Prague's Municipal House (Obecni Dum). And mostly I talked about the building in terms of Art Nouveau. Its architectural style is indeed Art Nouveau. And clearly that is also the case with the exterior decoration and much of the interior.

But it is a bit of a simplification. The building was at the forefront of architectural and decorative trends when it was built between 1905 and 1912. Indeed the Czechs often were breaking new ground in the first part of the twentieth century. As a result some of the decorative details are art deco and indeed cubist.

The decoration is everywhere. From the concert hall to the ticket office, from basement to the salons upstairs, from the lift (photograph above) to the lights (below).

As an introduction to the architecture of the early part of the 20th Century a visit to the Obecni Dum is an excellent idea.

Masopust at the train station

Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday and so Masopust was celebrated in the Czech Republic. I have blogged about Masopust in previous posts and so I will simply share with you this photograph of two Masopusters waiting for the train to Horni Plana in the waiting room at Cesky Krumlov station.

You can see my video of Masopust in my nearest town here: http://czechproperty.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/masopust.html

and my post about the Masopusters visit to my village here: http://czechproperty.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/masopust-in-horice-na-sumave.html

Happy 1938

When you start collecting Czech ex libris, you will also be offered PFs. These are New Year cards and usually feature the letters PF (which stands for the French greeting pour feliciter) and the year and perhaps the name of the family sending the card. The Czechs refer to these cards as peefko. Sometimes families will make their own cards and sometimes they will commission artists to produce cards for them.

Some cards are humourous and many reveal the interests of the family sending the card, which is another reason (other than their artistic value) why they are fascinating to collect. This signed card in our collection is by the well-known artist Alois Moravec. As you can see it is a happy new year card for 1938, which was to be a far from a happy year for the Czechs. The choice of subject matter for this card would seem to be indicative of the impending Nazi invasion and Czech determination to resist.

This is a picture of Jan Zizka, the one-eyed military genius who successfully resisted a series of anti-Hussite crusader armies. These invading armies were for a large part made up of the Teutonic knights - the panzer divisions of their day - and on the face of it the Czech Hussites didn't stand a chance in the face of such military superiority. But the undefeated Zizka shattered the knights' reputation and in so doing entered into the Czech nationalist pantheon. No wonder he features on this 1938 PF.

Absinthe

 

The first Czech painting I ever saw in the Czech Republic was The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva. I had just arrived in a bitterly cold Prague and my friend took me to Cafe Slavia to warm up. The Cafe, which sits opposite the National Theatre on the bank of the Vltava, had always been a meeting place for artists, writers and intellectuals and it was still. As my friend debated the future of the post-Communist Czechoslovakia with her friends, my eyes were drawn to a large painting on the wall opposite. A man sits at a table, head in hands, conversing with the green fairy of absinthe.

Viktor Oliva was a Czech art nouveau painter and illustrator who discovered the green spirit when he lived in the Bohemian quarter of Paris. He died in Prague twenty seven years after painting the work and is buried in Olsany Cemetery.

I came across absinthe again this year. I was walking around Jindrichuv Hradec and came upon a distillery of liqueurs. In the shop window was this bottle of their own brand of absinthe. Jindrichuv Hradec is known for its liqueurs. Another local company, Fruko Schulz, is one of the largest producers of liqueurs and spirits in the Czech Republic. But Hills, the distillery I discovered on my walk, is more of a family affair and invites you in for a tour to learn about distilling and indeed a tasting. As I was driving, I took this photo and hurried on before being tempted in.

As a footnote to this post, I was in the Krumlov Tesco supermarket before Christmas and bought my son a pack of absinthe chocolate. There was also a bar of cannabis chocolate, but I didn't think I would get that through customs!

Czech Ex Libris

Signed by Mirko Hanak

For my Christmas present to my husband I made a small album of Czech bookplates. I have in the past bought exlibris and other graphics for our artist son, but a few months ago my husband and I were talking about the possibility of creating an exlibris collection. We have run out of wall space for pictures and prints in our home and so a collection of small prints which can be kept in an album appeals. Many antikvariat shops will have a box or an album on a shelf somewhere in which you can find a few or many exlibris treasures. It is a way of collecting original prints, often signed, by well-known Czech artists for as little as a £ each. I know of no other way to develop such an art collection.

Signed exlibris by Plevka

I picked up a collection of 32 bookplates on a Czech auction website and another on ebay. I emailed a gallery about a collection I missed and met with its lovely art director for a coffee in Prague and came away with nearly one hundred bookplates to add to the collection. Now everywhere I go I am on the look-out for antikvariats and pop in to ask for exlibris. Yesterday my husband and I were in Plzen (where the beer comes from) and spent a happy hour sifting through two shoeboxes.

Exlibris by Michael Florian

I have included three of my favourites in this post, but I promise to post with more in future. Watch this space as our collection grows

Back in time for winter

I returned from an English Christmas in time for a Czech Epiphany, from a country suffering from prolonged rain and horrendous floods (although not fortunately in my home town) in time for snow (I hoped). The Czech news had been full of how the temperatures in December been record-breakingly mild, seldom dipping below freezing the whole month. However the weather obligingly broke the day before I arrived, so the plane flew in over snow-covered fields.

In South Bohemia however the mild weather soon melted the scattering of white on the hills. A week or so ago all that changed overnight. I looked out of the window to see this:

It has been snowing ever since. Inside the house the stove is lit and all is warm: the perfect way to enjoy a Czech winter.

The Obecni Dum - Prague's Munipical House

 Prague's Obecni Dum (Municipal House) is often overlooked by visitors planning their stay. I have to confess that the same was true of me and my family, even though we visited Prague regularly. I suspect that the reason for this is that the building is not advertised as well as it might be. Anyway this time last year my husband and I rectified the omission.

And it was a serious omission. This building is amazing. Architecturally it is a jewel of the Art Nouveau, historically it is an amazing statement of the rise of Czech nationalism (the Declaration of Independence was signed here) and its decoration is by some of the best Czech artists of the early twentieth century.

 
You have to take a guided tour of the interiors to really get a real feel for the building. It is well worth the money, you get to see the amazing Mayor's Hall decorated by Alfons Mucha, the Riegr Room with frescoes by Max Svabinsky, the Palacky Hall with paintings by Preisler, and many other rooms and works by other artists of the day. Our guide was excellent who told us the story the building in such a way that it became a story of the Czech nation too.

After the tour we went upstairs to visit an exhibition of European and Czech Art Nouveau 1900, which finished our visit off perfectly. The exhibition, which is drawn from the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts (the museum is currently being refurbished), features furniture, ceramics, costumes, posters and graphics and is on until the end of July 2016.

Prior to taking our tour we enjoyed a coffee and cake in the building's amazing Art Nouveau Francouzska Restaurant. The cake was lovely and not too expensive and the decorations surrounding us were divine. My husband disappeared for a while to photograph the decor, leaving me to smile at the waiter. Phil was in seventh heaven - the whole building is covered with architectural details of the highest quality from the staircase to the cloakrooms. We got a voucher for a reduced price drink in the American Bar in the buildings basement, with our tickets. But we were still so replete with cakes that we only wandered in to look at the decoration. As with every part of the building the bar is amazing - black ceramic tiles influenced by the American style of the 1910s contrasting with coloured drawings of folk scenes (originally these were by Czech artist Mikolas Ales).

If you really can't afford the 290 Korun for the tour, the restaurants and bars are open to the public without a ticket. Another way of seeing some of the building is to attend one of the many concerts which take place in the stunning Smetana hall.