The Sad Story of the Alchemist's House

If you walk down the Siroka - the market street in Cesky Krumlov in which you will find the Egon Schiele Art Centrum - you will see the Alchemist's House. This wonderful renaissance house is the most perfect example of burgher home in the town and indeed anywhere. Its association with the alchemist Anton Michael of Ebbersbach, a former resident, gives the house its local name and this in turn gave a group of local people the idea for a use for the building - the creation of an alchemy museum.

The museum would have covered the history of alchemy both in Krumlov and further afield, and it would have looked at alchemy's legacy - to science (the alchemists developed many of the early scientific methods) and to literature. It was a perfect idea for Cesky Krumlov, commercially attractive and appropriate. It also would have meant the restoration of the building - sensitive restoration because the people involved in developing the project cared and still do care about the building. The building was owned by the "Cesky Krumlov Development Fund". You can find out what it claims to be doing on the web - that it was protecting the heritage and developing the town for the benefit of local people and future generations. Let us decide from its behaviour over the Alchemist's House whether this is the case.

The proposers of the Alchemy Museum concept were encouraged to work up their business plans and to look for funding. If they did this, they were told, they would get the house. So they set about doing just that. Then they heard that the house had been sold behind their backs to a hotel developer. It is obvious that a hotel conversion of this building is inappropriate. As I indicated in my previous post hotels require changes to the internal fabric of the building incompatible with heritage conservation concerns. Criticism of the hotel proposals has come from national and regional conservation bodies. Does the Development Fund listen? Well it hasn't yet.

Anton Michael of Ebbersbach was an unethical charlatan, who had claimed to be able to grow gold coins by watering them. The Development Fund has found another way to grow gold!

UNESCO or not

Those of you who have read my other posts will know my love of Cesky Krumlov. It is a wonderful Czech town in South Bohemia. As you arrive from Prague you come down the hill and in front of you you see a Renaissance castle, set on cliffs, almost Gormenghast-like in its proportions and aspect. It takes your breath away and you realise you are arriving somewhere very special. And you are - the heart of the Cesky Krumlov is a perfectly preserved medieval/renaissance town. In recognition of this the town was made a UNESCO world heritage site. The UNESCO status is meant to help protect its wonderful and unique collection of buildings and in some ways it does. But UNESCO status is a double-edged sword, it brings with it other dangers.

Being a UNESCO World Heritage site means that inevitably the town gets on to the tourism map. There is nothing wrong with that if the tourism is managed in an appropriate sustainable way, but it isn't. It would appear that those who "manage" tourism in Cesky Krumlov and too many that invest in it worship at the shrine of the filthy lucre, of the god of the fast buck. The tourists that are coming tend to be day-trippers, often on a day-trip from Prague. Now it takes about 3 hours to get from Prague to Cesky Krumlov , so as you can see a day-trip to Cesky Krumlov actually means that the visitors have only 2 - 3 hours in the town, not long enough to spend enough money to justify the damage they are doing to the town.

In the 1970's under the Communists there were a small band of people in the Krumlov, who set about saving the town and its heritage from the ravages of communist planning. They went in and saved old medieval doors and other features when the houses were being "improved". Over the decades these same people have faithfully restored frescos, chimneys and other features. If you want to understand more of this, visit the small museum of architecture (you can bet the day-trippers won't). This museum is an example of the sort of visitor offering that the town should have been providing, one in keeping with the setting and which enables the visitor to understand the heritage of Cesky Krumlov. Of course the town did not provide it, it was the initiative of one dedicated individual. The town didn't even provide the building in which this remarkable collection is housed.

The band rejoiced when the town got UNESCO status, now they feel that the status has done harm. It would seem that the greed of capitalism has combined with the centralist legacy of communism to exploit the status for financial benefit, not of the people of Krumlov nor of the fabric of the town, but of a few individuals and often external companies. Historic houses held in trust by the local historical fund have been sold off for inappropriate use. Restaurants, hotels and the like may keep the facades, but inside these uses inevitably result in major changes in the fabric of the houses - visitors expect ensuite bathrooms, these in turn need pipes to be punched through medieval walls. The so-called "protectors" of Cesky Krumlov are creating a disney-world, a facade beautifully restored but a facade nonetheless. A year ago I laughed when my friend told me that some of the Japanese visitors thought that the town was folded up and put away for winter. It is too near the truth now for me to laugh.

Action is needed. Action from UNESCO and the Czech government to stop this. To stop this now before it is too late.

For an update on this post visit my September post

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.

Easter in the Czech Republic

My first visit to the Czech Republic was just before Easter 1990 and I have enjoyed a fair few Czech Easters since. In fact I try to ensure that I am there for Easter, it is such a special time in the Republic.

Many visitors to Czecho return home with a box or two of brightly decorated easter eggs (above) - they make a lovely and light momento of your visit. On my first visit I too brought back some eggs, but I had little idea what their significance was. Nor did I know that of the switches of woven willow wands and decorated with ribbons, which I saw on sale in Wenceslas Square.

Over the years I have learnt more about these Easter traditions, but then a few years ago I was let into some of the secrets. I was invited into a small kitchen on Easter Monday where the lady of the house was preparing the eggs. She was going to show us the local tradition of egg decoration. She had blown several dozen of them - the family was going to be eating a lot of omelettes over the next few days! She needed a lot as the matriarch of a large family and as a brilliant egg decorator her eggs were going to be in great demand.

Now there are different forms of decoration I believe in different parts of the country and different traditions are passed down from mother to daughter, so the traditional decoration I was shown would not be found every where. It involved dyes, beeswax melted on the stove and a pin stuck into the end of a pencil. The process was a sort of batik on egg, with the pin used to apply the wax on the egg in a pattern. Our hostess made it look easy, it wasn't - the wax would stick to the pin or come off in a blob and my attempt looked very primitive when set against hers. Once the wax is set the egg is dyed, the wax is then removed with a warm cloth to reveal the colour beneath. This process can be repeated to create patterns in different colours. The pattern that I was shown was a traditional one of various fertility symbols - the ear of corn, a woman in traditional dress etc.

We had hardly finished dying the eggs, when in through the door burst some male friends of the family carrying the willow switches. They set about playfully belabouring the legs of all the women present with the switches. In return for being "beaten" we gave the men some eggs. Then the matriarch produced some cake and plum brandy, which were consumed by her visitors with gusto. Afterwards they all disappeared in search of other female prey, eggs, cake and alcohol. The tradition is obviously a pagan fertility rite - which is very clear when one discovers that the name for the switch is pomlazka (from pomladit "to make younger") . Of course the tradition has been upbraided by American feminists to Czech bemusement.

Later we sat in the garden and listened to the gaggles of men, now quite drunk after visiting various houses, caroling along the street below. When the doorbell rang we hid, we had no more eggs to give!

Good Friday at Rimov

Easter is a special time in the Czech Republic and it means a lot to me personally. As I said the first time I visited the country was around Easter and somehow since then I have often been in the country for the Easter celebrations.

A special place to visit at Easter is Rimov a few miles from Cesky Krumlov. The village has been a place of pilgrimage since the 17th century. The Baroque Loretto Chapel there is beautiful but my preference is to walk around the short trail (about 5 kilometres), which takes you past 25 small stations of the cross - the Rimov Passion. The stations are all very different - some are simple hand painted paintings in small wayside chapels, some are tableaux, some are more complex. My favourite is the one shown in the photo above - the statues in the Garden of Gethsemane, all life size and set naturally in the landscape. You are walking through a wood along a small stream set about with coltsfoot and early spring flowers and then on a brow of a low hill you see the first of the statues. Statues of the sleeping disciples lie prostrate, Jesus is in urgent prayer, he leans forward, his eyes fixed on an angel at the top of the slope who proffers the cross.

The trail combines gentle exercise with prayer - at Easter you will find families, couples and friends walking, talking or meditating. And if you aren't religious you can always raid the willows along the river for withies - now why would you need them?

Prague First Impressions - Weeping Angels

The next five days were spent wandering around Prague. These were days before the arrival of the hordes of tourists, and so I was often alone as I meandered around the narrow streets of the Old Town and up to the Castle. Virtually no one spoke English - the language having been looked on with suspicion by the communist authorities - and so I got by on rudimentary German and miming.

My friend was renewing old acquaintances and exploring business opportunities and so I just took the opportunity in her absence to explore and soak in the atmosphere, and what an atmosphere it was. It is now hard to explain what it felt like back in early 1990. I had no guidebook and instead just walked, following my instinct, often going over the same ground time and again. I was completely breathless with the beauty of the place and felt the city's history - both glorious and sad - reaching out to me from alleyways and courtyards, through the railings of the Jewish quarter and from the facades of once rich buildings. Now the visitor finds the route from Charles Bridge to Town Square lined with hawkers, shops crammed with souvenirs and frankly often tat; then it was quiet and powerful. The statues on Charles Bridge stood alone and silent, without the accompanying flash of cameras and chatter of posing tourists.

On a number of occasions and at a number of places I came across small shrines of candles and flowers, set up to those who had been murdered by the oppressors. In Wenceslas Square there was a large makeshift memorial to Jan Palach - the student who had burnt himself to death in 1968 as a protest against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring. Here there was a constant stream of people bringing flowers and lighting candles. It all felt hugely personal. I felt a voyeur watching the people's bowed heads. How could I comprehend what I was seeing? How could I share anything of the emotion that hung like incense in the air? And I was angered by other non-Czech visitors who stood around and took photos of it all.

I regularly made my way back to the lights and warmth of Cafe Slavia either to meet up with my friend or to drink black Czech coffee and eat the Cafe's rich cakes. Energy and wits refreshed, I would then venture back on to the streets. I do not know whether it was the caffeine or the intensity of emotion in Prague at that time, but I increasingly found myself unable to sleep. In that heightened state I found angels everywhere - statues, in frescos, in pictures. I sensed too a presence in the air, the angels of Prague were weeping and rejoicing.

Cafe Slavia

Cafe Slavia is to be found on the bank of the Vltava opposite the National Theatre. On the evening of my first day in Czechoslovakia nearly 20 years ago Cafe Slavia was full of people.

Cafe Slavia had long been the favourite watering hole of Prague's intelligensia - Kafka and Kundera have been among its customers. And it was also a favourite of the former Czech dissident leader and now president Vaclav Havel. Cafe Slavia then in early 1990 was a centre for those who were planning and executing the transformation of the newly democratised country. The cafe's Art Deco leather bank seating, cherrywood and onyx had been allowed to tarnish under the communists and yet the place shone with an energy that was almost palpable.

My puppeteer friend and I joined a group of her friends sitting in animated conversation, into which she soon was drawn. I sat, watched and listened to the flurry of a language I did not understand. I drank a cup of dark, thick Czech coffee and soon was intoxicated. Without language I was thrown back on my other senses, all of which seemed heightened by the apparent absence of the one.

Language is very important to me, but it exists on three levels. The first is that of conversation, the run-of-the-day exchange, and I am good at that, good at making people feel at ease, good at communicating what I wish and hiding the rest. The second is that of academic exactitude and arguing the case; three years at Oxford had honed this side of my language to a dagger point. And the last is something deeper. My parents tell me that as a small child even before I could read or write I composed poetry. This last level of language has a habit of tripping me up, starting as it does not in words but in rhythm. It is powerful and heady and something I resist until I can resist no longer. But most of the time it is drowned out by the hubbub of daily life. Here in the Cafe Slavia, drunk with the electricity in the air, I found that the conversation around me, stripped of meaningful words but full of exciting rhythyms and cadences, rang deep in that third level. It resonated inside me and something flexed like a Golem still unformed in Vltava mud.

Afterwards as we walked along the river to catch a tram to where I was staying I asked my friend about the one word I had made out in the multitude of others that evening. It had seemed to appear in every sentence, been the answer to every question. She smiled "Possibly," she said, "It means possibly." On that cold night in the early days following the Velvet Revolution everything was possible.

First Impressions - the train

As is the case for most people my first impressions of the Czech Republic were of Prague. Well, actually no, my first impressions were from a train window as I entered the country on a slow train from Germany. It was a few months after the Velvet Revolution, just before Easter, and the number of planes flying to Prague had not yet increased to take account of the number of people wanting to fly there. And so I flew to Frankfurt, took the train to Nurenburg, changed on to a smaller train and so on to Prague. It was a wonderful way to arrive, in that it gave me time to watch the changes, to feel the transformation.

Even now I recommend to anyone coming to Cesky Krumlov that they make the journey from Prague to Cesky Krumlov by train rather than hire a car and come down in a hermetically sealed pod. You will meet Czechs that way and you will see some wonderful countryside. The last part of the journey, after you climb on the little train at Ceske Budejovice, is particularly magical as the train winds its way through the forests of the Blanksy Les past a series of small villages.

But back to my first journey into Czecho. The train was full of Germans - a bunch of Bavarians with a large hamper of food and beer who talked very loudly and were on their way to flash the mighty deutschmark in Prague and a Prussian couple who talked to me in English. At the border our papers were checked first by the German border guards, then the train moved a few yards and the Czech guards arrived. Although it was about three months after the collapse of communism, many of its structures, mentality and behaviours were alive and strong, and these included those of the border guards. They arrived grim-faced, together with rifles, inspected the passports and papers as if certain we were enemies of the state, and slowly made their way through the train.

I was relieved when the jolt of the train indicated we were moving again and so we entered Czechoslovakia. My first impressions were not entirely favourable. As the night was drawing in I could not see much beyond the immediate environment of the railway line, but here everywhere looked run-down - the station buildings in need of repairs, long trains with coal, timber and other goods trundled past. The only countryside I could see was where the forest dark and mysterious pressed in. I felt a frisson down my spine. The fairytales of my childhood came to mind, somewhere out there were the woodcutter and hunter, bears, foxes and big, bad wolves.

At last we arrived in Prague Station. There standing on the platform was my puppeteer friend. She was buzzing with excitement, glad to be back in her homeland after 20 years, glad to have renewed acquaintances with ex-student friends now bigshots in the brave new world of post Velvet Revolution Prague. "Come," she said, "We have time for a coffee to Cafe Slavia."

Beginning - the puppeteer

A few days ago I talked about an exhibition of puppets I organised at Liverpool nearly 20 years ago and how it was one beginning to the journey that led me to Cesky Krumlov and the Czech Republic. Well, although it is true that puppets generally are something of a common theme with the Czechs, that exhibition had a special importance in my journey.

I approached quite a number of television and film puppeteers for exhibits - these were days before the arrival of emails and so the approach took the form of a letter. Any way I got a phone call in response from one puppeteer. Of course I could borrow some puppets, she even had some scenery if that would help. But she wasn't sure what I would want anything said the puppeteer with a soft, low, Czech accent. Perhaps I could come round to her flat and look at them - she lived only a few miles away from my home in London.

And so it was that I found myself climbing up the cast-iron external staircase of a large Victorian house. At the top of the stairs I rang the doorbell and waited. The door opened, I was greeted and invited in. I descended a few steps in to the reception area, on one side was a set of what I recognised as old Czech marionettes, on a table was a nutcracker in the form of a soldier. On the walls was an array of prints and paintings, and a large Mexican embroidary. I was shown into the main room and waited whilst the puppeteer disappeared to find the puppets. The room was light and airy with large windows overlooking a park. A centre piece of the room was a grand piano with sheet music, beside the door was a plant hung with hand-painted Czech easter eggs. On the bookcase was an eclectic range of books - on Jung, books of fairytales, film and a number of books in Czech.

The puppeteer came back carrying some wonderful characterful black-light theatre puppets - wasn't sure that I would want them, I wanted everything including the scenery and I told her so. She grinned and asked if I would like some tea. Two mugs of dark (very British) tea arrived and we started to talk. We have been talking and drinking tea together ever since.

Spring

I love the Czech springtime - in particular I love the spring flowers. As I indicated in an earlier post spring has a habit of arriving with bang, overnight even. The countryside, which is at first brown from what are usually several months of snow, starts to turn green. The first flowers appear and spring is definitely sprung.

One of my favourite spring walks is past the Castle Gardens above Cesky Krumlov and up to a little hill above the town. Here among the woods is what looks to be an old hunting lodge of the Schwarzenbergs. And all around the hunting lodge in late March you will find lovely purple buttercups (see above), which form a sheen on the forest floor. You circle around the hill and drop down to the Cesky Krumlov Castle Gardens. If the Gardens are open go in and wander in the less formal area around the revolving theatre and pond. Here you find even more spring flowers. One Easter I spent a whole afternoon lying on the grass among the flowers looking up at the tree branches just breaking into leaf. Among the flowers are Stars of Bethlehem, white anemones, and little cowslips (which my Czech friend calls primroses, but they are unlike English wild primroses). I am working on getting the walk together as a pdf for our website www.ceskykrumlovholiday.co.uk - will let you do when I do, so you can download it and discover the walk for yourself.

Another Beginning - Puppets 1

1988 - a street in Liverpool, the press are waiting. Then a limousine pulls up outside a rather nondescript warehouse and the press photographers start snapping the car's occupants. The occupants are Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. They smile and wave, but they do not get out of the car. They can't, they don't have any legs. They are Spitting Image puppets. Inside the warehouse I have organised an exhibition of television and film puppets and this is a publicity stunt.

Although Reagan and Gorbachev were the architects of glasnost, which a year and a bit later led to the Velvet Revolution and the opening of the Czech lands to us westerners, that is not why I consider this to be a beginning. The exhibition contained a huge range of puppets - Sooty, Parker from Thunderbirds, Postman Pat, Cosgrove Hall's "The Reluctant Dragon", Muffin the Mule, to name but a few. Before having my son earlier in the year I had worked as the manager of the Puppet Centre, the national centre for the puppeteer's art. And so I had had the pleasure of working with some of Britain's finest puppeteers.

I loved and still love puppetry - I loved the way you can do extraordinary things with puppets. Puppetry is a place where art meets theatre meets film meets magic. Now, any visitor to Cesky Krumlov or Prague will tell you that puppetry is part of life in the Czech Republic. Somehow there is something in the Czech soul that responds to puppets and the same is true of mine. There are two puppet museums in Cesky Krumlov and puppets with various standards of execution can be bought in many of the gift shops in the town. But that is not the only reason I consider the Liverpool exhibition to be a beginning of my journey towards Czecho.

So something about the Celts

It doesn't actually take long to notice the Czech interest in their Celtic roots and even in the British Arthurian tradition. There is even a guy in Cesky Krumlov who calls himself Merlin. You can buy a wonderful map which marks out the places of ancient power in the area - the comments are in Czech and so I am not sure of the places' significance. But you wouldn't get a map like that sold along side the Ordnance Survey in shops in England.

On two occasions I have been taken by some Czech friends to visit local standing stones. On one occasion my friend and I were taken to a place off the road between Cesky Krumlov and Horice na Sumave. We parked the car by the road, dropped down a short slope to cross a stream, passed one of the many small shrines that cover the Czech countryside and followed a path that curved up into the woods. After a while we came to an opening in the trees; the sun streamed through the trees on to a stone lying on the floor. We were told that this had long been a place of power with travellers coming here for centuries to access the forces. Individually we knelt by the horizontal stone and placed our right hands on it, as instructed. We then rose and waited. My friend having risen, found herself being compelled for no reason to walk backwards until she stopped a few yards away. Our guide was delighted - my friend had apparently stopped somewhere important. For me nothing happened.

As we walked back to the car I pondered my reactions to it all. Did I believe what had happened? I knew my friend's reaction would have been absolutely honest, and so something had moved her. But did I believe it? If I did, why did it not work for me? I had been open to anything, I thought. And for that matter I am usually very sensitive to places. As a teenager I had been as obsessed by the Celts as the Czechs, making pilgrimages to ancient places - standing stones, circles and Celtic hill forts (oppida). I had had a whole collection of clunky Celtic jewellary on leather thongs - but then so did everyone else in the early 70s. And I had bought every book I could find on the Celts.

I suppose it might just be that that particular place did not have an impact on me. Then it could have been that the rational and somewhat cynical English side of me was on top at that point - the Oxford-trained historian. You will note that I talk of it as the English side not the British. You see one thing we have in common with the Czechs is not just our Celtic roots, but that we have other roots, roots we are perhaps less fond of. The Czechs have the Slavs, the English have the Anglo Saxon. And so we seek what we see as the Celtic, - the other, the mystical side in our personalities.

Bouncingczech replies

Well I've had my first comment:

bouncingczech said...

I am glad you like the crazy Czech Fairy-psyche. But did you know that we are related? You the Brits, us the Czechs, I mean. Because we are both Celtic by origin.You should czech out (sorry, couldn't resist that) the Celtic sites around the place, in fact there are masses of them around the area you so love! Anyway, maybe some of that fairy-tale poetry romance stuff is just the thing for you to rediscover, I gather the Brits have it inside them but what with all their work-ethic, how deep is it burried? Or is it enough to scratch the surface - your musings would suggest it is :-)

23 March 2007 19:42

Beginnings - fairies

So why am I sitting outside a cafe in Cesky Krumlov? What was it that brought me to this place? Well, I suppose there were lots of points at which this journey started. It was like a river - a multitude of sources all coming together. I don't suppose I can identify all of them. But over the next few posts, I' ll explore some of them.

Here is the first - when I was a child I loved fairytales (podhadky in the Czech). I devoured every fairytale book in the library - the Green Fairy Book, the Blue, the Yellow. And I watched the wonderful dramatisations of fairytales that were so much part of British children's 60s tv. Well looking back they were probably pretty rubbish, but I loved them. They were usually badly dubbed and produced in what was then refered to as the Eastern Bloc, including Czechoslovakia. I have seen some more recently, here in the Czech Republic where I am told they are rerun regularly. The Czechs love fairytales, it is part of their pysche. Grown adults will talk with seriousness about fairies and other little folk in the forest. When a house was being done up for a friend and a series of unexplained mishaps took place, the answer proffered was to put a small bowl of milk under the threshold for the fairies. And when I am here, I too find myself refering to the fairies. So when I come here, I am going back to my childhood perhaps.

More About Sitting in Cafes - a plea for slow tourism

In my last post I talked about sitting outside a cafe in Cesky Krumlov, I was drinking a latte and eating Czech honey cake, reading a book and watching the world go by. I can do that for hours. Cesky Krumlov is a great place for slow tourism.

And as I sit I watch the other tourists and what are they doing? Rushing about - they are "doing" Cesky Krumlov. Many of the tourists are on day trips from Prague (3 hrs away). They get off the coach run round the castle, have lunch in one of the hundreds of restaurants and catch a few minutes wandering around the shops, before piling back on to the coach exhausted. Meanwhile I might have finished my latte.

Then there is the other type of tourist - the backpacker. You will find dozens of blogs from them with entries eulogising the town, its beer, its atmosphere. Often the blog entry will say stopped for a night in Cesky Krumlov on the way from Vienna to Prague, Krakow to Berlin or whatever. They are "doing" Europe. We see them in England - "doing" Oxford where I work, "doing" Stratford Upon Avon. Good for them, at least they stay longer than the daytrippers. But they haven't done anywhere, not really. It takes time to get to know a place like Cesky Krumlov or a nation as complex as the Czechs. It takes time and lots of sitting in cafes and watching. In fact it takes years and probably it takes living here, but I will come back to that. This blog is perhaps my attempt to communicate what I have learnt and to explore that - indeed to share that.

Weird Weather

Right now Cesky Krumlov is covered with snow. There is nothing weird about that - in this part of the Czech Republic the winter snow usually arrives in December and stays until March, when suddenly in a matter of days spring arrives. A white Christmas is virtually guaranteed as is skiing. If you go towards the Sumava mountains in the south and so rise 200 more metres you will find the winter snow lasts longer (starting at the end of November), which is good because there are some ski resorts there, the nearest to Cesky Krumlov being Ski Real at Kramolin.

No, what is weird is that only a week ago I was getting a suntan - sitting at a cafe table by the river and reading a book. It was that hot, well over 20 degrees. The winter snow failed to turn up for Christmas, made only a cursory appearance for New Year and then came for another too brief spell, before disappearing again. The Czechs all say they have never known a winter like it. I say it is like a British winter, and they say how lucky we are not to get snow. Of course that is not how I feel, I love the Czech winters - the diamonds in the snow, the bright winter sunshine, the crisp air - so much better than the depressing grey of England.

And South Bohemia

One of the reasons we keep coming back here is that we just love exploring the local countryside. Cesky Krumlov is set in some of the Czech Republic's most beautiful countryside. Cesky Krumlov is only a few miles away from the Sumava National Park, the largest national park in the country. The Sumava is the Czech's equivalent of the Lake District - only the Sumava hills and mountains are covered with forests. The area is a brilliant place for walking, mountain biking, canoeing, and other adventure holiday activities. The main lake - Lipno - is man-made and offers fishing and various boating activities. For more about Lipno and Sumava - check out www.ceskykrumlovholiday.co.uk/LAKE_LIPNO_&_SUMAVA_NATIONAL_PARK.html

Cesky Krumlov borders the Blanksy Les Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The magical Klet Mountain forms a backdrop to the town.

An Introduction to Cesky Krumlov

Let us start this blog by a few brief introductions to the town, where we stay - Cesky Krumlov and the area in which it sits. Cesky Krumlov is a UNESCO world heritage site, a few miles south of Ceske Budejovice in Southern Bohemia. It is the most incredible place - in many ways a perfect fairytale town. The town stands on two bends in the River Vltava and is dominated by the second largest castle complex in the Czech Republic, which almost seems to grow out of the rock formation on which it is built.

Welcome & Introduction

For some years now we have been enjoying trips to Southern Bohemia and especially the wonderful medieval/renaissance town of Cesky Krumlov. We now have friends there and return several times a year. We have even created a website - http://www.ceskykrumlovholiday.co.uk/ to introduce the town and area to others. But we also wanted a blog to just share ideas about, impressions of and updates on our Czech adventures. So here it is...