Folk baroque in Holasovice

We have enjoyed this part of the Southern Bohemia countryside so much, driving through lush green country spotted with what look like solid fortified country farmhouses, completely walled in on all sides by barns, the farm house and sheltered gates.  Safe and fertile.  

Then to come across this lovely UNESCO inscribed peasant village, Holasovice, we were completely charmed.  The countryside is green and peaceful decorated with stone remnants of war, history and whimsy.  

It is heartening to see a Protected Landscape sign on the side of our route today.  Ancient beech trees are protected in ancient forests in this Les Blanskey region, as are wild boar, limestone molluscs and deer, to name a few.   

A firm selling sawdust-pressed briquettes have cleverly  built a Czech 'Stonehenge' as a point of interest for potential clients, recycling old stones from their excavations and setting them out as an energy circle for folk interested in astral healing and positive energy absorption which they believe comes through such experiences.  

Holasovice is set around a large green village square, perfect for communal peasant festivities. These pretty rural homes, many with wooden well pumps out front for drawing water, have been built in an architectural style known as ‘folk baroque’ a mid-nineteenth century conception, tho’ many of these were constructed a little later than that.  Renovations have been going on since 1990 and the village has gradually repopulated.  

There is nothing grand about the homes. They are simple rendered abodes with their facades and gables decorated with coloured plaster motifs. What is special, here, is that the entire village is presented in this style. Right down to the tiny chapel on the green.  One of the homes even has a chicken pen in folk baroque.  All so beautifully preserved.  

Holasovice around the water pond

Countryside enroute to Holasovice 

A Stonehenge in Czechia

Protected landscape region

Not all renovations are complete

Pink and white colours prevail in Holasovice

Stunning s'graffito

Slavonice and Telc are two of the most beautiful towns we have seen anywhere. Slavonice is on the recommended UNESCO list; Telc is already inscribed.

Historically, both towns sat on the connection route between Prague and Vienna so were always important, but became really beautiful when they were taken over by the Hradec family, who brought in Italian and Flemish artisans to construct some of the most beautiful Rennaisance patrician’s homes in Czechia, covered in complex and beautifully done s’graffito. 

S’graffito means ‘scratched’, and when you look closely you can see how the artisans' implements have ripped at the surface, creating the beautiful designs. 

Different layers and colours of plaster have been applied to the façade of the burgur homes then motifs of choice have been scratched on to the top layer – biblical, pastoral, geometric, classical – exposing the colour underneath.

There are also glorious gables, valuable frescoes, famous cellar vaults, and, in Telc, man-made lakes that almost surround Zacchariah of Hradac’s beautiful castle at the top of town. All quite lovely. 

Renaissance houses, Slavonice, Czechia

Telc Castle and Jesuit Church

S'graffito in Slavonice

More s'graffito

Main Square, Slavonice

Beautiful Main Square in Telc

Slavonice through an arch

Architectural detail everywhere

More s'graffito in the historic old town of Slavonice

Once a ghetto

Virtually no Jews live now in Trebic in Czechia. 

While their population peaked late in the eighteenth century, as a group the remaining Trebic Jews were virtually wiped out in the Holocaust. Only 10 survived, with all the heart and stuffing knocked out of them. 

Before that, Jews wandered up and down to their cramped little ghetto on the side of the hill in Trebic via steep stone stairwells and narrow switchback alleys with cobbles underfoot. 

Their old Jewish Quarter in Trebic, called Zamosti, is now another of the inscribed UNESCO World Heritage sites we visited and it is the only Jewish site, outside of Jerusalem, to be so listed. Their cemetery is included with it. 

Their lives, even then, were prescribed, restricted. They were allowed to produce spirits and gloves, work in the tannery industry (Thomas Bata actually owned and ran a shoe making business in the town before the war), and trade in second-hand goods. 

They had their own cemetery. Restricted even in death. Traditionally, this was because Jewish cemeteries had to be located out of sight of others; and often, could be found only in places that no one else would use, for example, near the scaffold. 

The Jewish cemetery in Trebic has nearly 11,000 people buried there and over 3,000 gravestones some dating from the 17th century. It is a green and peaceful place high on a hill on a site that developers, these days, would kill to access. 

Today the entire ghetto is being restored given its UNESCO listing. It brings tourists, so money is spent. Tiny little terraced buildings huddled together down the hill are being turned into cafes, bars and shops. In parts, it is bordering on charming – in a way it likely never was in reality. 

It is home, at the moment, to many of the town’s local Romany population – but one would guess, that their time, too, may well be limited in Zamosti. 

Leaving Loket, heading for Trebic

Walkways in old Jewish quarter in Trebic

Monuments in Jewish Cemetery, Trebic

Restored Basilica of St Prokop, Trebic

Once elegant home in Jewish quarter, Trebic

Toxic water and rattlin' bones

When we stopped rambling and eventually started following inscribed (and proposed) UNESCO World Heritage sites in Czechia our travel mood lifted from lacklustre to elated. 

Remarkable some of them. Most tucked away in the tiny, somewhat ethnically more Germanic, region of the south-west corner of Southern Bohemia and in parts of Southern Moravia; tho’ there are others lightly scattered elsewhere. We almost missed the really wonderful ones as we were so nearly ready to drive on, out of the country.

First on our UNESCO list was the spruced up classical old spa town of Karlovy Vary, in Western Bohemia. Mineral waters that fountain up all over town are tapped, and locals pause to drink copious amounts in order to cure any and all ailments. They come prepared, filling their personal mugs, called Bechers, from the permanently pouring water spouts. Bechers have handles that double as a sipping pipe, designed to keep the water from staining their teeth. 

The way the mineral water stains most of the fountains around town it looks almost as toxic as the local liquor, Bercherovka, which is made from pure alcohol mixed with the town water along with spices. It is sold out of street stands all over town. Concocted in a pharmacy, in 1807, by Jan Becher, it has a strong medicinal flavour and, reputedly, only two people in the world know the recipe.  Quite possibly because not too many more really want to. 

Kutná Hora was next on our UNESCO list. Another site hugely popular with the coach trippers from Prague who literally came in droves.

Silver dug up in the Kutna Hora region supplied much of Europe with its currency throughout the 1300s, and with the funds came the construction of cavernous cathedrals, and the presence of the Cistercian monks: a contemplative clever lot.

One of these monks, Abbot Henry, returned from his pilgrimage perk to the Holy Land in 1278 with a small souvenir: a jar full of dirt he’d scraped from the grounds of Golgotha. 

This he sprinkled over the burial grounds at Sedlec, a couple of kilometres downhill from Kutna Hora. Somewhat like the silver, the word soon spread about the holy land and the holy soil, which started a mad rush across all of Europe of folk wishing to be buried in the holy ground at Sedlec. 

So many bodies came to be buried there, layer upon layer, that after the Black Death, a monk was given the delicate job of digging up the old bones to make way for the new. He was half-blind. I wonder if that assisted, or accentuated, his task. 

He stacked all the bones in a nearby crypt where they lay until 1870 when a woodcarver, named Frantisek Rindt, who was in the employ of the Prince of Schwartzenburg at the time, was given an equally ghoulish task: that of decorating the chapel with the bones from the crypt. 

The work took him 10 years. I hope he was paid well. 

Frantisek coated every surface of the chapel with friezes over arches dripping like boney curtains; arranged urns of bones like floral art in alcoves; displayed a coat of arms of the Schwartzenburg family strung with intricate rows of fragile little metatarsal bones and small skull bones; hung a centrepiece chandelier using every bone in the human body; dangled crossed bones with skull-topped figurines light-lit and grotesque ready to dry rattle in a gust of wind; and meticulously mounded every side chapel with pyramids of dry-stacked human bones. Knee bone to kneebone. Thighbone to thighbone.

Mouldy. Mildewy. Macabre. 

Over all of it, high on top of the Ossuary spire, a skull and crossbones symbolically marks this spot, as it did in ancient burial places, as a place of death.

Beautiful spa town, Karlovy Vary

Mineral spa water fountain

Bone chandelier in ossuary

Bones made into an emblem

Bechers for drinking the mineral water

Mill Colonnade, Karlovy Vary 

Canal in Karlovy Vary 

Castle Loket, 12c Gothic, Locket

Neat woodpile for a Czechia winter

Bones, bones and more bones

Traditional wafer eaten in Karlovy Vary

No Maccas, no!

We drove back into the Czech Republic after our trip to Bratislava and found a patch of the Czechia countryside that we’d happily come back to.  Much of the south-west, in truth, but more on that shortly.

Firstly, another little insight into the way we travel. We like to stop for a morning coffee, around 10am if we’re up and away by then.  And we follow the theory that if we are stopping for coffee we should stop at the best place that offers coffee.  Anywhere in the world.  In Hong Kong that’s The Peninsula.  In Singapore it’s Raffles.  It is never McDonald's: No Macca’s, no!  And so it goes. That way you likely get not only great coffee, but access to some of the best loo facilities in the land.  It is, quite simply, good value. 

This day we were late and  hanging out for our caffeine hit, so we stopped in a little place whose name we barely caught we were so desperate.  We didn’t care. We just needed coffee: that was our focus. We now know the place to be Dolni Kounice.

Pete, for some reason, was not happy with the length of the park for the motorhome in front of what I thought was the best place in town, so out he backed and went further down the street, parking in front of another place: demure in its exterior. As it was open and close we went in. Smart casual, I thought, was a first impression.  Tho’ smarter than any place in CZ we had yet found, and far less casual as it turned out. 

I ordered my usual espresso and toddled off to check out the Damy facilities.  Which were stylish in charcoal, black and white minimalist marble with a massive black and white tiled mural of Gorbachev (why Gorbachev?) in the anteroom, as well as stunning black and white images of naked men over the washroom sinks.  

Pete, then, had to check out the Panove to see if there were any naked women on the walls, but no such happenstance. So, we drank our divine coffee, marvelled at the loos and salivated over the framed and exquisitely bound menus we hunted down--who has ever seen pork knuckle on a menu ever, uh?  Here it was: trendy.

Sadly, it was too early to eat, we’d not long had breakfast, and we weren’t able yet to focus on lunch. We should have. I have already lived to regret not staying right at that very table until my tummy fair rumbled, because the chef was acclaimed, each item on the menu looked amazing (clients drove from Brno and Prague just to eat there) and the prices were excellent.

After coffee a charming young waiter, so proud of his workplace, invited the three of us to tour ‘something special’ downstairs, which required collecting a unique set of keys, and following him deep into the dungeons.  Fascinated. There we saw what happens when a 600 year old tile brick structure that has been left to die is renovated to the highest craftsmen standards.

He showed us a small but beautifully fitted-out wine tasting room, with the hotel’s cellar built into the cavities in the walls, minimalist apart from extravagant wrought iron security screens protecting the wines, below an original vaulted ceiling so beautifully re-pointed it looked brand new.  Breathing with vents and moisture protection barriers, subtly hidden.

Beyond that, and beyond a black wrought iron gate that looked like a deadly medieval portcullis over an archway, were secret tunnels used throughout history in times of trouble, burrowing far -- even to Brno. Flooded now as a security element, so that the precious wine cellar could not be tampered with.

The black liquid tunnel was straight out of a scene from a dark Venetian night.  I could imagine a gondola being poled slickly through those dark oily waters; but was assured access to the cellars was impossible. Televised security monitored every access point.  One later has to wonder at the need for this level of all security.

On into the next vaulted cellar, where, behind black iron gates, individually locked and numbered, were a hundred private wine cellars with the patron’s names displayed in brass -- their bottled wines laid down immaculately, stored for their private use.

These were wines brought in by the patrons to be cellared--some, even, from their own vineyards.  So, on nights when they stayed as guests, they simply ordered up their own wine selection from their very own cellar out of this tiny vaulted room protected by a tunnel filled with water. With no corkage charged. Understandable that, given the annual premium paid to use a cellar there. All immaculately  monitored and stored at a perfect 12° C and 70% humidity.

With so much of Czechia still in rubble and decay it is oddly mind-splitting to accidently come across something like this in such an unprepossessing little town. But the sheer beauty of this place made us wonder how many more beautiful, or even potentially beautiful, vaulted basements there may be tucked away behind the many shabby facades that are presented all over the country.

Beautiful country in the south and west of Czech

Elegant secure private wine cellars for wealthy patrons

Prostitutes and potholes

These are some of the images of the Czech Republic, particularly around the border towns: 

Prostitutes. Mostly in singles, but occasionally in doubles, prostitutes flaunt their wares from even the smallest and most remote layouts on routes entering Czech Republic from the north, west and south. Soliciting in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but diesel dust and forbidding forests. So alone, so unprotected. What are their pimps thinking? 

Potholes. On the highways destroy-your-truck potholes are occasionally splash-painted angry red as if someone has been told to mark the worst of them, and, perhaps, one day, fill one or two. On the byways, though, the potholes are left unpainted and long unattended. Decades of potholes pit hundreds of kilometers of dead and dying roads from west to east of the country. Not even worth filling now as the roads are way past reclaiming, and, surely, it would be cheaper to build new ones. 

Diversions. Many routes are very frequently completely closed. Is this because they are too degraded by potholes to be negotiated? Our sat nav often struggles to find alternatives if a detour route is not displayed, and our first and only choice out of a road block is often an unsurfaced two-wheel rut that makes the Innamincka to Birdsville stretch look like a super highway. 

Asian Wayside Stores. Like the prostitutes, bored Asian stallholders have been set up semi-permanently in the middle of nowhere, selling acres of cheap and tacky tourist tat, in places where it is often barely possible even to park. Even if drivers could find a park who would ever want to buy any of this stuff? 

Brothels. Beside Casinos. Beside Kinderworld playparks. Beside family restaurants. Operating ‘non stop’.

Shocking driving. On roads so narrow that a truck and a camper barely pass each other without locking side windows seedy males and sullen females drive at speed, often tailgating with their front ends edging way over the centre line right into the space of oncoming traffic trying to get the jump on the vehicle in front, then fishtailing wildly around unmarked corners. Bad drivers on bad roads. 

Lack of infrastructure work going on. In Western Europe vast sums of EU money are being spent on dramatically noticeable road, bridge, and housing development work. Such is not yet the case in the Czech Republic. Small pockets of work are evident, but these seem to deal in the main with local essential services, such as fixing water pipes. I wonder where all the brothel money goes? 

Supermarket proliferation. Practically every major food chain from Western Europe seems to have flooded the republic attempting to corner the Czech supermarket spending. Even Tesco. Competitors have set up shop sites at different exits on the same roundabouts. All attempting to be bigger and better than their competitors. Then along comes Globus who throws down an entire city block of a supermarket-cum-department store that requires a cut lunch to walk the length of the wall that carries just the yoghurt choices on offer. So many products must all be outdated before they can even be correctly shelved. Crazy planning. Whoever makes these decisions?

Dilapidation and a sense of depression. There is a sense that something has sucked the life, colour, and energy out of much of the place. Countrywide there are few towns or villages that bother with even the thinnest coating of rendering or token splash of paint that occurs in some of the more noted tourist haunts. You don’t realise until you drive out of the country just a few short kilometers into Austria, how, in similar types of socio-economic communities, things like a patch of yellow housepaint, a red geranium in a window box, a laid down footpath for a child to walk safely on, a neatly planted field, a tidy woodpile so simply but so surely lifts one’s spirits. Almost to gaiety, after all that grinding grey grimness. 

Where have all the campers gone? Mainly it has been just us, and, occasionally, one or two motorhomers from Holland setting up in any of the more remote campsites in Czechia; tho’ in touristy places like Karlovy Vary or Kutna Hora, we inevitably come across the usual waves of busloads of Eastern European tourists being hurriedly herded around the sites then shuffled off into terribly ordinary-looking hotels. Surely it is not just the less than stellar camping facilities keeping campers away? Last night we were the only campers in the noted town of Trebic. Which was very disconcerting. 

This is a sad and strange profile that parts of the Czech Republic present to its foreign tourists.

Cheap border markets 

Beautiful dusty collection of prams

Depressed and dilapidated 

 

 

 

Seedy side of Bratislava

We skipped out of Czechia into Slovakia for a couple of days to visit Bratislava. As we drove into the Bratislava it was all graffiti, sex shops and so littered with billboards it made your eyes bleed; along with concrete seediness, and endless casinos. Thank god for the historic centre, which, though tiny, is completely pedestrianised and has a completely relaxed feel to it. A very pleasant place to spend time: which almost makes the drive into the country worthwhile. With little effort you can even imagine a precocious six year old Mozart and a nine year old List performing here in the lovely old theatres.

Downtown, too, is full of whimsical statues that parody modern culture -- like Rubberneck, reputed to emulate a lazy Communist 'worker' with his body parts way out of an underground sewerage drain resting his chin on his hands, as he waits for tourists to take his photo; or Paparazzi, looking inquisitively around the corner of a trendy café, camera in hand, searching for a star, yet he is the star. 

Old castles overlook the Danube. There is a tidied up town hall and numerous spired cathedrals within easy reach of the city centre, as are modern meeting places like universities, cafes and restaurants.

Where we are staying, tho’, is likely to be the most memorable bit of Bratislava, unfortunately. We’re in a campground, which, if you were rating in the negative, this one would hit the continuum as the worst there ever was. Virtually nothing works. Everything looks tattered and suspect. The laundry has been vandalized and never replaced, and there are no other laundramats in all of Bratislava. Tough cheese. Showers fair flood the other amenities, and the drains don’t work properly. About one in twenty electrical hookups function, and the reception folk do not care. The place is filled with seedy hangers-on, who occupy most of the very dirty and very dilapidated outbuildings, giving the impression of doing little or nothing at all.

Overlooking the site a group of destitute looking prostitutes hang out of upper floor balconies in appalling conditions in what looks like decrepit hotel rooms. They are operating from the hotel just over the fence where I go to find decent wifi reception. The campground is part of the same complex, because anywhere it is painted, which is not a lot, it is the same colour.

Camp sites in central Europe have varied from basic to primitive. If this one was condemned tomorrow it would be too late. Bratislava really deserves better.

Rubberneck

Paparazzi

National Theatre, Bratislava

Billboards proliferate entering and leaving Bratislava

St Michael's Gate, ancient northern entrance to the city

Stylish courtyard in downtown Bratislava

UFO Observation Deck with a view of the city