Grandmother's Valley

"It was long, long ago, when last I gazed on that dear face, kissed those pale, wrinkled cheeks, and tried to fathom the depths of those blue eyes, in which were hidden so much goodness and love."

The author of this simple lament for her deceased grandmother was one of Czech literature's most highly regarded figures, Božena Němcová. Her image graces the five hundred crown banknote, and the cool, green valley of the Úpa river around the Ratibořice chateau is called Grandmother's valley after her most beloved character. Grandmother is an iconic story in Romantic Czech literature and if you think of the regard for stories like Huckleberry Finn or the Adventures of Robin Hood you’ll have an idea of the tale's place in the national consciousness.

For anyone who has read Grandmother and wants to find out more, the gentle, leafy stretch of the Úpa river valley from Havlovice to Česká Skalice is a good place to start. Božena's father worked as a stablehand at the Ratibořice chateau for most of her childhood and it along with the other prominent buildings of the valley provide the setting for her stories.

The Ratibořice chateau sits on the side of a low hill surrounded by dense gardens. As you crossed the Úpa River and follow the road across its open floodplain, the trees of the forest provide an almost theatrical backdrop. As you draw close to the chateau around the gentle right hand bend, the huge carpark and the jumble of souvenir and refreshment stands will make immediately clear just how popular this place is among individuals and school groups.

A little further along the same road is the old water mill. The narrow channel that runs alongside still turns the huge wooden waterwheels, but the roguish miller and his family are long gone. Further up the valley again near a weir is the wide flat plain called bělidlo, which come from the word běla or bíla meaning white. Usually translated into English as the Bleachery, it was the place that the peasants of the valley gathered to wash their linen and clothes and spread them out on the even grass to dry in the sunshine. The wooden cottage there was Božena's childhood home.

When you've explored the chateau, the mill and the cottage at the old bleachery, there's also a very pretty 3km path along which young Božena walked from Ratibořice to attend school in Česká Skalice. The path is marked with signs describing the history but they’re only in Czech. The Božena Němcová museum in Česká Skalice's old wooden schoolhouse has translations for the exhibits.

Even if you won't make it to Grandmothers valley, take a look at Božena's portrait on the five hundred crown banknote and keep an eye out for statues of her or streets named in her honour. She's an important and respected figure in modern Czech history and if you're spending much time in the Czech Republic it's good to be aware of at least a couple of those.

Trying to like Ústí

Among the rounded hills of the North Bohemian highlands about 80km north of Prague, the city of Ústí nad Labem lies in the valley of the mighty Labe River where the smaller river Bílina joins it on the long journey towards the North Sea.

It may sound like a lovely setting for a city, but Ústí has a reputation as being not a very nice place to visit. And as you approach, it’s easy to see why. No matter from the north or south or by train from the west along the Bílina valley, huge industrial and manufacturing zones litter the skyline, hillsides and riverbanks with smoke stacks, silos, conveyor belts and docking cranes.

Poor Ústí can’t even rely on the saving grace of many riverside cities, their bridges, for a bit of architectural interest or romance. The southernmost of Ústí’s three river crossings is a flat Meccano-like span and the middle bridge with the arched top is little better. Despite its brutal modern design, the northernmost bridge is the most striking of the three. Two high sharp-edged pillars of reinforced concrete rise asymmetrically from the river’s eastern bank and from those, steel cables as thick as a man’s leg fan out to evenly spaced points across the span like the web of a monstrous mechanical spider or one of those string and pin wall hangings your crafty aunt used to make back in the 1970’s.

The old centre of Ústí roughly keeps the original layout of the customs settlement that grew beside the river between the 10th and 13th centuries, but apart from the two churches, there’s little remaining of historic architectural interest. On the main square alone there are five modern buildings of six stories or more. Of them the only one that really displays any architectural grace is the Česká Spořitelna building with its considered proportions and detailed relief work around the entrances.

There’s also an interesting mosaic column, presumably from the communist era, that scales the height of the bronze-windowed Magistrát Města building, but when I visited in October 2008 it appeared soon to disappear behind whatever the cranes and concrete trucks were constructing behind the barricades in that corner of the square.

The worst of the buildings is the 13 storey bright blue Interhotel Bohemia. As if being 13 floors high and bright but grimy blue weren’t enough, it also has large illuminated signs proclaiming Casino Non-stop and a flashing and beeping electronic billboard that blasts out across the main part of the square.

With so many Czech cities and towns talking such good care of their historic centres, how did Ústí manage to become such an eyesore? Grim European cities tend to fall into one of two categories; industrial or war-damaged. Ústí falls into both.

When the industrial revolution began to replace traditional manual labour with machines and factories in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ústí found itself with all the prerequisites for transformation into an industrial and manufacturing centre; The surrounding hills are laced with rich deposits of brown coal which was a convenient source of energy and the wide and easily navigable river Labe at its feet provided Ústí with an efficient means of transport.

Two large ports were built on the left bank of the Labe, a shipbuilding factory soon followed and not only did Ústí mine and ship coal, coal powered factories were built nearby to manufacture goods close to the source of their energy.

Today the Setuza industrial area is the backdrop for any view across the river from the centre of Ústí and slightly west of the centre along the valley of the Bílina River, is another industrial area the size of a small city. The main resident here is Spolchemie a.s. They manufacture chemicals, glues and other substances for use in the building, plastics and pharmaceutical industries.

On top of 100 gloomy years of coal mining and heavy industry, Ústí suffered more than most Czech cities during the Nazi occupation from 1938-45. In the mid 1930’s there had been a sizable Jewish community in Ústí nad Labem including prominent business families the Petscheks and the Weinmanns. Both families managed to emigrate before Ústí was, along with the rest of the Sudetenland, fell into Mr Hitler’s control in October 1938. The Petschek villa was occupied by the Gestapo then the Communist Party and is now an art school.

Ústí’s Jewish quarter just west of the city centre was completely destroyed during the war and the land is now part of the Spolchemie industrial zone. No trace remains of The Ústí synagogue, which was burnt to the ground at the end of 1938 and the former hillside Jewish cemetery is now the city park. The headstones that couldn’t be sold or otherwise used were laid flat and covered with earth and there they remain, the Cemetery remembered only by a monument in the form of a huge stone Star of David half buried in the soil at the lowest corner of the park.

The worst blows to Ústí came towards the end of WWII. A section of the Berlin to Prague Railway had been laid through in the 1870’s and with its high-capacity ports Ústí was one of the busiest and most important transport hubs in central Europe. With the German Army transporting huge numbers of troops through Ústí and making use of the extensive manufacturing hardware to produce arms it was an obvious target for Allied bombing raids.

The allies first bombed Ústí in December 1944, but the most destructive raids were in April the following year. In two raids, the 8th squadron of the American air force destroying almost a quarter of the city’s buildings. Both historic churches were damaged and at least 512 people lost their lives. The majority of the German troops managed to survive the bombing in air raid shelters; most of the known victims were local residents, German civilians retreating before the approaching eastern front, or prisoners of war including French, Czech and Slovakian resistance fighters and captive soldiers of the soviet red army.

Especially tragic was that for those 512 lives and 2137 buildings destroyed, the Allied forces gained almost nothing. The Wehrmacht was able to repair the railway junction to resume full transport of troops and supplies to the eastern front through Ústí within a matter of hours, and the manufacture of weapons and ammunition was unaffected.

Tragically the bombing raids weren’t the only unnecessary mass loss of innocent lives in Ústí that year. Czechoslovakia’s ethnic German minority was Hitler’s main excuse for his invasion, and many of those ‘liberated’ Sudeten Germans enthusiastically became enthusiastic Nazi supporters and collaborators.

Immediately following the war, the understandably anti-German feeling in Czech society, and the gradual revelation of the full scale of the crimes of the holocaust made it seem impossible that the two nationalities could ever again live peacefully side by side in a single society. The transfer of ethnic Germans to Germany and Austria seemed the only conceivable solution and was approved by the Allied powers at the Potsdam conference in August 1945.

Before the officially approved population transfer began though were a series of events collectively known as the wild expulsion. Groups of armed Czechs took the law into their own hands and violently forced their German neighbours from their homes, towns and the country. The worst incidents were the Brno death march and the massacres at Postoloprty, Švédská Šance (near Přerov) and Ústí nad Labem.

On the afternoon of 31 June 1945 a group of ethnic Germans finished work at the Setuza factory (from Severočeské Tukové Závody-the elegantly named North Bohemian Fat Works) in Ústí nad Labem, and set out to walk home across the middle of Ústí’s three bridges. They met a group of Czechs, words were exchanged and it led to a violent struggle in which as many as 100 of the Germans were thrown from the bridge and lost their lives in the waters of the Labe River below. The custodian of the Ústí museum who first told me the story said that even children and babies in prams were thrown to their deaths.

The Ústí massacre is not a very well known event and seems to have been so thoroughly covered up during the communist era that many Czechs have never heard of it. If you’re ever in Ústí though, take a walk across the bridge on the downstream footpath and out near the middle you'll find a small plaque with the words “In memory of the victims of the violence on 31.7.1945”.

As you lean over the railing and think about the distance to the water’s surface, spare a moment to be grateful that the human race has matured and progressed to the point that mob violence based on a victim’s ethnicity couldn't...uh, never mind.

A history book in your wallet

Czech history may seem obtuse to travellers when they first arrive from abroad, but a shortcut to understanding it may be as close as your hip pocket. The beautifully designed series of Czech banknotes depict prominent figures from the country's history in a neat progression from the 12th to 20th centuries.

20Kč Přemysl Otakar I (1166-1230)
The old 20Kč notes have largely been replaced by coins now, which is a pity because it's one of the nicest designs. The diplomatic skills of Přemysl Otakar I brought about an era of relative peace within the volatile ruling classes of the Czech lands. Under his reign, the Bohemian crown became recognised as hereditary by the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor and other European powers and 20Kč note therefore represents the beginnings of the Bohemian kingdom as a stable political entity. Přemysl Otakar I is buried in Prague's St Vitus' cathedral.

50Kč Saint Agnes of Bohemia (1211-1282)
As youngest daughter of Přemysl Otakar I, Agnes was born into a life of wealth, comfort and influence. After several arranged and broken engagements, one of which led to a war, (English King Henry III and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II were among her suitors) Agnes retreated from aristocratic life, took vows of poverty and chastity and spent her adult life performing religious works. The convent she founded on the right bank of the Vltava river is one of Bohemia's earliest Gothic buildings and the rear of the banknote shows a view towards the ribs and arches of its ceiling. Her canonization by Pope John Paul II preceded by five days the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

100Kč King Charles IV (1316-1378)
Charles IV is considered by many to have been the greatest King of Bohemian history. Charles's mother was Saint Agnes' niece Eliška Přemyslovna and his father was King John of Luxembourg. The benefits and perspective of Charles' education at the French court combined with his deep faith and affection for Bohemia to bring a golden age of development to Prague. Rather than moving to take up his post when crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Charles made the empire come to him and declared Prague the new capital. Surviving monuments of the time include the Přemyslid tomb in St Vitus' cathedral, the celebrated Charles' Bridge and Karlštejn castle. Elements of Gothic architecture decorate both sides of the 100Kč banknote.

200Kč Jan Amoš Komenský (1592-1670)
Born in on near Uherský Brod in 1592, Jan Amoš Komenský attended the Latin school in Přerov and became a pastor as central Europe lurched towards the Thirty Year's War. During his studies Komenský adopted protestant ideals and was forced into exile by the persecution that followed Catholic victory in 1620. Komenský's writings on universal practical education brought widespread renown and he was invited to work in the great countries of Europe including Hungary, Sweden, England and the Netherlands. He was also the last bishop of the exiled Unity of Brethren which fragmented and reformed as the Moravian Church, popular in parts of the United States. Komenský is better known abroad under his Latin name Comenius and is widely considered to be the father of modern education. He's buried in Naarden in the Netherlands.

500Kč Božena Němcová (1820-1862)
The period from the thirty years war to the mid-19th century was a dark time in Czech history. Ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty from Vienna, Czech language and culture were at best neglected, at worst actively suppressed. The revolutionary events of 1848 encouraged the Hapsburg court to flee Vienna for Olomouc, where Emperor Ferdinand was persuaded to abdicate in favour of his nephew, the liberal and far-sighted Franz Joseph. The resulting easing of restrictions on ethnic minorities within the empire brought about a period of freedom that Czechs know as the National Revival. Božena Němcová became one of the leading writers of the period and is most closely associated with the 'Grandmother's valley' area around Ratibořice and České Skalice in North-East Bohemia, where her best known semi-autobiographical works are set.

1000Kč František Palacký (1798-1876)
Also active at the time of the Czech National Revival after 300 years of Austrian Imperial rule, Frantisek Palacký was a historian and politician whose 5-volumed 'History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia' offered modern Czechs the first account of their own history from their own perspective in their own language. Alongside Charles IV and Masaryk, Palacký is considered one of the fathers of the Czech Nation (Otec narodů) and many city squares, boulevards and even the country's second university are named in his honour. He was born and grew up in Hodslavice in North Moravia and is buried at Lobkovice which is now part of Neratovice near Mělník.

2000Kč Emmy Destinn (1878-1930)
Emmy Destinn was a Prague-born opera singer who earned international fame for her roles in Strauss, Puccini and Wagner operas. She appeared frequently opposite Enrico Caruso in the opera houses of New York, London and Berlin, but her career declined with the coming of WWI. She was publicly linked with the patriotic Czech resistance and confined to the chateau at Stráž nad Nežarkou in South Bohemia until the war ended. The banknote design suggests the art nouveau movement popular during Emmy Destinn's life and is my favourite of the series.

5000Kč Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937)
Most visitors to the Czech Republic won't see many 5000Kč notes featuring TGM in daily circulation, but that's OK because in every Czech town or city there's at least one statue or a square, avenue, embankment, college or university named in his memory. Masaryk served in the Austrian Parliament as a member of the Young Czech Party but when WWI broke out he went into exile and began agitating for an independent Czech and Slovak state. When the Austrian Empire fell, the Allies recognized Masaryk as leader of a caretaker government. In the first elections he was voted President of Czechoslovakia and served until 1935. Born in Hodonín on the border of Moravia and Slovakia, Masaryk passed away at the age of 87 and rests now in the grounds of the presidential chateau at Lány in Central Bohemia.

The 20Kč note is rare and there's now a 50Kč coin so perhaps Agnes' days are numbered too. The rest of the gang seem safe until at least 2014, which is the earliest realistic date for the adoption of the common European currency.

Related posts: When Czech Republic adopts the Euro...

Kuks and Braun's bethlehem

Crumbling stone staircases lead nowhere. Anger, lechery, cunning and the angel of grievous death guard the terrace. Desire, despair and defamation loom over the hospital hedges while headless saints and deformed hermits collect skulls in the thickly forested hills.

Kuks is an otherwise typical riverside village made remarkable by the gloomy architectural remnants of its baroque heyday. Around the turn of the 18th century, healing mineral springs were discovered at Kuks, which was part of an estate belonging to east Bohemia's richest aristocrat, Franz Antonin Sporck. On the left bank of the River Labe, the ambitious Sporck set about building a magnificent chateau and spa complex that became one of the most elegant in Europe.

Kuks' shortlived glory days ended in 1740, when a massive flood washed away the spa pavilions, glasshouses, bridges, racetrack and wooden theatre and destroyed the mineral water springs that were the reason for the settlement in the first place.

Sporck had passed away in 1738 and after the flood his descendants abandoned Kuks and relocated to Lysa nad Labem. The remains of the Kuks spa and chateau fell into disrepair and were eventually demolished in 1901, remembered only by a wide staircase flanked by reclining water-gods and the burbling cascades from their urns.

On the opposite and higher right bank of the river, Sporck's baroque hospital complex and Church of the Holy Trinity survived the floods, and are open to the public today. The church and west wing of the hospital make up one guided tour and the pharmaceutical museum in the east wing is a second.

I only had time and energy enough for one and chose the pharmacy museum. The ticket seller made a point of looking surprised, double checked and when I persisted, told me I was ‘an exception’. Once again the only person on the tour. I waited fifteen minutes before the guide appeared from somewhere deep within the complex and leaned over the balcony to find out who it was who wanted to see the pharmacies. “Me”. “Well come on then”.

The Charles University of Hradec Králové has a faculty in the building and my guide was one of the students. Her hair and painted eyebrows were darker than the middle ages and she wore velvet as if she'd just stepped away from Count Sporck's dinner table. An intriguing change from the archivally mousy guides who usually work in these places, but after a languid ten minutes of incessantly beaming smiles and drawling commentary that would make a sleeping cat sound energetic, I was wondering how many pharmacy students found their way into the discipline through a previous recreational interest.

In any case, I had no regrets about my choice of tours; the rooms displaying techniques, instruments and products from the history of pharmacy were fascinating and the preserved baroque pharmacy itself is a colourful wonder chamber of vials and vessels and elaborately carved cabinets. Photography is supposedly prohibited inside the museum, but if you ask nicely and your guide is as laid back as mine, you might be able to sneak a discreet snap or two.

There’s also plenty of opportunity for photography around the outside of the hospital and church. At the rear is an extensive formal garden of hedges, fountains and statues including some that came from the old racecourse. But at the front of the complex are the statues for which Kuks is most famous.

On the terrace in front of the church are religious statues including the eight blessings and the angels of glorious and painful death. Either side of the terrace and parallel with the front of the hospital are two dozen life-size figures - the twelve virtues and the twelve vices. The statues of the twelve vices are extraordinarily evocative and it’s a challenge to work out the identity of each statue before resorting to the information board near the ticket office.

My favourite vices were Gluttony, a heavyset lady holding a wild boar by the scruff of its neck while daintily balancing a bowl of exotic fruits in the other hand; and Laziness, who’d stopped to take a rest by leaning on a convenient cow. I felt quite sorry for Despair, an attractive girl compelled to drive a dagger into her baroquely curvaceous breast, but couldn't blame her having seen the company she’d been keeping.

On the other side of the churchfront terrace the garden wall is topped by the twelve virtues of Faith, Hope, Love, Wisdom, Bravery, Chastity, Diligence, Generosity, Sincerity, Justice and Temperance. Much more respectable than the vices but not nearly as much fun at a party.

Except for one, the virtues and vices are all the work of famous sculptor Mathias Bernard Braun. After learning his craft in Salzburg, travelling in the Italy of Michelangelo and Bernini, Braun opened a workshop in Prague and set about expanding the boundaries of Bohemian sculpture.

Amongst other things Braun and his team completed the 1710 statue of St Luitgard for the Charles Bridge in Prague. Thanks in particular to that sculpture, Braun became a sought after craftsman and Count Sporck became one of his most enthusiastic patrons. Between 1718 and 1732 Braun and his assistants completed not only the work at Kuks, but also a group of statues in the nearby forest which has come to be known as Braun’s Bethlehem.

Braun’s Bethlehem would be spookier than any of the gloomy statues at Kuks if you were to stumble across it by chance. On a high ridge in a patch of thick forest, the collection of statues were carved from the natural rocky outcrops and realistically depicted startled hermits, biblical stories and a generous scattering of human skulls.

Much of the surreal air about the Bethlehem statues comes from the damage they've suffered. The headless figures have no doubt been touched by thieves, but the natural world has also played its part in deforming and decaying the otherwise lifelike figures. Centuries of wind, rain, ice and sun have worked hard to turn the statues back into rocks and relentless mosses and lichens have afflicted the hermits and holy men with the most severe cases of gangrene imaginable. In the 1920’s the forest was devastated by a plague of Nun moths and the statues were hammered by falling branches.

Restoration work was carried out several times during the twentieth century, but it’s a massive undertaking in a difficult environment and in the year 2000 Braun’s Bethlehem was added to the International Monuments Fund directory of the World’s 100 Most Endangered Monuments.

The church and hospital at Kuks are open from April through October each year, but if you're curious to see Braun’s Bethlehem it might be good to do it soon as possible.

Scaling Sněžka

Peaking at 1602 metres above sea level, Sněžka is the highest mountain in the Czech Republic. The name is a derivative of the old German 'Schneekoppe', which means something like 'snowy peak' or 'snowy head'. Shaped roughly like a three-sided pyramid, Sněžka's north face slopes down into Poland, the south-east towards the rolling hills outside Trutnov and the west into the valley of the River Úpa.

The nearest town is Pec pod Sněžkou and that’s where I based myself for the hike to the top. Actually, I stayed a little outside town, about halfway between Pec and nearby Velka Úpa. It wouldn't be quite truthful to call Pec a resort town, but most of the businesses there are involved in tourism in some way. There are ski schools, adventure equipment stores, restaurants, pubs, hotels, and at least a dozen pensions.

Pec is the Czech word for furnace and gives a clue to the reason for the first settlement in such a high and remote part of the Krkonoše mountains. In the early 16th century German colonists settled in the mountains to mine iron, copper and arsenic and after 1566 they were joined by woodcutters felling timber to be floated downstream to the silver mines at Kutná Hora. Pec pod Sněžkou's importance as a mining colony gradually faded but the furnace for arsenic (nicknamed the poison furnace) functioned until serfdom was abolished in the mid-19th century, and small scale mining continued as late as 1959.

There’s not much left of historic Pec but the most useful facilities for travellers are close to the intersection of the roads that run along the base of the river valleys. The supermarket, the best pub in town and the information office that deals with accommodation are all within a few metres of the intersection. Finding accommodation shouldn’t be too difficult; almost every second building is a pension.

The tourist information office in town helped me arrange a room at the cottage Eliška. For less than the price of a typical hostel dorm bed, I had my own room with a writing table and access to a balcony, garden and a kitchen equipped even with recycling bins. The owner told me that most of the people who visit Pec are Czech, Polish or German, and those three nationalities in roughly equal numbers. The busiest season is winter, but the summer holidays are not far behind.

To get to the top of Sněžka from Pec, you can either walk or take the cable car. The cable car started operation in 1949 and covers the 700m of altitude between Pec (864m above sea level) and Sněžka in two stages of about two kilometres each. The base station is along the valley of the Úpa at the edge of town and operates from 8am to 7pm in the summer months. The fare is 180Kč for adults, with discounts for children, pensioners and groups of more than 20 people.

To walk to Sněžka from Pec, you can choose either the yellow marked trail that leads up from the edge of town near the cable car, or the green trail that leaves from behind the pizzeria about 200m from the big intersection. It doesn’t matter too much which one you choose, because they join together less than ten minutes into the forest. I went up on the yellow and came down on the green.

The first part of the trail is steep and leads out of the river valley through thick pine forest up to the ridge that runs south from the peak. The undergrowth is of moss and ferns, but as you approach the ridge they give way to grasses and the trees thin to a clearing with wide sky and a view of Sněžka’s barren peak.

There are two cabins up here and they offer accommodation and have restaurants open to the public. If the weather is good, it’s hard to resist joining the other hikers sitting at the outdoor benches and admiring the view, and if the weather’s bad, I’m sure it would be hard to resist zipping inside for a warm drink and a sit around the open fire.

From the cabins the hiking trail flattens out and leads past the cable car relay station. The cable car seems to be used mostly by people who are too old to climb the mountain without endangering their health. Or groups of school kids who couldn’t climb the mountain without endangering the mental health of their teachers. Towards the treeline, the trees get smaller and smaller and there are glimpses of cable car passengers swinging through their tops like the shopping bags of an invisible giant.

When the trees come to an end, so does the gently sloping trail along the ridge. This is the base of Sněžka's bald head and the hiking trail becomes a steep staircase covered in loose rock. I found this the most difficult part of the hike but there are a handful of benches on which to catch a breath and the peak is in sight, so it's too late to give up no matter what your legs and lungs might tell you.

Approaching the peak there's a view over the other side down into Poland and there will no doubt be hikers heading up that way too. There are a couple of reasonably large towns down in the valley on the Polish side, and Sněžka suddenly doesn’t seem nearly as remote as it looks from the Czech side of the border.

The knee-high concrete markers with a P on one side and a C on the other mark the international border that runs precisely across the peak of Sněžka. Right at the top there a flattish area about twice the size of a tennis court, with three or four buildings on it. The square ones are on the Czech side of the border and the round ones are Polish.

The small, round, wooden building is the Chapel of St. Lawrence. The large one that looks like a comic-book space station or a clump of huge, metallic mushrooms is a restaurant, souvenir store and weather station. When I visited Sněžka there were two buildings on the Czech side of the peak (not counting the cable car terminal which is a few minutes' walk downhill) but there's now only one.

The small wooden hut that functioned as a post office and cafe was up for sale very cheaply on the condition that the purchaser remove it. Its role as a post office and meteorological station has been taken over by a modern, louvre-clad building with a raised observation deck that was getting its finishing details in June of 2008.

Public transport connections to Pec
Accommodation in Pec

Liberec: The town in the tinman's hat

I've had a soft spot for the North Bohemian city of Liberec since the first time I visited back in the autumn of 2001. It has around 100,000 inhabitants and all the cafes, bars, bookshops and urban life you'd expect from a city of the size. Liberec is also surrounded by impressive open natural areas; the Bohemian Paradise, the Krkonoše national park and the Jizera mountains.

A notable characteristic of Liberec is the energetic mix of old and new architecture. Cobbled streets and historic churches pepper the city centre, while the highlights of the suburbs and outskirts are the streets of 19th/early 20th Century villas, the glass and steel reconciliation library and the futuristic hotel and television tower on the peak of nearby Jested.

The Ještěd tower is probably the most admired 20th century structure in the Czech lands. Built in the late 60's and early 70's to a design by architect Karel Hubáček, the swooping circular tower takes the shape of its hilltop and curves it up to a 94 metre high needlepoint. Something like a giant Tin-man's hat on a huge earthen head. Inside is a restaurant and cafe with panoramic views in every direction and a stylishly unique hotel with luxury and budget rooms.

The other really prominent 20th century building in Liberec is the reconciliation library. Two blocks from the main central square, it stands on the site of the synagogue that was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. As the largest and wealthiest city in the Sudetenland, Liberec was a flashpoint for interwar tensions between Germans and Czechs. During the Nazi occupation and under its German name Reichenburg, Liberec became the administrative centre of the Sudetenland and local political leader Konrad Henlein become governor of the entire province.

The construction of the library started in 1995 and was a joint project between the Czech and German authorities aimed at healing some of the lingering tension between the two nationalities. The former synagogue is commemorated by a triangular room on the ground floor and the soaring library interior houses over a million books across six floors and is well used by locals and university students both Czech and from abroad. The little cafe just inside the entrance is not bad either.

Across from the library is David Černý's sculptural bus stop and around the corner from there the main square is dominated by the town hall, which is a remarkable and imposing neo-renaissance palace built around 1890 to a design by Viennese architect Franz Neumann.

In addition to the council chambers, the town hall hosts the most important of events in Liberec. Weddings, state visits and other ceremonies take place there and historic figures including Emperor Franz Josef, Václav Havel, and Hitler's henchman Konrad Henlein have all chosen the balcony overlooking the square as the best place to address the public at crucial moments. The impressive interiors are open to visitors on regular guided tours, but I managed to get into the town hall only on my third visit to Liberec, and even then not to the balcony which was closed for university graduation ceremonies.

Being close to the Polish border, Liberec was one of the first places invaded by Warsaw Pact troops in the August 1968 crushing of the so-called 'Prague Spring'. Václav Havel was there at the time and in his book 'Disturbing the Peace' he recounts: “I saw Soviet tanks smash down arcades on the main square and bury several people in the rubble. I saw a tank commander start shooting wildly into the crowd.” The bronze plaque shaped as a tank track on the front facade of the town hall is a memorial to the victims of that invasion.

Other historic buildings in the centre of Liberec are the Churches of Saint Antonin and the Sacred Heart and a row of medieval half timbered buildings usually known as the Valdštejn houses. The Valdštejn houses suffered from neglect during the early communist years and only the front rooms have survived. In the 1960s, the rear rooms were demolished and replaced by a brick and concrete structure of three floors that now houses the Liberec School of Building Studies.

Apart from all its individual attractions, there's something intangible that makes Liberec a special place (to me at least). Somehow it has its own distinct atmosphere, so unlike other Czech cities that it could almost be in a different country. Perhaps the surrounding mountains make it feel especially isolated? Or the nearby triple border and easy access to Poland and the former Eastern Germany exerts a certain cultural influence that doesn't occur elsewhere?

I can't quite pin down what makes Liberec feel so unique and I wonder if it's just me or have any of you been there and felt the same?

More Information:
Liberec hotels and guesthouses
Liberec Tourist Information
All connections to Liberec