Spring festivals roundup

English-language media in the Czech Republic tends to focus on events in or close to Prague, undoubtedly because that’s where most of their readers live. Understandable, but also a pity because there are wonderful and unique events in other places and with the excellent and inexpensive public transport, it’s not difficult to get around.

Here then are the top events of Spring 2009 that you won't find in the Prague Post or on expats.cz.

April
April 14 – 19 AFO documentary film festival
April 15 – 18, Polička Jazz festival

May
This year, the 1st and 8th of May public holidays fall on Fridays.
May 7 – 10 Znojmo wine and food festival There’ll be wine and food of course, but the hidden gems of this festival are the top-notch Romany musicians performing on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
May 8 - 9, Valtice Wine Expo
May11-June 4 Dvořák’s Olomouc
May 12-June 12 Mahler’s Jihlava
May 13 – 17 Olomouc beer festival The Czech Republic’s largest beer festival with dozens of breweries and 20 bands on two open air stages.
May 20 – June 5 Janáček’s May Classical music festival at the Hukvaldy castle ruins
May 23 – 25 Mikulov Weekend of Jewish culture
May 23 - June 8 Ignis Brunensis The Brno fireworks festival is like five festivals rolled into one with a hot air balloon rally, a magicians’ weekend and dragon boat races just some of the opening acts for the fireworks displays
May 29 – 31 Vlčnov Ride of the Kings If you only see one traditional festival in the Czech lands, make it this one.
May 31-June 7 Zlín Film festival

June
June 12 – July 6 Smetana’s Litomyšl International opera festival in Bohemia’s prettiest small town.

The Rožnov Easter festival

The Czech lands have some wonderfully colourful traditions connected with Easter, but unless you know where to look, they can be easy to miss.

Most people with any connection to the Czech Republic would know that there’s a tradition of decorated eggs and some kind of whipping on Easter Monday. But to really understand what’s going on, why, and how it came to be is sometimes difficult. Even local people are often unable to explain the traditions and are hasty to dismiss them as only for old people and country bumpkins.

One way to really find out is to go to an event with performances by folklore troupes, which are groups of people dedicated to preserving the traditions of their forefathers. The troupes have members of all ages, genders and professions, and are a popular alternative to other leisure and social activities like football, fishing, scouting or ballet lessons. Some troupes focus on traditional music, others are more oriented towards dance and still others excel at particular events like the Ride of the Kings or Masopust.

A good place to see pure Easter traditions performed (half drunk teenagers chasing their schoolmates around city streets with sticks doesn’t count) is the Easter festival in the Outdoor Museum at Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.

The outdoor museum is the oldest and largest in the country and owes its existence to two brothers who, in the early 20th century, dedicated themselves to preserving the traditional wooden buildings of Wallachia. Whenever they found a building that was going to be torn down they relocated it to the riverside park in Rožnov and eventually recreated an entire town square.

Among the buildings are a functioning post office, a church (whose tiny cemetery includes the grave of local boy and Olympic champion Emil Zátopek) and three working pubs with benches that spill out onto the square whenever there’s a big event on. There are three parts to the museum, but the Easter festivities are all held in the little wooden town, which is the collection of buildings around the green square.

The second part of the museum is the mill valley where the flowing waters are converted into power for grinding stones, a woodsaw, an oil press and a blacksmiths’ hammer. The third and largest part of the outdoor museum is the Wallachian farming village which spreads across the hillside above Rožnov. The farmhouses, barns, wells and windmills are all used for their original purposes and horses, cattle, ducks and geese, flocks of the local Wallachian sheep and bees are all tended here.

Events are always well run here and the Easter festival is three days of music, traditional dance and demonstrations. Some of the specific Easter traditions are the burning of the winter maiden, rattle processions, chases with birch whips and the dance to wake up the new year, which is represented by a sleeping man wrapped up in a white blanket.

The museum is worth a visit at any time, but going during the Easter festival is two for the price of one. Why not take your Czech friends along and challenge them to buy you dinner if you show them something they didn’t know about their own country?

May Day concerts

Every year on May Day there are concerts on the main square of Olomouc for free. Tomorrow's program looks pretty good and I'm especially looking forward to seeing Čankišou and Traband. Here's a sample for you...

Tomáš Kočko and Orchestra


Žamboši


Čankišou

Ivan Hlas

Peha

and last but not least (at 7pm for those of you within travelling distance), Traband.

Czech Easter traditions

The Czech Republic’s Easter traditions are colourful both in appearance and name.

Green Thursday is so called because of the long green robes worn in church and the spinach and cabbage traditionally eaten on the day. The Thursday before Easter was the day of the last supper, when Christ feasted with the apostles on lamb with bread and wine, labelled Judas as a traitor and began the institution of the Eucharist by pronouncing ‘this is my body’ and ‘this is my blood’.

Green Thursday folk customs include the boys’ game Chasing Judas, and the baking of twisted spiral buns representing serpents, the symbols of betrayal. In some villages there are processions led by a captive Judas in a straw suit which is ceremonially burnt at the end of the day. When sprinkled into a clean jug of water, the ashes of Judas were believed to have special powers including the abilities to guard against fire and protect the health of livestock for the coming year.

Good Friday here is Velký Patek; Great Friday! It’s a serious and sombre affair, not even interrupted by church bells, which are said to have “flown away to Rome” Christians attend church services and take the Eucharist but no music is played and mass is not performed. On the morning of Great Friday, people would wake before dawn and find their way to the nearest watercourse, where they would ceremonially wash themselves and gather pristine Great Friday water to take home and use in their baking.

White Saturday was the day that early Christians baptized new members and converts and the name has evolved from the colour of the robes worn to those ceremonies.

But Sunday’s the big day. The day that Christ rose from the grave, the day of new life cleansed of suffering and victorious over death. The morning is for attending church services, (the bells having returned from Rome) and the early afternoon is set aside for a great feast. After the meal it’s time to visit relatives, and in some places to ride in a horseback procession through the countryside with blessed twigs to ensure fertile fields for the year ahead. While the men and boys are out gallivanting around on horses, girls are at home decorating eggs in preparation for the following day.

Red Monday is the day for a peculiar ritual; the symbolic whipping of girls’ legs with braided willow twigs to encourage vigour and health in the year ahead. Men and boys use green willow twigs to braid their whips, which are known as Pomlázky, (from the verb pomladit; to rejuvenate). The custom probably dates from pre-Christian times and involves men and boys marching throughout town and chasing the girls who make a show of running away.

The whipping is not intended to be painful, but there are undoubtedly occasional miscreants who get carried away and need to be reigned in by somebody’s brother or father. Especially if there happened to have been shots of slivovice at each house in place of the more usual gifts of sweets and painted eggs. In some regions the girls get their revenge on Tuesday when it’s their turn with the whips. In other regions they return the rejuvenation with a bucket of ice-cold water.

Usually, colourful hand-painted eggs are presented to the boys in thanks for bringing the refreshment and invigoration of a new year. The eggs are a symbol of the rebirth of life and hope and are called Kraslice, from the old Czech word krásný, meaning red, which was the most common colour used for dying. Egg decorating is a distinct craft and there are competitions for the best Kraslice and even a dedicated national museum. Different regions have different styles that aficionados can apparently tell apart at a glance.

Like Pomlázky, Kraslice can easily be bought from street markets in the weeks before Easter, and both make interesting and unique souvenirs. If you’d prefer to see the traditions in action, you can take your chances in a random village picked from a map or attend one of the organized festivals at one of the country’s fine ethnographic museums. The photos in this post are all from the Easter festival at the outdoor museum in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, North Moravia. This year the festival runs from Thursday through Monday, but the best days to visit would be Saturday and Sunday.

If you’re in South Moravia on Monday there will be a procession through the historic centre of Telč beginning at 8am and interestingly, the girls will be doing the whipping because it’s a leap year. In South Bohemia you could visit the Easter markets and museum exhibition at Strakonice, in Northern Bohemia, there are markets in Jablonec nad Nisou, and in Central Bohemia the outdoor museum at Kouřim is a good bet especially if you want to see Judas on Green Thursday.

Happy Easter!

The Ride of the Kings

The Ride of the Kings is a traditional horseback procession that was once widely performed across Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. It now survives in just five or six Moravian villages and on the last weekend of May each year the biggest and brightest parade takes place at Vlčnov, near Uherské Hradiště.

The ride has its roots in the old Christian festival of Whitsuntide, but has evolved to tell the story of Hungarian King Matthias Corvin, who fled via Vlčnov, Kunovice and Hluk to his stronghold at Trenčin after being defeated in battle at Bilovec in 1469 by his father-in-law (and Bohemian King) Jíři of Poděbrady.

The central role in the event is played by the brightest 10-12 year old boy of the village who is chosen by his peers to represent the king. Mounted on a white horse, he’s disguised in the traditional ceremonial dress of the region’s ladyfolk and holds a rose between his teeth to symbolize the silence of the Hungarian King’s escape. His two sabre-wielding bodyguards are similarly attired and they are accompanied by an entourage of 15-20 callers or criers, also on horseback and wearing traditional male regional costume, or “Kroje”. The horses are draped with embroidered saddlecloths and hundreds of brightly-coloured flowers and ribbons and the whole thing is an amazingly colourful spectacle.

The festivities begin on Friday night with traditional music in the wine cellars (boudy) and continue on the Saturday with dance and more wine. but the culmination of the weekend is the Sunday. The day begins with presentations of this years participants to the mayor and the general public The ride itself begins in the late morning when all the riders have made their way through the crowd assembled outside the king’s house and the improbably costumed lad has been lifted onto his steed. Led by a flagbearer (an experienced horseman older than the criers, who are usually aged 18) the king and his party then set out for the centre of the village, and the spectators follow or are swept along.

The procession winds through the streets and lanes and the criers collect money from the crowd for their king who has fallen into difficult circumstances. They call traditional or improvised rhymes to encourage donations, and the wittier the verse, the higher should be the donation. The standard beginning is “Máme krale chudobného ale poctivého” (we have a king poor but chaste) and you’ll hear things like; “Za fotečku, do botečkou” “For a photo-shoot, into the boot” (where the donations are carried) or “Tento pan pěkně směje, jistě mě něco do boty přispěje”, “Smiling widely is that man; contribute something, sure he can!” It’s pretty poor form not to donate if you’re singled out, so it’s good to have some 20Kč coins along with you for the purpose.

Having taken loads of photographs at the same event last year and shown them at length to anyone who was interested or could be nailed down for a few minutes, there were about ten people keen to come along to see this year’s Ride. Marshalling them all to the train station for the 7am Sunday morning start proved easier than expected and the weather was surprisingly clear after the fierce storms of the night before. The day started to turn when our train developed a ten-minute delay due to the safety signals being damaged by lightning the night before, making it increasingly unlikely that we would make our eight minute connection to the bus at Staré Město u Uherské Hradiště.

Friends with a car called past and picked a couple of us up, but the rest of us had to get the local train into Uherské Hradiště and call a taxi from there. The 14km taxi ride cost us more than the 80km return train ride, but we couldn’t get this close and then give up for the sake of 100Kč each, could we?

And it was good that we didn’t. The ride was a bigger spectacle than most were expecting and despite the heat and humidity everyone had a great day. We had a crowded bus ride back to Hradiště, but the train delays worked in our favour this time, giving us a little extra time to make our connections. We were home in Olomouc by 6.30pm, tired and a bit sunburnt, but happy to have been part of a unique and vibrant centuries-old tradition, all the more remarkable for being kept up enthusiastically by teenage boys and young men despite all the distractions of life in the age of playstation and the internet.