Sudetenland, Part II

Today's Czech Minute!
One of the comforting things about spending time ensconced in another culture is that you have many opportunities to discover how very similar all members of the human race are. Case in point: while visiting Broumov for my on-site lessons about the Sudetenland, we had lunch at a pub frequented by working-class men of the town. Martin commented that he looks for workingmen at pubs at lunchtime to know that the food is good. While having our lunch, I couldn't help but notice that the workmen of the Broumov area looked and acted an awful lot like workmen in Oregon: farmer tans, frequent olging and cat-calling of young, attractive women, and unfortunate displays of butt crack. Ah, it's just like home . . .


My introduction to Broumov (Bro-mov) began with a survey of the large and stately homes on the street leading to the main square. Martin noted that many successful entrepreneurs from the 19th and early 20th Century had made their money in the region and built their homes in this street, I assume as a way to showcase their wealth. (People are the same all over.) At the peak of Broumov's prominence, there were more than 10,000 people living in the town (which is fairly good-sized for a Czech village) and quite a few wealthy and prominent citizens, many of whom probably had German surnames. These homes are in various physical states now, but Martin told me that very few of them are currently being used as single-family residences. Most or all have been converted into schools/retirement homes/flats/businesses, etc. Broumov no longer has the thriving economy that it once did.

Our first official stop in Broumov was at the Benedictine Monastery. Because Prague served for a while as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire (Charles IV, crowned King of Bohemia in 1346, was also crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355), many monasteries were built throughout what is now the Czech Republic, and Catholicism in general was central to Czech life for a long time. Interestingly though, the Czech Republic, and specifically Bohemia, now has one of the highest rates of athiesm in Europe (Moravia, on the other hand, still has a very active Catholic population). It's a complicated issue, naturally, but this shift was partially due to the fragmentation that happened as a result of the Protestant Reformation, and partially due to the influence of the Communist regime. The monastery in Broumov, for instance, served as a "concentration camp" of sorts for monks and nuns during the Communist era. Following the fall of the Soviet bloc, a handful of monks attempted to rebuild the monastic community there but eventually moved to Canada, so the monastery is now empty and cared for as a historic site. I'm not Catholic, but even I found it disconcerting to be taken into areas of the chapel and monastery where only priests could have gone before. It felt very disrespectful or sacreligious. Martin reminded me that Czech people, to a great degree, have lost faith in this sort of religious reverence, and asked if I didn't think that, ultimately, any space is just space, since any importance of it only exists in our minds?

Randomly, while we were in the sacristy of the chapel (one of the rooms in which I felt very uncomfortable), the tour guide drew our attention to a fresco on the ceiling which was blackened all around the sides but had clearly been cleaned in the center. She said the entire painting had not been cleaned to show the build up of soot from years of candle and incense burning. She then told us that their budget is quite small and they were unable to afford professional restoration services, so one of the curators tried gently cleaning the fresco with bread--apparently, it worked like a charm. Also, a copy of the Shroud of Turin was found inside an altar in one of the cathedral chapels in 1998. No one is exactly sure how long it had been there, but it seems likely it was hidden purposefully, perhaps to be saved from destruction during the Communist era.

Here is a not-particularly-stellar photograph of the Monastery. As a side note about it, like most monasteries around the world, it had a "real work" focus to allow the monks to make enough money to live on, and as with many monasteries in Europe, this one made beer . . .



From the monastery, we moved further into town, to the oldest church in Broumov, the Church of Saint Mary. It also happens to be the oldest stick-built church in Central Europe, dating from the early part of the 13th Century. Miraculously, it only burned once, in 1459, when Hussites set fire to it, and was rebuilt shortly thereafter. It was not open, unfortunately, but the front door had an opening through which the interior could be viewed. The window was covered with wire mesh rather than glass so what I remember most, even weeks later, is the smell of the interior--the mixture of decay and mildew and dust is hard to describe, but it's that smell that just proclaims that something is old. It was very disappointing to not be able to go sit inside for a moment, but it's obvious--commendably so--why it's not open for public access. There are services held inside on high holy days, however, so maybe I can go back for Easter mass.



Part of the reason for visiting the Church of Saint Mary was to see the cemetery in the church yard. You can read the history of the town in the gravestones, most of which look like this (note the names):



Following the Second World War, there was some destruction done to graves in this cemetery, so there are hundreds of headstones that now lean against the wall of the church yard, some damaged and some not:




The newest graves in the cemetery bear stones written in Czech, and almost always bearing Czech or otherwise Slavic names. I'm not sure I would have noticed it consciously, had I not been told about the repatriation of Germans after the war, but it certainly shows in the cemetary that all things German vanished from Broumov after 1945.

After we had lunch in town (with the workmen), we drove out to Martin's parents' chalet. Many, many Czech families keep cottages or country houses that they use on weekends. In the summer, Martin's parents live at the chalet from Friday to Monday every week. Here, we rested for a bit (with beer, naturally) and watched the kids swim before continuing our tour. For the second half, Hanka and the girls stayed at the chalet while Martin and I drove further out in the country to tour some abandoned churches. Martin explained that there are ten churches in the Broumov area that constitute what is known as the Broumov Circle. All of the churches were designed by German architects Christoph and Kilian Dientzenhofer (brothers) between about 1710 and 1730, and were architectural marvels when constructed as the Dientzenhofers' designs bucked many of the prevailing trends for religious spaces at the time. I had already seen one of the churches (the small chapel on the ridge at Hvezda) and Martin thought we could get to 4 or 5 more pretty easily. Our first stop would be in Sonov (Sho-nov) to see the Church of Saint Margaret (Marketa, in Czech). With this church, the Dientenhofer design tried to take full advantage of the small rise upon which the church would be built, to try to make the building seem as organic as possible. As we drove from Broumov to Sonov, in a rural area with lots of orchards and corn fields, the church was the only visible building, partially hidden by trees. (I should have made Martin stop the car for a photo, but I didn't. Here is one photo I took as we climbed up the hill, though . . .)



Once we reached the top of the hill, it was much more apparent how much the condition of the church has deteriorated since its abandonment by a local congregation. Martin thought we might be able to get in, as it isn't always securely closed, but it was on this day. (I later learned that concerts are held in the church quite often, so I will update this post with interior photos after I attend a concert!)



We stood there looking at it for quite a while, and Martin finally asked me what I was thinking, saying he was very curious what I thought about something like this. I said that it made me sad--it's a beautiful building, and was meant to be a place of community and worship, and it's been left to sink back into the ground it seems like--and I wondered why no one was trying to save it. I don't know if Martin and I always completely understand each other--while his English is very good, I know he doesn't always understand all the words that I use, and I think he must be limited sometimes in communicating with me because he doesn't know all of the words he wants to use. That being said, he sort of paused after my reply and said, "Do you think we should save everything?" Later, I think I realized what he meant--this is a nation where buildings from the 14th and 15th Century are routinely being used for homes and businesses in every city. Maybe a church, that is arguably pretty ostentatious for a small village like Sonov, shouldn't be a top priority? As we walked back down the hill, I remember thinking that Martin didn't have any sense of sentimentality. Now I think maybe he was just being pragmatic.

We were about to climb into the car when I asked if we could wander through the church yard that was just across the road. It contained a much smaller church, and the local cemetary.




While we were wandering through the cemetary, reading stones (all of which bore Czech names and seemed to be recent--Martin said later that he guessed the townspeople had destroyed the old German ones, noting that that kind of thing probably didn't happen in more religious communities), Martin struck up a conversation with an older man who was tending some graves. We were particularly interested in two graves that were marked with large headstones bearing the names of two priests and seemed very well-cared for (and of which, of course, I didn't take a photo). The man told the following story (to Martin, who translated it for me): the two priests, as evidenced from the names on the headstones, were German and several people in the town believed that they had been Nazi collaborators during the war. One night, sometime after the war was over, a group of men drinking in a pub convinced themselves that they should murder the priests for collaborating and set out in a lynch mob of sorts. They broke into the rectory in the middle of the night, and dragged the priests out of bed and up into the nearby hills, where they were made to dig their own graves before being shot and buried there. In 1992, a group of citizens from Sonov decided to find the graves, which they did, and dig up the remains of the priests to re-inter them honorably in the cemetary, and have arranged for care of the graves ever since. I suppose you could say this was an act of contrition. The man said he was a young boy when it happened, but he remembered it being spoke of in days following. He also said that any evidence of actual collaborating by the priests was anecdotal and not very reliable, seeming to suggest that they probably weren't collaborators at all.

On the way out of Sonov, Martin pointed out a stone pillar on the side of the road and said that these markers are all over the Czech Republic and indicate important historical events. I asked what the one we had just seen was for and he said he didn't know--there are no plaques or signs to indicate the reason for a marker; instead you have to ask locals to find someone who knows. I asked about the problem of inaccuracy--what if people tell the wrong story? Martin looked at me and simply asked, "Why would they do that?"

I started to get the feeling that I wasn't going to be able to find out any of the things I wanted to know about the Czech Republic from books.

By the time we left Sonov, we were already late for dinner at the chalet so we only stopped at two more churches that were on our way. The first was a Protestant church whose tower seemed to dominate the skyline as we drove back into Broumov. Ironically, Martin said he had never been to it so we should stop to take a look. It is not part of the Broumov circle, however, but still kind of impressive in its own right.



The second was another Dientzenhofer church of the Broumov circle, in slightly more dilapadated shape than the Church of Saint Margaret, complete with its own overgrown cemetery, seen here:




Just across the road from this church is a relatively new artist colony, that has become controversial in conservative Broumov (and that I also forgot to take a photo of). It is inhabited, sporadically, by artists from Prague who are looking to return Broumov to its former prominence and glory, only this time due to its art scene. Some citizens find it offensive, some find it silly, and some are just curious if it will ever happen. Apparently, the artists have been coming to the area for about 10 years and nothing very spectacular has happened YET. Europeans are much more patient when it comes to change and the effects of time, having a much longer view of history themselves, so it's probably way too early to predict what will happen with this venture.

And, next door to the church, is a building that has recently been purchased by a wealthy man from somewhere else (probably Prague) and he is converting it into his home. The building was the old, original pub and stable in Broumov. I asked Martin if he was bothered by the man making his home out of this historic site, but he seemed much more annoyed by the outside money than anything the man was doing with the building.

By this point, we were really late for dinner. Luckily, Mr. Vancl was just starting the barbeque fire when we arrived. Dinner was the largest platter of sausages I have ever seen (where eating "only" 2, as I did, was barely considered a meal) and lots of fresh vegetables from the garden, and, of course, more beer. After dinner, the beer turned to Slivovice (plum brandy) and Becherovka (some sort of spicy liquer that is allegedly good for digestion). Czechs don't use mixers, and beer doesn't really count as alcohol, so when you really start drinking, that means shots of whatever is at hand. I also had the distinct pleasure of trying some sort of pressed pork loaf, that mostly seemed like bits of pork in lard, which is a Czech delicacy, eaten drizzled with vinegar. I'm sorry to say that it was not good, even with all the alcohol I had imbibed.

It was well past sunset when we finally left the cottage. The girls were spending the weekend with their grandparents so Hanka & Martin could do some work on their house, but they needed some tiles first so I was invited for a shopping trip to Hradec Kralove on Saturday, which seemed much safer than spending any more time near Martin's father and his liquor cabinet.