I’m back in Czechia¹ for the second time this year, this time to see a bunch of stuff that wasn’t Prague. I spent a long time considering catching the bus from Riga, but it’s a 22 hour trip and that was just too miserable.² I landed midday, picked up a rental car at the airport, and started driving.

I visited three towns to the east of Prague: Kutná Hora, Olomouc, and Mikulov. Kutná Hora was first and probably the best known to tourists; it’s an easy day trip on the train from Prague and primarily known for the Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel decorated in the bones from 40,000 skeletons. And sure, the ossuary’s a huge crowd pleaser.³ But there’s a lot more to Kutná Hora than that, and it’s a shame that most people end up just passing through.

Kutná Hora was built on a silver mine, and that made it very, very rich. It competed with Prague economically and culturally, playing a central role in Bohemia throughout the Middle Ages, an influence which only collapsed when the mines flooded in the 16^th century.⁴ What that left was a fantastic medieval city core, with the distinctive and gorgeous triple-peaked Cathedral of St. Barbara⁵ in the center. You can also tour the silver mines if you aren’t claustrophobic,⁶ and otherwise wander around seeing what survived five centuries of history. It’s worth at least an overnight stay.

My next stop was Olomouc, the historic capital of Moravia. Olomouc has a top-notch central square⁷ and a similarly well-preserved city center.⁸ It’s a university town, and I was visiting while the university was on break, so it was rather drowsy. And I arrived at the wrong time. Everything closes early on Sunday and a lot of places were closed on Monday, so it was a quiet couple days for me. It turns out that’s fine for Olomouc; it’s more a place to get the rhythm of Czech life than a place for tourism. You’re best off coming for a week or coming for a day trip; anything in between doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I did get to see the Vila Primavesi, an Art Nouveau masterpiece fallen into disrepair and only recently recovered. It’s a town house built near the turn of the century for the Primavesi family, who had to give it up following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in World War I. Otto Primavesi was an art collector and a good friend of Gustov Klimt and the house was filled with all sorts of paintings and furniture and sculptures.⁹ My guidebook suggested the house was closed but there was a pretty good restaurant there, but when I arrived the restaurant had become an unremarkable café but the first floor of the house was open for touring.¹⁰ They’ve managed to recover a lot of stuff and they’re restoring what they can as money comes in. It was a highlight.

The last town I hit was Mikulov, deep in the heart of the Moravian wine country. I always think of beer when I think of Czechia, but that’s Bohemia. Moravia’s into wine. The big reason to come this far south are two estates, Lednice and Valtice. The estates were owned by the Liechtenstein family¹¹ until they were repatriated by Czechoslovakia in 1945 following World War II.

Of the two, Lednice is the nicer one. I didn’t end up touring Valtice¹² but Lednice could easily take up your whole day if you let it.¹³ There were four tours you could take, each one 60-90 minutes, and each through a different part of the manor. I only went on the one¹⁴ and the sheer amount of wealth on display was stunning, even taking into account the Liechtensteins took the best stuff with them when they left for Liechtenstein. There’s a staircase carved from a single oak in the library, the mounted head of a unicorn,¹⁵ a porcelain toilet painted like a fish,¹⁶ a statue of one of the princes done up in Roman armor, and some really impressive ceilings done up in the style of medieval halls, all jammed in with dozens of suits of armor and racks of antlers.¹⁷

That was just one tour. And if that’s not enough, it’s surrounded by acres of gardens and parkland and that’s littered with the kind of architectural follies you’d expect bored aristocrats to build in the Romantic period: a Roman aqueduct, a classical temple, the requisite ruined Gothic castle.¹⁸ There’s a rather pretty minaret a short 20-minute walk into the park and visible from the castle;¹⁹ I walked there and back as my immersion into nature for the day.

After that it was time to return the rental car, so I drove back to Prague, dropped off the car at the airport,²⁰ and checked in to a hotel. I’m boarding a flight to Dublin in a couple hours. I had a bad night last night — my back went wonky again, and I mostly lay in bed and tried to relax.²¹ It seems to have passed this morning, but I guess I’ll know for sure after a three-hour flight on a discount airline.

The particularly nice thing about this trip was that I managed to find a part of Europe that wasn’t so aggressively touristy. I mean, yes, Kutná Hora was filled with day-trippers, and Lednice is literally running four different tours through the manor, but the people doing those things are overwhelmingly Czech. Lednice wasn’t even running any tours in English.²² Credit cards weren’t universally accepted.²³ I kept having to bust out Google Translate to find out what I could eat.²⁴

This was great. Or at least, reassuring. You can get a sense of Czech history from Prague, but it’s a very warped view of what Czechia is like. I’m not going to claim I saw the authentic side of Czech life (there’s no such thing) and I was still doing some pretty touristy stuff while I traveled. But it was a fuller picture of the place than I’ve seen before. That’s worth a lot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to be moving on. I’ll be thrilled to spend time in Ireland, where the cultural dislocations aren’t nearly as great, and it’s reasonable to expect everyone to speak fluent English.²⁵ I’ll be moving a little less quickly through the next part of my travels, staying 3-4 days in some places, and it’s a good time to be slowing down. Let’s hope I can catch my breath.

Next: Dublin (DUB) to Paris (CDG)
Prev: Riga (RIX) to Prague (PRG)

Footnotes

¹ Does it feel weird to call the place Czechia? The formal name is the Czech Republic, but Czechia is the common name for the country, just like nobody calls Germany the Federal Republic of Germany in casual conversation. But there’s wasn’t an official short name for a long time — that’s the fault of the Czechs, since they couldn’t decide between the leading contenders Česko and Čechy — and by the time they had most everyone in English-speaking countries had settled on the full name.

I spend a lot of time researching language, and I try very hard to defer to local preferences. Czechia’s clearly the preferred term by the government. Even Eurovision switched this year. But I sometimes find myself using the Czech Republic when talking to people, mostly because I don’t have access footnotes in conversation.²⁶

² I checked the trains as well, and you’d need to change at the border from Latvia to Lithuania, then change again at Vilnius for the single train running on weekends, then change again in Warsaw. And it still takes 22 hours.

Why aren’t there luxury night buses, with proper seats that convert into beds and fancy meals? I’d settle for a high-speed train line from Tallinn to Zürich, but that seems even more far-fetched.

³ I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say it’s a mandatory stop if you’re visiting Prague. It’s a half-day trip and the macabre isn’t for everyone. But it’s close, and if nothing else you get to marvel at how you’d reproduce drapery or a coat of arms — including a raven pecking out the eye of a Turk — in solid bone.

⁴ This was just at the time the Spanish were flooding Europe with cheap silver from the Americas, which really put the nail in the coffin.

⁵ More properly the Church of St. Barbara, since it never housed a bishop. But it’s got flying buttresses, so screw that.

⁶ Speaking as someone hobbit-sized I was constantly banging my head against the ceiling (they provide helmets) and I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone bigger. There was about a 15-second stretch through the narrowest tunnels where I was not okay, but the rest was absolutely fine.

⁷ With five fountains scattered throughout it, a fine town hall, and the tallest, grandest plague column in Europe. Of particular note is the astronomical clock, once more complicated than Prague’s, destroyed by the Nazis but “restored” by the Communists. The current one persists in the Soviet Realism style, with chemists and mothers taking the place of the usual saints and the birthdays of heroes of socialism helpfully labeled in red.

⁸ Olomouc’s decline happened in the 1700s, when Prussian forces held siege — Olomouc was conveniently on the way to Vienna — so most of the buildings are baroque.

⁹ One of the tenets of Art Nouveau is the integration of architecture with the furnishings of the house; everything is intended to form a unified and harmonious whole. Lots of Art Nouveau buildings are pretty on the outside, but you really need to tour the interiors, and you really need to see them restored and refurbished with something close to the intended furniture in order to really get it.

There’s a reason Art Nouveau fell out of favor. Society just wasn’t building grandiose town houses any more. Modern architecture is all about cookie cutter apartments or boxy prefab houses for suburban subdivisions.

¹⁰ If you’re producing travel guidebooks, the global pandemic really did a number on your business. On the one hand, lots of places folded or changed policies so all your information is out of date and you couldn’t get anyone in the field to revalidate it for a couple years. On the other hand, travel is booming again. I’m only just now seeing new editions of travel guides being released.

¹¹ Yes, that Liechtenstein family, and how then ended up with a microstate all the way on the other side of Austria when all their ancestral holdings were from this region is a testament to massive wealth, savvy politics, and plain good luck.

In short: none of the lands they owned were held directly from the Emperor, which meant they were denied a seat in the Imperial Diet. To get around this, they managed to acquire some lands near Switzerland at the turn of the 18^th century which were unburdened by a feudal overlord. With the collapse of the Empire, no other sovereign country had a claim.

¹² The small parking lot required you to pay by the hour and only took coins, which I didn’t have a lot of and was trying to horde for all the other parking I needed to do.

¹³ And their parking machines take credit cards for the 70 Kč it costs to park for the day.

¹⁴ The weather was hot and I’ve been on my feet a lot over the past week. I needed an air-conditioned room to sit in for a while.

¹⁵ This was a joke, I’m pretty sure. It’s a wooden horse’s head with a narwhal’s horn, and dates from when everyone must have known better.

¹⁶ I suppose when these things were new people had no idea how to deal with them. My advice: don’t paint your toilet to look like a living creature, and if you must don’t make their anatomy congruent with the plumbing.

¹⁷ The residents were quite enthusiastic about hunting.

¹⁸ No hermitage or hermit, as far as I know

¹⁹ With Qur’an verses neatly painted in Arabic on the sides, but unattached to an actual mosque.

²⁰ With a detour just north to see The Devil Heads, two enormous rock carvings about half as tall as the ones on Mount Rushmore. Because I could.

²¹ I used to get back spasms with semi-regularity which were incredibly debilitating for a few days but for some reason — I think I’ve gotten better about recognizing when they’re coming and taking steps to prevent them — I’ve only gotten them really badly once since I started traveling. Twice, now, although this wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Traditionally, it’s a pulsing pain right in the middle of my back. A fun new feature this time was a kind of dull pain running down both arms to my wrists and palms. It was sufficiently new that I kind of wondered if it was a heart attack, although the fact it was stronger on my right side than my left kind of made that seem unlikely.

I managed to check into the hotel, run out very quickly for soda and peanut M&Ms (which I was sure I was going to be able to eat; the pizza shop a few doors down looked absolutely dreadful), and curl up with a couple episodes of Strange New Worlds.

²² There was one tour at noon in English at the silver mine in Kutná Hora — if you go, book ahead — and it was a weird mix of nationalities on it.

²³ I was baffled that none of the concessions stands at Lednice did, since they did for ticket sales.

²⁴ Google kept insisting, bizarrely, that most of the pizza had ermine on it. Turns out there’s a kind of soft cheese here whose name is the same. Ermine didn’t seem like particularly good eating, but I’ve never tried it.

²⁵ Albeit in the countryside, so the accents may still occasionally be daunting.

²⁶ Actually, given how often I digress in face-to-face conversations, I kinda do. In my defense, I’ve got a surprisingly good track record at getting back to my point eventually.