the museums of Orlik and Zvikov

Orlik Castle

It’s surprisingly cold in the newly re-branded country of Czechia. The climate has been on course for the change, though to something slightly more comfortable than all the warming mumbo jumbo. Last year, I remember sitting up in my attic apartment at night, soaking in sweat, unable to do much but drink water and breathe heavily. This year, I’m quite happily relaxed in blue jeans on my balcony, sipping coffee while I watch all the plebeians pass me by down below. But summer isn’t over yet, as there are still some things to be done and castles to be seen, and truly some borderline summer spirit to take you there.

The current cool cloudy clime is still the perfect time for a visit to Zvikov and Orlik. This would be my third time there and indeed, my second time to write about it (the first time was covered here). I won’t cover much information that I covered there on this blog, but rather something we managed to do that I’d never done before: the tours.

Orlik

Our first stop was Orlik, or the “little eagle” in English, beginning with our customary langose. I’m not overly sure what a langose is, but it’s flat, fried, and topped with copious amounts of cheese and garlic. Frankly, I’m not even sure if it’s any good, but I keep ordering the stuff so it must have some merit. 

We then went on our merry way to the castle grounds. My first instinct is always to go down the stairs at Orlik and follow the moat to a small peninsula, where you pass by a door where there’s always a hundred or so people streaming out. What was that door? A secret entrance? I couldn’t tell, since as I said, there were a hundred or so people streaming out an egress that could barely fit a kitchen stool.

Back up the moat and to the tour. The tour costs 120 czk for the straight Czech and 200 total for that with a booklet that will let you decipher the tour guide’s speeches. The castle is well worth the tour and is now on my top three list of castle tours. 

Orlik castle was the main manor of the noble Schwarzenberg family, who still wields power in the Czech government today. The house tour shows you the living period of the most famous of the Schwarzenbergs, Karl Philipp, who led the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig. However, the man also served as the Austrian Ambassador to the French Empire and had been an acquaintance of the Corsican Fiend, even receiving the best gift you could receive from a friend: their own bust. The bust of the Little Corporal is on display in the gigantic lounge room, which is situated next to the dining room, by far the chambre sans pareil of the chateau. The room is paneled entirely of hand-carved wood, taking the master craftsman from the locality over four years to complete. The ceiling, the walls, everything. It’s truly a masterpiece of woodcarving and shouldn’t be missed by any fan of the trade, and it certainly makes the entire tour worth the price.

The next most interesting thing are the Halls of Terror (name is mine). In one hall are rows and rows of hunting guns, and in another, an unparalleled assemblage of animal heads. It seems that the Schwarzenberg family tradition was to provide a fresh gun for each guest and store the gun for later use by that guest, and they’d go out hunting in the immediate lands. The guns were all notched with their score and on the plate of each beast’s head was served the name of the hunter and date of the conquest. 

Orlik from the front

From Orlik, we went on the ferry down the Vltava. The schedule is on this site and costs 240 czk for a round trip. On board you can find beers by the can, so no need to come prepared, and there’s also a beer garden on the Orlik side.

Zvikov

Zvikov I’ve already written about as well. It’s a mystical little place with the ruins of an old fortress. The boat lands in the back, but it’s best to hurry on and walk through the place and pretend to walk in from the front, which is certainly the best way to enter, where you walk over a bridge that’s easy to imagine having once been a drawbridge. There are ruined towers galore here and a museum that’s well worth a visit—again, before I’d never taken the visit, but this time decided on it, as it was just 70 czk. 

Zvikov from the front

The first floor of the museum has a couple of art galleries and for the castle and history buff is a bit of a disappointment. It’s the second floor that makes the place shine, with the old wooden rooms and the stairs up to the top of the tower. Moreover, I learned about why the castle stopped being occupied. It once served as the storage facility of the crown jewels of the Bohemian King, an honor that was later transferred to Karlstejn. Part of the palace had crumbled down off the cliff, and this part included the royal bedroom of the King. Figuring that this wasn’t a good precedent—especially for his crown jewels—the King abandoned it and it declined in its usefulness.

The walls near the dock

a brief on Cesky Krumlov

Cesky Krumlov on a cold morning

My first visit to Cesky Krumlov was a romantic overnight stay last winter - and I've been back three times. Overnight with a lover is really the best way to see the beautiful crown jewel of South Bohemia. Cesky Krumlov is settled on the tight bends of the Vltava River with several scenic bridges spanning over the sanguine stream, and two large hills littered with cottages and Baroque blocks and one precipitous climb with a castle grasping on the ledges of granite. In the winter, when we were first there, the nights are quiet and the lights dot the darkness like candle flames, the reflection of the water flickering as the gentle wind blows. In the summer, during the days the streets are packed with tourists and the river crowded with kayakers, making their journey through the castle riddled hills of the Czech Republic. 

The night lights

The town and castle were founded in 1240 by the Vitkovci clan to protect an important trade route on the southern road leading from Prague to the Alps. The town was built in two stages. When the castle was built, the town Latran was built underneath it, mainly for the administrative staff and servants of the castle. As it expanded, it grew across the river to a “green meadow”, where no previous settlement had been. In fact, that expansion and term led to the name of Krumlov, which itself comes from the German for “crooked meadow”, or Krumme Aue – to Krumlau to Krumlov, "crooked" because of the river.

One branch of the Vitkovci, the House of Rosenberg, came to prominence and took over the castle. The Rosenbergs have a weird family history for Slavs, though it followed the fashion of the time. Many of the old Greek families traced their origins back to the gods, the Roman families often linked their families to the Greeks of myths (or the gods), and the medieval nobility linked their own to the Romans. The Rosenbergs linked their family to the Ursini family, who were said to have resided on Mons Rosarum (hence, Rosenberg). Ursa itself means bear, which led to the family deciding to take on the care of some friendly bears in their moat, a tradition that continues even today.

The crooked meadow

The House of Rosenberg came into decline, especially after several pricey renovations of their castles. Finally, in 1601, Peter Wok von Rosnberg had to settle his debts and sell the castle to Emperor Rudolf II Habsburg. Several wars and a Swedish occupation later, a future Emperor handed the property over to the Eggenberg family. The Eggenbergs died out and the property went where all properties in Bohemia eventually went, to the Schwarzenbergs.

Though Cesky Krumlov can be reached in 3 hours by a Student Agency bus and can be handled within a day, I’d recommend staying the night. Take some time to meander through the cobblestone alleys and streets, have some shisha in the Moroccan flavored Dobra Cajovna, and in general just enjoy the medieval beauty and atmosphere of the old town. Most of the restaurants there are delicious too – there’s always some fresh game at Rozmberska basta, while Kolectiv serves up a fine enough breakfast. For beer, there’s the local Eggenberg brewery which has been supplying the town with brews for the past 500 years.

A Paval work

There are three main attractions in the city. For those of you liking castle tours, the Cesky Krumlov castle is one of the best (the best in the area is in Hluboka, if you can, go there for the tour). Even better though is what’s literally underneath the castle. Within the old wine and storage cellars (and perhaps dungeons?), there is now housed a museum of statues by the Czech artist Miroslav Paval. His work looks like Rodin slipped on a Freudian banana peel and came out with a sexualized statue representation of Dali’s paintings. Which is to say, in a word, awesome. Though most plaques accompanying the scuptures of perverse, mutated figures with seemingly anal fixations have right out political descriptions, one takes notice that there must be something else going on inside of Paval’s mind. However, I still like what he has to say, such as on his statue “Guardian of the Intestines”:

“Up to that point, they were used to living in socialism, ie to go once per year to the Baltics for holidays, to have free weekends, to work only eight hours per day. After the change of regime they suddenly found out they had not enough free time. Successful entrepreneurs stared spending most of their time with their good-looking secretaries and soon after divorced their wives. They used unfair business practices as part of their strategies to be successful. What started to appear in society can be called a new form of aggression – my territory, my carrion, my intestines.”

Lastly not to be missed is the Egon Schiele museum. Mostly the museum has local and national modern Czech artists. But as you get lost in the bizarre layout of the winding corridors, you find a large collection of Ex Libris plates, chocked full of art nouveau occult symbols, and then up finally to the namestake of the house: Egon Schiele’s rooms. There are mostly copies of his work with a few originals, and some of his clothes, along with texts about his life. Schiele was a protégé of Gustav Klimt and spent much of his life in Cesky Krumlov, where his grandmother was from. Most of his art looks starved and deranged and features an almost melting quality, as if the skin and the souls of his subjects were under and intense and putrefying heat. His best works are his nudes, which look like vapid connections to their representations, with hollowed husks of hips and emptied, sagging breasts.

If you only have a day to hit Cesky Krumlov, then do it. But try at most to spend the night and see everything the town has to offer. There’s plenty to do there and around.

9 Things Only Tourists Do in Prague

There’s no doubt that Prague has one of the most beautiful old towns in Europe and perhaps the world. It’s easy to get lost in the winding alleys and narrow cobblestone streets of the City of a Hundred Spires. It’s also easy to forget that there’s a lot more to experience beyondStaroměstská and Malá Strana, including some of the city’s best restaurants and museums. Though Czechs are extraordinarily proud of their historical monuments, most locals have a hard time finding any decent restaurants and cafés in the Old Town, since all the proprietors know that all the tourists will stay within its boundaries and can be ripped off by excruciating degrees. In fact, unless a local works there, they tend to avoid the Old Town like it’s quarantined. There can be good deals for business lunches in the Old Town though, so you’ll occasionally see locals dining there.

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you are not from the castle

My first exposure to Kafka was like anyone else’s, a reading of “Metamorphosis” in high school. When you’re that young, it’s truly impossible to get a full grasp of the meaning of most stories - lacking the life experience, it can be hard to relate with something someone much older and more experienced has written. Of course, it’s main themes of alienation and loneliness can probably be pretty familiar for most teens; there’s still something more to the prose, however. A teenager has a couple of years of loneliness - an adult can have decades of loneliness, and that kind of dark decay of the soul is much more profound than you can truly appreciate when young. Of course, a teenager always thinks he alone can understand such a vast sorrow, but that’s not so.

To brush up on this understanding, and to see why a good friend of mine hated the Prague writer so much, I had purchased a copy of one of his collections of short stories and was determined to read it. This was back when I lived in Denver, with that constant level of fear and alienation I was feeling from my own culture building up inside of me. It wasn’t so much that I was in truth alienated, but maybe it was that I was at a point of life that if I wasn’t alienated, then there must have been something mediocre about me, and hence the fear. What greater and worst thing is there in life than to be mediocre? And when you look at all the greats of history, most have accomplished so much by the age that I was, in my mid-twenties, and there I was with a mediocre desk job, a mediocre salary, mediocre stories, a mediocre life. And there I was reading the Collected Works while sitting alone on my toilet, while Augustus Caesar meowed outside, clawing underneath the door, trying to save me from the depths of whatever renal attack he imagined the great porcelain toilet monster was letting me have. What else could all that noise be? he must have been wondering with great fear. If the God dies, then where will the mana come from?

Last Sunday, I went to the Kafka Museum, here in Prague. At the time of reading the greater hull of Kafka’s works while sitting on my toilet back in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver, I had no design to ever live in Prague. I didn’t even want to visit the city, as it was already overused and outdone by hipsters throughout the town - “I’ve been to Prague, it’s so out there, on the border of civilization, and amazing and artistic.” Right, not really - I’ve been to the places on the "border of civilization", and in those regards, Prague is quaint. You can quote me on that when talking to hometown hipsters.

The Kafka Museum is in a building where in all likelihood Franz Kafka never set a foot. The Mala Strana of his time was dilapidated and run down, smelling of fish and sewage and overrun by gypsies and fortune tellers. That’s not to say that scene was beneath Kafka, as he lived over in the Jewish ghetto or roundabout for most of his life, just swap the fish for some freshly butchered dead kosher products and it was roughly pretty similar dirt stained walls and caking of grime leftover from the greater days of the since fallen Holy Roman Empire. It was at that time, one of the principal cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though most of the newer construction, factories and development were taking place outside of the center. As this was before the advent of the airplane, tourism was slight, nothing like in today’s record numbers of Russians fleeing Vlad the Great’s ever tightening grip for a last and possible final breath of fresh freedom. Indeed, Prague was having its own problems back then, with the German, Czech and Jewish populations all about equal and all three equally discontent with each other. The Germans and Czechs were seeking out their own national identities - the Germans already as the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of those who built up the city, and the Czechs seeking out the strength of their own identity - the first period in history where Czech was even spoken openly on the streets of Prague. The third ethnic group at large in Prague were the Jews, most of whom spoke German, and whose identity would often waver in-between the other two groups. That was the Prague that Kafka was born into, completely different from the Czech utopia now, where you’re more likely to here a hodge-podge of Slavic languages and English than anything German.

"The Piss" by David Cerny

The entry of the museum is just off of Charles’ Bridge, in a small square hidden from the main tourist walks by a gate. In the small square is a symbol exhibition of modern Czech art, a fountain by the much acclaimed Czech artist, David Cerny. It’s called "The Piss" and is composed of two male statues with rotating pelvises and dipping peters, pissing into a pool made in the shape of the country. You can write a message and send it in, and the male pair will piss out the message, like children writing their names in the snow.

The museum tickets (200 crowns, or about 10 USD) are bought in the gift shop, which is the door to the left of the statues, while the museum itself is on the right. You enter in, the large angry lady - there is no museum in the Czech Republic complete without a large angry lady - sends you upstairs. The first floor of the museum if full of the finer details of Kafka’s life - basically edited prints from wikipedia displayed in a slightly more visually appealing manner. By the end of this reading tour - of course, what can you expect from a museum about an author - you’re pretty tired and ready for a beer. But then there’s a staircase down and alas, another floor!

The stairs are appealing though, boosting you with some additional strength, and besides, there's no other way to exit. A dark, red light is cast outward from underneath each step, making it seem like your descending into the fires of Kafka’s self-prescribed madness. Down at the bottom, there’s an angled mirror, with a quote in German from Kafka, probably something like “There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.” Then you turn and you’re in a hall of file cabinets, never ending file cabinets, as the hall turns and turns and seems endless, symbolizing the bureaucratic hell that haunted Kafka, and influenced his writings towards misanthropy and loneliness. There is nothing that shoves your face into the compost heap of human existence quite like being a single cog - no, a bolt - in a giant organization, nothing that shows you how meaningless you are, when your own existence can be forgotten and subsumed by your lesser qualified coworkers. “You are not of the castle, you are not of the village. You are nothing.”

Then, a video display about the Castle, weird cardboard cutout scenes from Prague, quotes to belittle your existence and lots of smoke and mirrors. Then next room a dark fortress or prison, past the windows another video showing a man’s back being opened with a scalpel, peeling away the skin in various directions.

And then, like a Czech movie, you're standing outside, everything’s over but nothing has ended, and you scratch your head and try to figure out the meaning of what you just went through. But now you’re back standing in front of the pissing men, and all the meaninglessness is just about too much to handle.

Thanks God you're in Prague and there’s a lot of fantastic beer.