The Curious Japanese Garden South of Prague

The huge gold fish swam in the pond before us. It was teeming with them, the fish climbing over each other to get a breath of air, or to get out of the water, or who knows what they were after.

“If the fish jump up the little waterfall,” my friend said, “And through the gate, then they’ll become huge dragons." She was translating for us. Explaining the myth of the pond was an old Czech lady, the owner of the house slash Japanese garden.

"Do the fish know that?" I asked.

My friend didn’t really understand my question, but she translated it anyway.

“No,” the lady replied, also feeling my question was a bit strange.

“Then how would they know to jump up the waterfall? Why would they ever try it? I think if I were one of those fish, I’d appreciate that knowledge, even if it’s quite impossible to jump up the waterfall. At least there’s something to live for,” I said to myself.

the goldfish pond and the magic gate the left

It was a beautiful place, a weird place. My friend lived out in the village of Olesko, just south of Prague. Olesko is a beautiful village that follows a ridge overlooking the Vltava river. The village is mostly just big summer houses for Praguers, scattered through a thick forest. The summer house is an important thing throughout European culture, a way to get out and get a breath of fresh air, away from the crowded city.

the view from a beer drinking ridge

Just down the dirt road from her forest home was a Japanese Garden. Some time ago, two quite rich Czechs moved there, built a mansion, and developed a healthy obsession with bonsai. The obsession would turn into a full blown Japanese garden, which became something of their retirement job, where they’d take care of the garden and then charge entry for tourists, and give them a tour of what a traditional garden in Japan might look like (I say might as I have no idea if it’s accurate, our Japanese friend who was with us said it was at least).

When we got there, there was some confusion. We were waiting outside the fence in the road. Our friend pressed on the buzzer and had a short talk. Nothing really came from it. She had called them earlier and told them we were coming, and now we were told to wait in the road. Some people came out so we walked in and waited inside, out of the dust, and feeling with a little bit more meaning and purpose. There was a very long driveway, lined with little bonsai trees on either side. There were two large houses, and to the left a Japanese style gate through which I supposed was the garden. There were a lot of people milling around, and clearly this was some sort of strangely popular thing for Czechs to do on the weekend.

the entrance of the gate

Then an angry old man approached us. This was starting to play out like a Japanese manga. “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” he was growling.

Our Czech friend replied, “We made a reservation, so we’re waiting for the tour.”

After the brief interview, I asked, “Do you know that guy?”

“Yeah, he’s our neighbor,” she said. “I told him we were coming, that we were here to take the tour. I don’t know what his problem is.”

It certainly didn’t seem like he knew her. I guess that's what bonsai does to someone.

Then a friendly old lady came up to us, all smiles and cheer. She started us on our tour, starting first at the Japanese gate. They close it every night because evil spirits would come in otherwise. Then upon entry through the gate, we had to follow the stone path going clockwise. Something again about evil spirits. The big dog that accompanied her didn’t seem to care much about evil spirits though, as he trotted around and plopped down wherever he had pleased.

no evil spirits be gettin into there!

one of many statues that adorned the garden

We came to an upper pond, which had a small stream run off from it that went to a waterfall and then down to the lower pond full of goldfish. Down there were a few shelves along the house wall, with some random but expensive looking souvenirs from Japan.

the upper pond

souvenirs and more souvenirs

When the tour was over, I was left a bit weirded out. I mean, the gardening was probably not that much more spectacular than many of the private yards that I’ve seen back in the States at richer homes, but I couldn’t imagine those people giving tours of their landscaping to people for a couple of dollars.

leading a tour

Was it worth a few dollars? I guess so. That’s all it cost. And it seems they’re at least paying for the upkeep of the garden with all the tours they were giving. Just very strange. One day I’m going to turn a room of my house into a magnet museum, so I can charge people entry to see all my magnets from all over the world. The Japanese garden is on Vltavksa 371 in Brezova-Olesko. Call Vaclav Wiesner at 602 315 658 or email him at tanukiwiesner@gmail.com. They're also on Facebook. Reservations required and they don't speak English.

If you enjoyed reading and want more of Prague, then make sure to check out my latest relase, A Facetious Guide to Prague, available now on Amazon (in a couple of days on paperback, and on kindle in maybe a week!)

#Prague #parks #nature #museums

Burn the Witches!

All across Prague, bonfires would be lit up, and effigies of dark cloaked women would be set on fire and roasting, the wicked cackling of the winter would be driven away, welcoming in the spring time and warm weather. The evil spirits of winter would be burned and destroyed, the witch’s strength would be ebbed by the coming warm air.

It was Čarodějnice, or Witches’ Day, a Czech holiday celebrated every year on the day before May Day.

Also, I'll put in here quickly that I don't in any way advocate any burning of actual witches.

A Bit of History

Of course, it wasn’t always a day to burn effigies of witches. That innovation is somewhat more recent in regards to May Day celebrations. The transfer from paganism to Christianity doesn’t really follow a clear, sharp line. As people converted to Christianity in the middle ages, they weren’t so willing to part with their traditional ways (we see the same in modern Czech Republic, they’re atheist now but love to celebrate their long held Catholic traditions).

St. Vitus Cathedral at night

Many people were forcibly converted, yes, but a large part simply because it was an easier religion to follow and also that it was often not really that different (take Slavic and Germanic paganism, who already had an all-father, from which all lesser gods and spirits, read angels, were created). It was clear, and there were benefits. Humans wouldn’t be sacrificed, neither livestock, to principalities that only had remote and bizarre characters. Nobility were nothing that special, rather than god-men.

In the Roman lands, the peasantry was the first to convert, and it went bottom up, not top down. The Roman Emperors repeatedly tried to quell the growing faith, but were so unsuccessful that eventually, it was impossible to be a Roman Emperor without being Christian, which also meant sacrificing, or at least changing, the cult of the Emperor.

And why was it popular with the poor? Because Christianity taught that the first were made last and the last would be made first (granted, it's certainly strayed from that since then). It wouldn’t be until much later that the emperors and kings decided to try to wiggle their divine rights into a religion that really didn’t honor the divine rights of kings. So pagans, especially the lower castes, weren’t always reticent to join Christianity.

St. Nicholas Church in Mala Strana

There are stories, of course, of mass forced conversions. Namely Charlemagne’s exploits in Northern Germany, but for the most part, the Christian conversion of Europe was a long, centuries' long process brought by weird, long bearded hippie dudes in brown robes and sandals arguing with Druids and the other established hierarchs (the first Christian king of Bohemia wasn’t until Saint Wenceslas as late as the 10th century). And of course, in non-Latin lands when these hippie monks came in talking crazy stuff that should get you killed, often they were brought to the king and the king sometimes took interest, sometimes burned the guy at a stake or sacrificed him one way or another to Wotan or Chernobog or whoever.

Anyway, enough of that, I’m talking about Witches Day. The traditions were very slow to go. The Catholic Inquisition struggled with figuring out ways that the traditions would be quelled. It didn't work so well, and some schools of thought believed that it would be better to blend the local traditions with Christianity (Jesuits especially took up this strain of thought when they went on a global level, hence the differences between Latin American Catholicism and Roman Catholicism). And so, the winter yule tree became a symbol of Christmas, the Easter bunny a symbol of Easter and the animals that God created, and so forth. The symbols of pagan religions were subverted into symbols of Christianity. And why not? Paganism probably did the same with the animalistic traditions that came before Wotan and Zeus.

On May Day, the old pagans held bonfires and sacrifices, hoping that the evil spirits of winter would be driven away and the warmth of summer would be brought in. People loved the bonfires. So the bonfires were eventually allowed, but the meaning slightly changed (witches instead of evil spirits, the irony here being that it was a tradition of witches to begin with), and the guys over at the Inquisition office had an idea. “Who do we normally burn on bonfires?”

“Witches!”

“And who celebrates May Day the most anyway?”

“Witches!”

“So why don’t we take May Day and turn it into a day of burning witches?” (of course, human sacrifice is so popular a thing that that also didn't end easily, at some point everyone was burning each other)

“How do we know who’s a witch?”

“Burn her!”

Basically, the old Monty Python scene:

And later, when they ran out of witches... “We could use an effigy!”

“Ah, what a fine idea!”

And so a new tradition was born, or rather an old tradition transformed into a new one.

The Actual Event

There are a few bonfires held around Prague for Caroldejnice. The most famous one is in Mala Strana at Kampa park, and the more local ones are in Zizkov and the villages around. The more local you get, the more kids and cheesy pop music concerts you get, so we went to the Kampa one, hoping that it would have more of the traditional trappings to show off to the tourists.

Supposedly, there’s a procession that starts from St. Nicholas Church and goes to Kampa Park and they light the fire at 8. We were a bit late, so we went straight to Kampa.

a fireman makes sure it stays under control

We made it for the fire. First we just saw a mass of people, mostly random foreigners, but also a lot of Czech families dressed up as witches and wizards. Then there were the firemen. Firemen everywhere. Fire trucks, fire men standing on fire trucks, and so on.

Then there was a speech in Czech, and finally the drumming started. We fetched a beer in this process, and then sort of watched these dudes with brooms dancing around in a circle, all around the bonfire. I finally caught a glimpse of the bonfire, on which was a burning witch! Not a real witch, mind you, an effigy, but it seemed pretty real. It even looked like it had a skeleton. Weird.

a man with a rat does a dance... as they do

a child looks expectantly for a burning witch

Now I’m not sure what it means that a bunch of people dressed as witches were dancing around a burning witch. Especially after I had read a rant by some English pagans about how it’s bad to burn people and they wouldn’t be burning any witches but celebrating them in England. I wonder if they have a problem with burning Catholics on Guy Fawkes Day…

the fireman wonders why he's there

The bonfire was honestly a bit of a disappointment. Earlier that day, Prague City Hall had met and decided that everything was too dry, hot, and windy, and that they wouldn’t allow bonfires within the city limits. Rather than disallowing the fires altogether, they allowed little small ones that at least got the job of burning the witch done, but areas with bigger witches had their witches remaining unsinged.

Supposedly in the villages it gets crazier, especially where there are rivers separating one village from another. They have a contest about which village can light the bigger fire. But no big fires in Prague tonight, my friends.

We then waddled over to the stage, beers in hand. There were some guys dressed up in medieval costume with medieval instruments, jamming out to some medieval tunes. They didn't seem too disappointed by the lack of fire. They were pretty awesome, I’ll have to grant them. Definitely beat the tiny doll burning in the fire.

the best part of the show, to be honest

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#holidays #Prague #festivals #islands #kampa #history

Vysehrad: A Tale of Two Castles

We were howling through the night, crossing the bridge that seemed to lead across the netherworlds, fog wrapping up and down, and soon we were on the battlements of a castle, singing songs and drinking wine and liquor. That was my first exposure to Vysehrad so many years ago, and I still remember that crisply enough. So when I moved to Prague, I was thinking, “well, no rush to get to Vysehrad and see it in the day since I’ve already technically done that.”

Then I went from city to city, country to country, and now our four years is almost up, and I still hadn’t gone to Vysehrad. When my wife’s cousin came here to see the city, I decided this was the proper occasion to finally give the place a proper look.

view from a bridge on a cloudy day

Anyone who’s been to Prague knows Vysehrad, at the very least by sight: it's that other big church on the other hill on the river. Many people make the mistake of not going. They think “castle” and see Prague Castle, and left to a sense of general disappointment because they were thinking a castle had big walls and ramparts and all that jazz, where in Prague Castle it just feels like a semi-modern complex of government buildings and museums—because that’s what it is. Vysehrad though, actually retains that feel of a castle, touching a little on our Disney-world imagining of Europe, with huge stone walls, high ramparts, and massive gates.

A Tale of Two Castles

Long before the dawn of Prague, there were two castles on the opposite sides of the River Vltava. Czech historians are constantly bickering at which castle was first, and perhaps no one will ever know for sure. But the Czech folk tradition maintains that Vysehrad—which means “high castle” in Czech—was indeed the first castle and even the origin of all Bohemian tradition.

There in the castle lived a most fair maiden, named Princess Libuse, the daughter of the mighty King Krok son of Czech. But to understand Libuse’s importance, let’s rewind to Czech.

Libuse looking off to her fairy tale

Czech was the brother of Lech and Rus and they lived somewhere north of the Black Sea, in what would be modern day Ukraine. They went on a hunting trip together, and each followed different prey. Czech’s and Lech’s prey were pretty persistent, as Lech’s prey brought him all the way up to what is now Poland and Czech’s all the way over to what is now Prague. Rus’s prey must have been pretty easy, because Kyiv is where he ended up, which was only a spitting distance from where he started. Czech and his people were called the Czechs, Rus and his people were called the Rus (later Ukrainians and Russians), and Lech and his people were called the Pollechs. True story.

So Czech begat Krok who then begat three daughters, the youngest and wisest was Libuse. Her sister Kazi was a magician and Teta was a healer (hence the name of the Czech pharmacy chain), but she had the far superior gift of seeing the future. If you don’t know how this is superior, then you should either read Philip K. Dick’s “The Golden Man” or watch “Next” if you can handle Nicholas Cage.

a closer view of Libuse

Being that Libuse’s gift was that much more awesome than his other two dauther’s, Krok chose Libuse to take over the realm after he passed on. As they were walking along a cliff, or perhaps in another castle, or their house, or somewhere, legends are kind of dim here, Libuse said, “I see a castle on that hill, and a great city whose glory will touch the stars” (considering that Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were both from Prague, maybe this was a literal and accurate prediction). So following his daughter’s instruction, Krok built Vysehrad, and Libuse inherited it. And it was good.

Libuse was a wise ruler, but her subjects were even wiser. They said, “How is it there’s a woman ruling our kingdom? This is madness! You must marry and show us a man to follow around blindly!”

a Czech angel praying for the end of matriarchy

Now Libuse had been having some visions, some erotic visions even, as she was in love with the man she had seen in her visions. She told her men, “If you would have me marry, then find me this man. He’s a ploughman with a broken sandal, and you’ll find him by letting a horse loose at a junction in the road.” They set out and found the man, whose name was Premysl, who became the father of a long dynasty of Czech kings. At their peak, they would come to rule all of the Czech lands, as well as Austria and Poland, and didn’t die out until the 1300s, though ancestors from the female side would live on and birth the great Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV.

The fortress

The Presmyslids (ancestors of Premysl the Ploughman), in recorded history, were in Prague Castle for most of their reign, though they did make a short stay at Vysehrad.

the main castle gate

Charles IV in the 1300s laid the final fortifications of Prague Castle and by his time Vysehrad was a ruin, so he had it rebuilt as a principal defensive fortress and put a secondary residence there. After the Hussite wars, when it, like the rest of Prague’s monuments, was ransacked by drunk Protestants, it fell into disuse and disrepair, not seeing any TLC until the 1700s, when it was developed into a modern fortress with bastions and casements. Much of the upper city and palace area were destroyed to make way for barracks, weapons storage, and the burgrave’s residence.

looking out from the bastions

Getting there

There are two really great ways to enter Vysehrad, and a plethora of really crappy ways. The easiest and laziest way, being the best, is to come by metro. This is the way we took. We rode the metro, which hangs underneath the huge dry bridge reaching over the valley neighborhood of Nusle, and got off at the Vysehrad metro station. Then it’s an easy walk behind some conference centers and down a neighborhood street until you finally get to a moat and a gate. There we were, Vysehrad.

the entry from Naplavka

The other way up, which we would find on a subsequent trip, was from Naplavka. Go under the train tracks and follow a really pretty street up, which then leads to the fortress gates. You go through the gates, and then come up through a forested path lined with lanterns, until you see the residence and then the beauty of the summer scene with its magnificent view of Prague and the Castle.

The cemetery

Our cousin was really concerned with seeing famous dead Czechs for some reason, which is what sort of led us to this location to show him. Since here, next to that aforementioned gigantic church, is a graveyard with such great composers as Dvorak and Smetana, along with the robot-inventing writer Karel Capek, and Nobel prize-winning writer, Jaroslav Seifert.

the great Slavin, under which is a smattering of famous Czechs

here lies the great composer himself

the arcade where Dvorak's tomb is

The quiet and reflective cemetery is located right next to the massive neo-Gothic St. Peter and Paul basilica.

St. Peter and Paul Basilica

The first church in Vysehrad was built in the 11th century, but it burned down. So as with most churches that burned down, the locals decided to build a bigger and better one, and they built a successive list of massive churches until they finally settled on this beauty in the 1800s.

approaching St. Peter and Paul

the entrance of St. Peter and Paul

Inside is one of the prettier churches in Prague (far prettier than say, St. Vitus) and has murals and paint from floor to ceiling. The paintings are all “neo-Gothic”, which in Czech church terms actually means they’re art nouveau and look like they could have been painted by Alphonse Mucha, though without breasts and curvaceous babes. They are really interesting and beautiful works though.

a woman on Facebook

not quite as curvaceous as a Mucha

The park

Around the church is a vast park, filled with statues of different Czech figures, along with Czechs reclining, sunbathing, and drinking. The walk along the battlements is fantastic, which wraps around for what seems like a mile, incredible views everywhere, and just the nice feeling that you’re walking along some three hundred year old walls.

Festivals are commonly held here, and it’s a well known spot for great fireworks viewing on New Years.

heroic posing from heroic places

statues litter the park

The beer garden

It’s definitely one of the smaller beer gardens, but as it’s literally right on top of one of the bastions, it has a really awesome view of the Nuselske bridge and Nusle. The beer garden literally extends up to the edge of the wall, where you can look straight down to buildings below. They serve Pilsner Urquell out of the tap there, with a really smell-worthy Balkan grill cooking up the bureks and burgers.

the terrible view from the beer garden

not at all a romantic spot

really, really terrible view

It’s definitely a place in Prague not to be missed, and the only place where you can get the real “castle” feeling of walking along medieval walls (even if they aren’t quite medieval era, but shhhh, nobody’s really counting).

#castles #touristicsites #Prague #history