The Party on Hvar

I can’t stress it enough. The Dalmatian coast is one of the most beautiful in the world, with its steep cliffs, ancient Greek and Italian villages, castles, fields of lavender, and all the secret coves any sailor or beachcomber could desire.

A Little Bit of History

Last time I touched on Croatia, I was talking about the Sail Croatia cruise we were on last year and talked about the oldest city in Croatia, Stari Grad, which is on Hvar Island. This time, I’m still talking about that epic cruise vacation, except now I’m talking about the new port, Hvar. I call Hvar the new port, but it was settled in 800 AD, after the Slavs came in. So it’s old in regards to most cities in the world, but it’s a relatively new development on the island, since Stari Grad comes to us from the Greeks of Paros at around 384 BC.

Hvar and Stari Grad are opposites on many terms, not just in age. Where Stari Grad is a sleepy, romantic town of relaxation, lavender ice cream, and bicycle rides through olive and lavender fields, Hvar is literally a non-stop party.

About the Island

As our boat came creeping towards the harbor, we could already hear the gyrating dance music pounding out its rhythms from some exclusive club at 11 am. One questions whether it was just starting up or just finishing from the night before. The boats were all crowded in, and access to the town was impossible until a special water taxi came up to take us away. In the meantime, we went for a swim in a nearby cove until our taxi time was ready. The boat would then dock much later that night, when the day boats and ferries were gone. That meant, once we were on land, we were staying there.

taking the ferry to Hvar

That turned out to be no problem though. Hvar covers two hills. One hill is the new town, on the outer arm of the natural harbor, small Italian style villas and apartments crowded across it with shuttered windows and flowers spilling from every crack. On the other hill sits the castle and the gardens going down the side, to finally meet the city which sprawls midway up. Within the garden grounds was the old walled city, which has long been gone from fires and pirates and fires caused by pirates, pirates who were probably from Omis.

What to do

That said, there’s chiefly three things to occupy yourself with. Walk around the new town and get the wonderful views of the sea and the castle, or walk around the older quarters and pretend you’re in some sort of sprawling fantasy castle, re-enacting the scenes of Game of Thrones — of course, you’ll get enough of that once you get to Dubrovnik.

When you land with a view like this, you know you're in the right place

We finally got to the island and the club pounding away. People were invited in, but only people wearing all white and willing to drink champagne and dance. It looked as if there was a rule that if you stopped dancing in the 40-degree Celsius sun then out you went. It also appeared that perhaps they were filming a commercial or something, given the stringent requirements of looking like you were having fun. To note, unless you had a lot of drugs or alcohol, it would have been impossible to be having fun in that heat!

St. Stephen's towers over the main pjaca, or plaza

We immediately made our way to the central square, or pjaca (piatsa) and took shelter in the 14th century St. Stephen's Cathedral. It was built on the remains of a 6th century church, and didn't meet its final form until the bell tower was attached in the 17th century.

The Castle

The hike up the hill from the older quarters through the gardens is not easy, but it’s worth it. Drink lots of water before you go, as it’s hot even into the late night, and you’ll be drenched in sweat by the time you get to the top. As you go up, you get to see the ancient roads, and you start to see the formation of the ancient city as you approach the castle walls. And then there you are, in a massive fortress with a commanding view of the harbor and the sea beyond.

an ancient road and church on the way

at the castle ramparts

The castle has several interesting exhibitions inside, with one history about the history of the town. There’s also a dungeon that you can visit, with steep steps down the stairs of an outer tower and then a row of prison cells with pretty quality views. I was again reminded of a scene of Game of Thrones, when Tyrion was imprisoned in the Eyrie. That’s how steep the way down was!

inside the dungeon

no end to amazing views on the way

Make sure you hit the castle in time for sunset, as there is no other place to be for such an event on Hvar, standing on the ramparts and watching the sun sparkle across the sea, exploding on the horizon.

there are few better places to catch a sunset

Hvar is a party town, as I mentioned. There is no shortage of restaurants, cocktail bars, and restaurants. Start off with some Italian food or pizza – pizza if you’re on budget – and move on to any of your dozens of options in the old part of town. It’s like you’re partying in a medieval castle. Which you kind of are. And that’s really awesome.

How to Get There

Either you can sort out a cruise like we did, or you can take the ferry from Split, Dubrovnik, or other villages.

Places to Stay

We stayed on our boat. But there are also loads of hostels, hotels, and AirBnBs. You can try your usual booking sites, like booking.com or Airbnb.com.

Staying in Hvar is not for everyone though, and that comes with a big warning. If you’re young and want to dance all night or hook up, then it’s most definitely the place to go. If you want a quieter place, I would stay in Stari Grad and rent a bicycle to get to Hvar. Then just ride back after sunset for something romantic in the “Old Town”.

#hvar #Omis #castles #touristicsites #hotels

You Are Not From the Castle: The Kafka Museum

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 my cat 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?

the high castle of Prague

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.

David Cerny's moving pissing sculpture's in the museum courtyard

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 castle Kafka was not from

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.”

Prague Castle above the bridge

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.

#Prague #castles #rantsandraves #touristicsites #museums

An Escape to Country Castles

There's not much room for comfort these days in Prague. Every spare inch of shade is taken by someone in yearning for a cooler place. The bars and restaurants are sweltering, unless you find some multinational corporation like Costa or Starbucks that took the expense to put in some air conditioning. All the old white trash "herna" bars that were always stocked with air coolers were shut down in a popularly suspected anti-money laundering action a couple of years ago and nobody's house has anything remotely resembling a reasonable air conditioning system. This wouldn't be a problem if not climate change. Having spent many summers visiting family in Louisiana, I hate to complain about a bit of heat. In Louisiana, it's paired with unbreathable humidity, the kind where you step out of the car and fall back because the moisture just whacked you in the chest like a vengeful mafioso and now you have to adapt to breathing in water. Nothing compares to Louisiana heat, except maybe Florida heat I suspect, but I've never been there. I'm in Prague now anyway and it's pretty damned hot here.

Vitkov Castle

There are few things to do to escape the absurdity of the temperature. One can hit a movie, since they're almost always air conditioned. One can go to one of the few public swimming pools in town, like Podoli, but we tend to avoid those knowing how ridiculously over-crowded they ought to be with such a climatological extreme. The last option is to just get out of town. Around Prague, there are many lakes, creeks and rivers where people have adapted into beachfronts and places for pleasure-boating. I've yet to find a boat rental place outside of Prague though - you can rent boats on the Vltava on the embankment in the city - but they must exist.

For our outing, we decided to go to two beautiful Disneyesque castles we had scene last winter - Orlik and Zvikov. Both of the castles sit on the Vltava River, connected by about an hour long boat ride. We noticed the boat availability when we were there in November, but they only operate from June to August, so we decided to take advantage of the weekend and check it out. Orlik is only about an hour and a half drive, so going on the spur of the moment wasn't a problem for us. When we got to Orlik, we found the castle gates open this time, but instead of going in, we circled around and followed the coast a little back where the docks were. There was a small beergarden on the bank with an excellent view of the river. The Vltava had been dammed a bit further up making it almost like a really long lake with steep cliffs on every side.

The entrance to Orlik

The tour at Orlik is definitely worth it. There is a room with some of the most remarkable woodwork on a ceiling you'll ever see, and a very creepy sight of a thousand or so deer heads, then you get to see all the rifles used to get those deer heads. It's 120 czk and in Czech, but they give you a handy guide book in English to follow along. Outside of the tour, there's a small nature trail skirting the river and the beergarden. Orlik in Czech means "small eagle" or "baby eagle", and before the dam, it would have been high up on a rocky promontory overlooking the then much smaller river. Now it sits almost on the river, but still amazingly scenic, as more water never seems to take away from a sight. It was originally built as a royal property in the 15th century and like most major castles in Bohemia, passed hands to the Eggenbergs and then to the Schwarzenbergs. For a time it was the main residence of the Schwarzenberg family, and the most famous resident was Karl Phillipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, who led the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig.

Orlik standing over the water

We waited at the beergarden for about an hour for the boat. In such a heat, we didn't really have energy to do much else, but sit and drink and dodge the swarm of bees that took up residence there. Since we had arrived only in time for the last boat, it meant that we would only spend 15 minutes at Zvikov, which was fine since we had seen it before. However, Zvikov would have been a much better place to wait around, as there's a lot more shade as well as beach where one could relax and swim. Not so much was possible at Orlik. The boat though was a nice ride and had a bar serving up sort of cold refreshments. The ride was 240 czk round trip, which seemed to be pretty reasonable for such a beautiful and hassle free ride. Tickets are purchased first come first serve on the boat. There was also a boat that went to the damn and one that simply circumnavigated the immediate area too. All of them can be foundhere (unfortunately only in Czech, but there are no reservations anyway, so just come as you are).

Inside the Zvikov courtyard

Zvikov Castle is more of the traditional castle ruins that one might envision the Fellowship of the Ring coming upon while running from the Nazgul. Like Orlik, it also used to be high up on the rocks, but with the water rising up, now sits on a narrow peninsula formed by the convergence of the Vltava River and Oltava River. In a fashion, it's one of the oldest castles in the Czech Republic and much of Europe, in that there has been a fort there in one form or another since the Celts fortified the place in the 1st century AD. The current construction dates back to the 13th century, built under the orders of King Otakar I. It was under royal possession until the 1400s when it was sold to the Rozmberks, who sided with the Protestants during the 30 Years War and suffered a major siege there before capitulating. The Habsburgs proceeded to loot it and destroy it and it sat as a ruin for a few hundred years. The lands eventually passed, as all Czech lands eventually pass, to the Schwarzenberg family, who restored the castle.

Being in the middle of a major empire is really the worst place for a military fortification, and as the Schwarzenbergs were using Orlik as their primary residence, they let Zvikov slip away into memory. It was used for storing grain for awhile, until it was finally taken by the Communists and turned into a museum in 1948. Wandering the outside of Zvikov is amazing as it is, as there are few chances to freely walk around semi-preserved ruins. For the buildings that are left - which do have some interesting murals remaining - a small fee of 70 czk gets you in and wandering on your own. The most interesting room is the remains of a grand bedroom that half fell into the river below from age and disrepair - don't worry, it's safe now! Make sure you go early so you have plenty of time to explore both castles!

#castles #Orlik #Zvikov #museums #touristicsites