Strážnice

In one of my previous posts you could see the open-air museum in Strážnice, reminding us of the past of the area. Today I’d like to add a few photos from the town itself, photos capturing the traditional face of the town.

Strážnice is known as a place where a popular International Folklore Festival takes place every year. It started in 1946 and last year it was visited by more than 20 000 visitors.

There are several buildings in the town which preserve the typical decoration as you can see in the following two photos. The patterns are not same but have the same style. Some of the houses don’t have that blue stripe at the base and as you can see in the two photos, the stripe is either decorated with those little arcs or it is plain.

Hopefully there will always live people in the town which will like the style and will be proud of decorating their houses with it. The problem is that you can’t apply it to every house so the architecture plays an important role.

In the photo below you can see a White Watchtower, which was built in 1615 as part of the town’s fortification. It looked wonderful against the blue sky. I didn’t know there is a chance to climb it up so next time, if there is any, it would be a great idea to see the town from above.

And then, there is a Church of Assumption of the Virgin Mary, it was consecrated in 1750. It’s quite a huge building from both outside and inside and rather impressive. I was surprised to see a glass case placed near the front altar and displaying relics of the pope John Paul II – a piece of cloth he was wearing at the time when he escaped an assassination attempt in 1981, a piece of cloth stained with his blood. I wouldn’t expect seeing such a “modern relic” anywhere…

In the last photo, there is a building that attracted my attention as well, it’s of a high school.

Well, that’s all and I regret that I didn’t take many more photos as there would be much more to show. There was quite a strong Jewish community living in the town before WWII and we visited the local synagogue used as a museum nowadays. There is a street full of little houses where the Jews lived and you can perceive the atmosphere of the place. There was an interesting building of another high school and a picturesque town hall. But perhaps it’s not that bad to have a reason to return there one day and see the town from a different point of view.