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Chudenice
Chudenice is the town assigned to April in my photo project for this year so here I am, at the end of the month, to present some of the photos I took there. 35 photos again, as in the previous months, somehow the number feels good. Chudenice is a small town with about 705 inhabitants and long history reaching back to 1200. The town and its history are closely connected with one of the oldest Czech noble families – the Czernin family. The most interesting places you can see in the town are the old Czernin castle, church of John the Baptist, observation tower Bolfánek, bath house and manor with…
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Žichovice
Žichovice is the town that I had assigned to March in my photo project for this year so here I am at the end of the month to share some of the photos I took. I opted for the same number of photos as in my previous posts related to this project which is 35. Why Žichovice? It’s a small town (about 680 inhabitants) with a long history (dating back to 1045) and a few interesting buildings whose photos captured my attention when I was browsing the Internet and looking for potential places for the project. But photography may be deceptive and may show you things which are no longer true or look…
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Horšovský Týn
Horšovský Týn is the town assigned to February in my photo project for this year and because today is the last day of the month, I am here to share some of the photos I took. I opted for the same number of photos as in my post on Žinkovy which is 35. Horšovský Týn is a very old town that went through many changes. The first written reference to it comes from 1184, it was pronounced a town in the fourteenth century. In 1953, the town was declared an urban conservation area. Nowadays about 5,000 inhabitants live there. There is a castle in the town (built in the 13th century and rebuilt in…
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Winter trip to Karlovy Vary
In the Czech Republic, we have a tradition of so called “spring holidays” for schoolchildren. The holidays last one week but they are planned within several weeks so that all districts don’t have them at the same time, this year the span is from February 5 to March 18. My younger son Zbyněk has had the holidays this week and because we don’t go skiing, we were thinking about a trip to make. Finally we decided to visit the spa Karlovy Vary where Zbyněk was on a school trip last June and it seemed interesting to visit the spa in winter under quite different conditions. Also, I had never been…
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Žinkovy
January is almost at its end so I’m here to share some of the photos I took in Žinkovy, the first town on the list of my photo project for this year. Why Žinkovy, you might ask? The answer would be simple. Although it’s just a small town that is neither extraordinary nor special, we visited it several times in different seasons and always found something interesting so it seemed a good place to start the project with. Let me clarify that I don’t see this collection of photos as something representing the town but rather as a collection of captures that caught my attention. If you were there, you…
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Stachelberg fort
I have never been much interested in military history and don’t know much about it but I was quite impressed by the Stachelberg fort my family and I visited in northern Bohemia. The Stachelberg fort was built as part of border defences against Nazi Germany growing in power, it was supposed to become the largest Czechoslovak artillery fort. The fort consists of 12 objects connected by means of extensive underground, the total length of tunnels and rooms situated 25 to 60 metres underground is approximately 3.5 kilometres. Construction of the fort started in October 1937 and should have been finished in 2 years but it was stopped prematurely in October…
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Autumnal bits and pieces
Today I would like to share a few photos that I took in Rokycany in September, at the beginning of coming autumn. No. 1: Boxes in front of a vegetable shop Squash everywhere… in many types and sizes. No. 2: Light and shadows I took this photo in a park. There was an interesting wooden shape on the ground, something like a spiral, just triangular. I don’t know if it is intended as a place to sit down or whether it is just decorative, probably both. I loved how the light and shade complemented one another and that brought me to turning the photo into black and white which simplified…
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Flower Garden in Kroměříž
The Flower Garden in Kroměříž is an exceptional garden which belongs to the world’s most important examples of garden art. It’s not huge but it represents a transition between Italian late renaissance gardens and French baroque and classicist gardens and although it’s more than three hundred years old, its concept has been preserved to this day. As I mentioned in my previous post about the Archbishop chateau in Kroměříž, in 1998 the whole complex of the chateau and its gardens including the Flower Garden was added to the UNESCO List of World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The garden was established in 1665 – 1675 by bishop Karel II of Lichtenstein-Castelkorn,…
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Archbishop chateau in Kroměříž
In my post about Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach I mentioned the Archbishop chateau in Kroměříž and today I would like to tell you more about it. Castles and chateaus are usually linked to the history of noble families but the chateau in Kroměříž used to be property of bishops and archbishops residing in about 50 kilometres distant Olomouc, they used the chateau for representative purposes. The settlement Kroměříž became property of Olomouc episcopate way back in 1110. 150 years later it was declared a town, a castle was built there and all administration of the episcopate was brought there. In the first half of the sixteenth century the castle was remodelled into…
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Castle and chateau Frýdlant
In the Jizera Mountains in northern Bohemia, you can find a castle and chateau in one. It has the same name as a nearby town – Frýdlant – and belongs to one of the most important historical buildings in the Czech Republic. The castle was built in the 13th century to protect tradesmen using local business trails. A legend says that in the core of the castle was a stately tower on top of which fire was set to serve the tradesmen as a beacon. The castle was owned by several noble families that remodelled and improved the castle gradually. In the 16th century, part of the castle was rebuilt…
