Section Archive Spotlight
Slavonice: a South Bohemian renaissance town off the beaten track
It is a very crisp autumn day here in South Bohemia. And I’m slowly
trundling towards Slavonice, which is in the very far south of this
country, right on the Austrian border. I’m in a modern-looking, but as
you can probably hear, rather shuddery sort of train. And I’m heading
towards this stunningly pretty Czech town, which I hear, in recent years,
has become something of an artists’ colony. So, I’m off to find out
more about that in this week’s Spotlight.
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Wallachian Kingdom – reporting from a land that doesn’t exist
A rather strange court case made the news recently when the deposed king of
the make-believe Wallachian Kingdom lost a seven year legal battle with his
former ‘foreign minister’ over the copyright to the fictitious realm.
The Wallachian Kingdom – which has its own passports and currency -
started as a practical joke, but soon grew into the most successful tourist
venture in the country. And confusingly, it’s situated in the real
Moravian region of Wallachia. Our reporter Rob Cameron went there to find
out what all the fuss was about.
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Veltrusy Chateau
In this edition of Spotlight we visit Veltrusy Chateau, a gorgeous summer
estate found north of the Czech capital. Founded in the 1700s by Czech
nobleman Václav Antonín Chotek, Veltrusy is far from an obvious
destination, but is well-worth a day-trip. The castle grounds boast a 300
hectare park along the Vltava River, with numerous paths leading among
ancient trees to pavilions, a bridge or two and various monuments. Then of
course, there is the chateau itself, highly valued as a gem of Baroque
architecture. More
The days are numbered for Prague’s largest railway yard
The oldest and largest railway yard in Prague is soon to disappear. It will
be replaced by a modern development with shops, apartments, offices and all
kinds of other facilities as investors are ready to pour money into the
area. In this edition of Spotlight, we look at the past and the future of
the Bubny railway yard in Prague.
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Blatná Castle
The summer months are here and with it tourists visiting many of the
country’s most notable castles and chateaux. But one site you might want
to consider visiting, somewhat off the beaten path, is Blatná Castle in
southern Bohemia, some 95 kilometres south of the capital. It’s not an
understatement to say Blatná Castle is something out of a fairly tale,
overlooking a surrounding moat and deer park. Blatná is the location we
visit in Spotlight today. More
Varnsdorf, a north Bohemian town in the path of Buddha
A town surrounded by deep pine forests, dotted with old timbered
German-style villas and occasional Communist-era prefab houses, a town
boasting many parks, a river, two churches – and the country’s first
Buddhist temple. This is Varnsdorf, a town of 16,000 in the northernmost
part of the Czech Republic.
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Boating along the Vltava river in Prague
Forget the Blue Danube, it’s the greeny-brown Vltava which is the watery
muse of artists and musicians in this part of the world. The Vltava is the
Czech Republic’s longest river, stretching more than 400 km. It is also
the main waterway through the Czech capital Prague, and has been most
famous in recent years for bursting its banks in 2002. The floods caused
billions of crowns’ worth of damage to the capital alone, and put the
city’s metro out of action for several months.
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The Romany Holocaust commemoration service at Lety
A bus of students and activists heads for Lety, South Bohemia, on May 13.
They are driving to the site of a former concentration camp, set up by the
Nazis to wipe out the Bohemian protectorate’s Roma population during the
Second World War. Official sources say that 326 Roma perished in the
concentration camp at Lety, while many hundreds more were transported from
Lety to Auschwitz, where they were taken to the gas chambers.
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SAPA: Prague’s ‘little Vietnam’
SAPA is about as close as you are going to get to feeling like you are in
Hanoi, or Ho Chi Minh City, while you are still, in fact, in Prague. At
certain moments, and from certain angles, you can almost forget the prefab
housing which surrounds the Vietnamese market, and believe that you are on
a completely different continent. SAPA is the heart of the Czech
Republic’s rapidly-expanding Vietnamese community, and not for nothing
has it been dubbed ‘little Vietnam’. But unlike the Chinatowns that
form an integral part of many a city, SAPA is miles away from Prague’s
city centre. I ventured out to SAPA, where I was met by my guide for the
day: More
Mladá Boleslav – an industrial town with an ancient history
A rumbling engine drowns out the sounds of fellow passengers on the bus
–somehow fitting on a visit to Mladá Boleslav, a town synonymous with
cars and car engines. A little over a century ago, the first Czech
bicycle,
the first motorcycle, and eventually the first motorised buggy
rolled out of what was then a modest factory in the town owned by mechanic
Václav Laurin and former bookseller Václav Klement. Mladá Boleslav has
been known for its car production ever since. More
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