Give The Dog A Bone!

On the final morning of CeSFuR, we finally met up with Greylion, a fellow Untappd fan and someone who had been messaging me throughout the week on the service. As the WiFi in the hotel was so overloaded, correspondence was difficult but I did finally manage to collar him as we were about to leave, spying him on the terrace drinking a beer. We soon got chatting and we were invited to a post-convention gathering he was having back in Prague that evening. It was a nice way to end the con and made us feel slightly less sad when we were saying goodbye to all of our friends. The farewells were eased by the fact that we would see many of them again a mere seven weeks later at EF but saying goodbye to the excellent hotel and a fantastic four days was still quite tough.

We opted to avoid the motorway on the way back to Prague, deciding to drive through the country villages and small towns looking for a more authetic slice of the Czech Republic. Before we set off, we drove around to the village of Lisek once more to dump our rubbish in the recycling bins but soon we were on our way, traversing narrow country roads with tight bends, blind summits and a myriad of rural railway lines criss-crossing them. The driving wasn't particularly difficult although halfway to Prague, we did encounter difficulty as the road was closed and we were forced to take a poorly signed diversion, resulting in us eventually getting lost. The sat nav wasn't giving us an alternate route, sending us back onto the closed roads at various intervals, and we spent a good forty-five minutes driving around the same patch of countryside looking for a way through, encountering one village on two separate occasions from different ends. It was quite frustrating, particularly as we had somewhere to be, but in the end we found a breakthrough and we were soon on our way.

For about twenty years I have wanted to see the Sedlec Ossuary near the town of Kutna Hora. Installed onto the Unesco World Heritage list in 1996, Kutna Hora became the seat of King Wenceslas's Royal Mint in 1308, with silver from the nearby mines making it the most important settlement in the land after Prague. A depletion in the silver and The Thirty Years War hastened its demise, as did a fire in 1770, but today it's very much a picture postcard place, with cobbled narrow streets and pastel-shaded buildings. It's truly a beautiful place and I fell in love almost instantly, so much so that Wolfie and I have casually started looking at buying a house here. There are quite a few important sights here but the main one is the Ossuary, which I first saw on an episode of Lonely Planet on Discovery around 1997. The remains of 40,000 people were piled in the crypt of this small chapel and in 1870, when the building was purchased by the Schwarzenbergs, they allowed a local wood carver to get creative with the bones. The result is a haunting experience, with piles of skulls and femurs forming sarcophogi in all four corners of the main space while sitting above the crypt in the centre of the room is a huge chandelier made up of at least one of every bone in the human body. Surrouding the chandelier there are four pyriamids again made of human bones while there are chains of human skulls danging from the roof. The highlight though is the Schwarzenberg coat of arms, again made out of human bones, with one quadrant featuring a raven pecking out the eye socket of a skull. You would think that the Ossuary was somewhat creepy and yet it was actually quite calming, an affirmation of the importance of life and the overhanging presence of death. It was certainly a little grim but it was quite tasteful, artistic even, despite the pairs of femurs dangling from the central archways. The memorial to the victims of the Black Death outside, along with the graveyard, emphasised the morbid scene in direct contrast to the glory of the bright sunshine on a warm summer's day.

Due to our delay on the road, we only really had around one hour to see this and the other major site of Kutna Hora, the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist. This was around 100m away from the Ossuary and in fact we had parked outside it, with me impressing Wolfie with my knowledge of Czech by asking a local couple whether we needed to pay. Alas we didn't, and having seen the Ossuary, we walked towards the impressive Catherdal, only having around half an hour to see it. It's a truly magnificant Gothic-cum-Baroque structure, a rarity with the combination of the two styles. The interior is quite plain in white and light orange but this gives a sense of the huge space of the building, while the paintings along the nave highlight important moments in the Cathedral's history, not to mention important Biblical scenes. We took an audioguided tour, like we had done in the Ossuary, and it was a little rushed but Pavel the curator - who really could have been a furry - let us stay an additional ten minutes so we could drink more of it in. Architectually, the building was fascinating, and we got into the rough space to see how some of the chapels were constructed. The chapels themselves, all five of them from memory, were wonderfully different while the marble work and frescos were truly breathtaking.

Sadly we couldn't spend as long as we would have liked here due to the Cathedral closing, not to mention our need to get back to Prague to take the rental car back to Europcar before they closed at 8pm. However, I did want to see the centre of Kutna Hora, which I have already described and I was very glad that we took this opportunity. We did stop in the centre and walk around the main square, spying the Marian column, which are particularly popular in the Czech lands and dedicated to the glory of the Virgin Mary in thanks for ending a plague. While driving around the winding streets of Kutna Hora, we spied the imposing St. Barbara's Church (Chrám svaté Barbory), a huge structure very similar to York Minster if the Minster had its main support on its exterior rather than the interior. It's one of the most famous Gothic churches in Central Europe and is a breathtakingly imposing sight, which is only aided by the astonishing vista of the town from its gardens. Sadly, we didn't get to visit inside the Church due to time constraints but we did get to walk around its grounds and also along Barborská, the street that runs adjacent to the Seventeenth Century Jesuit College containing thirteen baroque statues of saints inspired by those on Charles Bridge in Prague. All of the statues are related to Jesuits or the town of Kutna Hora in some way, while St Barbara also features holding a chalace standing next to a stone tower. She is the patron saint of miners, which makes sense based on the town's silver history.

With a heavy heart, we had to leave Kutna Hora to head back to the Czech capital, which was still around an hour and a quarter away. We were cutting it fine admittedly and any delay would have scuppered us but fortunately all went well and, although finding a petrol station on the right side of the road to replenish our fuel proved tricky, we did get back to the rental place forty minutes before it was due to close. Our fuel for 450km of driving cost a mere £20, meaning that Kamsirius, who we had picked up in Prague and driven to CeSFuR (but not back) owed us the princely some of £3.50 in petrol for the ride. Added to the beer we bought him while he was there, he owed us a fiver. Once the car was safely back, we ambled along the streets of Prague with all our luggage, checking into the ibis hotel this time, which was conveniently next door to the MGallery hotel where we had spent the first night in the city.

However, we couldn't spend long there as we were already late for our meeting with Greylion, who text me a message to say that in addition to the three others we expected to be there, a group of ten Russian furs had also turned up. With directions how to get there on the tram in hand, we soon boarded the number 22 and headed to the north-east suburbs of the city and the Pivovar U Bulovky, one of the first microbreweries in the city, which opened in 2004. I've always preferred sticking to the Metro systems in foreign cities, feeling somewhat ill at ease on trams and buses in case I get lost, but the trams were very easy to use and had specified stops so finding Bulovka was pretty easy, particularly as I had taken a photograph of the route map before we embarked. The establishment is a rather non-discript place situated in a residential suburb. It's hard to believe that a place so good was where it was. It had a rather homely feel to it, bedecked in wood, and is one of two places owned by the Richter Brewery. As is quite typical in the Czech Republic, there were only four beers on tap, all from Richter and we enjoyed sampling all four. Světlý Ležák was a rather nice light pilsner while Jantar 13 was a higher strength more hoppy effort. Weissbier Dunkel 13 was a weak tasting wheat beer which was not too overpowering while Stout 14 was a rather malty effort which was probably my favourite. We also grabbed some delicious food here, with Wolfie opting for the same dish he had when with Lukas while I had lamb shank served with mashed potatoes and dill. The potato wasn't as mashed as thoroughly as it could have been but it was delicious, while the company was most excellent too. The Russian furs didn't say too much but we had a nice conversation with Greylion and his Slovak friend who now lives in Oban in north-west Scotland. The atmosphere was convivial and the beer kept flowing, with the Russians leaving at around 10pm (and not fully paying) and us following around half an hour later, after the bar had closed. We soon realised that we had no tram tickets to get back and there was no place to buy them but Greylion soon sorted us out and we headed back to the hotel satiated but happy.