Eastern Europe July 2017

tl;dr Go here if you're an illiterate schweinhund and only like pictures.  If you want to read the history too, focus not on violence and war, but on the people who made a difference by creating something that would continue being a gift to human civilization into the future:  Ignac Semmelweis, Gregor Mendel, Franz Kafka, Viktor Frankl, Ludwig Boltzmann, the Hussites, and Marcus Aurelius.

None of these cities was the Leesport of their respective countries, except maybe Hostavice, Czechia.

I was in Prague for a meeting and, noting that the countries in central and eastern Europe are small I realized I could maximize points!  In all seriousness, there's nothing quite like the concentration of culture, history, and beer you find in these places - along with some actual nature occasionally - and as inheritors of the Western European view of history, we neglect the history of these places at our peril. (Until I did my research for this vacation, I didn't know most of this either.)

Where I went: Czech Republic (Prague, Karlovy Vary, Brno); Poland (Auschwitz, Krakow, High Tatras); Slovakia (Spissky Hrad, Kosice, Trencin, Elizabeth Bathory's castle, Bratislava); Hungary (Mohi Battlefield, Budapest); Austria (Vienna, Carnuntum Roman ruins). Of the large cities I went to, I liked Krakow the most, Budapest and Vienna a lot, Prague a little bit less, and wasted a whole two days in Bratislava. As in the rest of Europe, most of the mid-size towns were quite pleasant.

I was surprised how much the countryside of Central Europe looks like Pennsylvania.

Where I didn't go: Romania, because the rental car companies don't let you drive your car into Romania, and there still really are no true highways so it takes forever to get anywhere, and they're not even in the Schengen Area yet; also, Ukraine, because part of the country is a war zone so my travel insurance would be voided even though I was just going to cross the border and get a soda and come back into Hungary, and in the western part at that, far from the military activity in Crimea. A travesty of social justice; clearly I am being oppressed. So if I enter Ukraine for 5 minutes so I get points for it, and then two days later a bear attacks me in Romania - the insurance company would check my passport before they reimburse, and when they saw that Ukraine stamp, BINGO! medical bills not covered. What does Ukraine have to do with that! Did the bear follow me across the border? Plus, you can get covered in lots of other supposedly safe places (e.g., rural El Salvador, which is a lot sketchier than the side of Ukraine away from Crimea, but no war there, so I guess it's fine!) Outrageous and shameful.

Note: eastern European languages use a lot of diacritics and accents that we don't use in English. Out of laziness, I omit those.

SUMMARY
Positive surprise of the trip: Krakow is really cool.
Letdown: Although Slovakian small towns are quite pleasant, the capital Bratislava is pointless.

CZECHIA
The garden in Brno where Mendel did his genetics experiments
The law school (but not the building) that Kafka attended
The site of both Defenestrations and the Prague Castle complex
The many bridges over the Vltava, including the Charles
The Jewish Quarter
Karlovy Vary and Jachymov (Joachimsthal), birthplace of the word "dollar" as well as site of a uranium mine and modern radon baths, yes really (in case you thought Centralia wasn't weird enough)
The park and mini-Eiffel tower on the hill
The Battle of Austerlitz (Napoleonic Wars)
The Battle of Bila Hora ("White Hill") (Thirty Years War)
Site of the Heydrich Assassination site (the Czechs assassinated their Nazi ruler)

POLAND
Auschwitz
Krakow (amazing medieval city, rebuilt in glory after being flattened by the Mongols twice)
The High Tatras, Europe’s awesomest mountain range you’ve never heard of (but judging by the crowds, Poles sure have)
And ate: pierogies!

HUNGARY
Mohi Battlefield, where the Mongols slaughtered the Hungarian army
The Ignaz Semmelweis Museum (the guy who figured out you should wash your hands before surgery)
The single high school that a substantial portion of the physicists on the Manhattan project attended
The Terror Museum (about the Nazi and Communist secret police)
Various monuments dedicated to the 1956 revolt
The Royal Palace
Parliament building
The Jewish quarter
And ate/drank: real goulash, palinka, semi-sweet Hungarian wine, and lots of other flavors (though it sounds weird to say) strange to Western palates, like meats in different creams, and elderberry soda


AUSTRIA
Roman ruins on the Danube where Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote part of the Meditations (Carnuntum)
Place where the Ottoman Turks were turned back by a combined army of Austrians and Poles (Kahlenberg)
Graves of Boltzmann, Beethoven, and Viktor Frankl (at Zentralfriedhof, Central Cemetery, the biggest cemetery you’ll ever see, a meganecropolis)
Natural History Museum
Art History Museum
Freud Museum
Emperor’s Palace (Schoenbrunn)
And ate/drank: schnitzel, strudel and coffee


SLOVAKIA
Elizabeth Bathory’s castle
Roman inscription and castle at Trencin
Monstrous miles of Soviet apartment blocks
Spissky castle (you’ve never heard of it and neither had I; still awesome)
The Iron Curtain – the Slovakia/Hungary/Austria tripoint
Old city Kosice
And ate/drank: haluska – warm sheep cottage cheese with bacon (Seriously, it’s amazing)


Here was my route:

GERMANY - I didn't mention Germany, but I flew through Dusseldorf on the way there and got an altbier.  Not blown away, but never had one before.



It was a four hour layover and I'm a little bummed I didn't take a quick ride out to the Neander Valley, to which I felt a strange draw for some mysterious reason.

CZECH REPUBLIC
Briefly: I found Czech people to be the least warm and approachable of all the four Slavic countries I was in. In particular the waitstaff in restaurants were often quite brusque. (German influence? I’m of German descent so I can say that.) Prague itself is beautiful as advertised, and feels smaller than it is, although at times can be unpleasantly claustrophobic, old city and otherwise. You can find museums and exhibits about the Soviet era but the Czechs seem not as focused on the Soviet legacy as some of the other countries (I get the impression that they think of themselves as, at least, first among equals in eastern Europe.) I didn't have a strong feeling that "this country was part of the Eastern bloc" as opposed to just "That's not like home...I must be in Europe." Czech food is the hearty meat-and-vegetables combination you’d expect.

Prague, Old Town - The first night, in typical European fashion, everything was closed too early.  Except the burrito place.  It's important to try local food.  Kidding!  I chided them sternly about their hateful cultural appropriation. I haven’t had whole pieces of lettuce in a burrito before, but whatever. I did on the other hand have the best ryby (fish) and chips I’ve had outside New Zealand.  Of course I had to get out on the Charles Bridge right away.  Nota bene, the single worst thing that happened to me on this trip: about 1 a.m. on a Sunday night in Prague I went to a money exchange place off Charles Square. The guy tried to rip me off to the tune of 75% (i.e. if I had given him US$100, he tried to give me back $25 in Czech koruna.) At first I thought I might be making a mistake because you’d have to be a moron to think other people are similar morons, but no, he was trying to screw me. When I demanded my money back he tried to negotiate with me, coming closer and closer to the actual exchange rate, at which time I offered some observations about his ancestry, practices, and moral character. No dealing with a thief. This is the only time an exchange desk has ever tried to rip me off.  

Returning to Charles Square during the day I noticed that the buildings actually had color.

On the wall (in Spanish), "Until forever comander, we will conquer!" A Guevara reference. Very interesting in a city that began blossoming precisely with the end of communism. (Just sayin.) I did note a lot more Spanish in Europe than I'd ever heard before, a testament to the success of Spain.
Prague, Klementinum - This is part of the Prague city library. What I wanted to see was this (image credit to the Klementinum website:)

But it's under construction, so what I actually saw was this.




Much like the cable cars in San Francisco were undergoing maintenance the first time I visited as a kid and I was so crushed I had to move there. How difficult is it to get Czech citizenship?  At least in the main modern library there was a giant book vagina.

Prague, Jewish Quarter - In Prague, Venice, and Budapest I spent a fair bit of time in historically Jewish areas. I didn't go to the ghetto in Krakow, which is largely a club zone now. Schindler's real factory is still there, although shuttered. Jewish areas in eastern Europe tend to be pretty depopulated of Jewish people, for obvious and very sad reasons which will be repeated throughout these pictures.



Above, the New Old Synagogue (really), one of the oldest in Europe.  Below, the Maisel Synagogue, where supposedly the real golem is sleeping in the attic.




Prague, Charles University Faculty of the Law - this is where my meeting was and where our panel spoke. Franz Kafka attended Charles University Law (law school is full of monstrous vermin, ZING!) so I asked an audience member just prior to starting whether this was the building he studied in, and she kindly looked it up and informed me it was only built in the 1920s, after his death. (I would have guessed late, i.e. that it was Soviet brutalism.) There was a small Karl Capek museum in his childhood home outside Prague but I didn't go.

Views From the Hill Across the Vltava from Prague

The First Defenestration of Prague - Until I was reading up before this trip, I had no idea that there was almost a full-on Reformation a century before Luther and Calvin in the form of the Hussites, their own leader in turn inspired by an English theologian. This is fascinating because it suggests that there was always going to be an intra-Christian revolt in Europe along north-south cultural lines. In 1419, the Hussites were marching and someone threw a rock at them from inside the New Town Tower (Novomestske Radnice).  They didn't like that, so they charged the tower, grabbed the city councilmen, and threw the fellows out a window. (They died.) Thus, the First Defenestration of Prague. The Hussites are now more or less the Moravian Church.

Prague Castle and the Second Defenestration of Prague - it turned out the Protestants weren't done complaining, and a second generation spontaneously emerged, and two hundred years later reacted with similar restraint when a Catholic official told them what they didn't want to hear. (I don't know about you but if I were an official in Prague, after the first time I would keep my office on the ground floor.) As it turned out I also defenestrated my phone onto the cobblestones, cracking the screen, as I prepared to take a picture of the defenestration window. This tower is in the Prague Castle complex, a massive enclosed area of cathedrals and palaces and administrative buildings worthy of Game of Thrones, the Czech president's residence now works (hence the military men with metal detectors seeing us in and out.) On the grounds there's also a vineyard that was planted in A.D. 908. A colleague on my panel said he tried the wine and it sucked. (The oldest vines in the U.S. are in Mission San Antonio on California's Central Coast, and date I think only from the 1840s, and those already make wine that tastes like crap. Nine more centuries might not do the vines further favors.) I didn’t take the funicular, as I’m already an expert (after Hong Kong, Pittsburgh, and even Altoona, I felt Prague would have frankly been over-indulging in funiculars.) Below is the very metal-looking St. Vitus cathedral.

Above:  the original Budweiser (Budvar.)  Below:  an IV bag drink that drained into my glass just before I took the picture.  I think we were all doctors at the table so no one was impressed.

Above:  Czech pork and sauerkraut passed this Pennsylvania Dutch boy's taste test, and the liter of beer didn't hurt.

Prague, Bila Hora (White Mountain) - the site of the first battle of the Thirty Years War following the Second Defenestration, about ten miles outside Prague. Catholic forces won the battle and never again lost Prague; Protestant-friendly Frederick V abdicated after a short reign, earning the derogatory nickname the Winter King (which has many parallels today it turns out.) A young Renee Descartes fought in this battle as a mercenary.  This war gave us such pleasant innovations as the modern nation-state, as well as the Swedish drink. The Swedes also lay siege to Prague and managed to take and loot the castle, but never the city; and Frederick the Great attacked the city in 1756 during the Seven Years War but his men could never advance across the Charles Bridge. Just imagine, some hothead colonel from Virgina has a French officer executed in the Appalachians (do a CTRL-F here for Jumonville) and next thing you know, the King of Prussia is attacking Prague. There are a lot of interesting questions from this period in history: to what extent were the horrendous conditions and the mercenaries used during the Thirty Years War responsible for the Treaty of Westphalia and its decried-by-alt-righters shift from city-states to nation-states? For that matter, is there a drop-off in the rate of castle-building in Europe after 1648? I predict yes. Also, I learned at this battlefield that you open Volkswagen trunks by rotating the medallion along the left-to-right axis.






Prague, monument and last stand of Czech World War II Heroes - Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were Czech patriots who parachuted back into their occupied homeland and successfully assassinated the Nazi ruler of Czechoslovakia in a daring plan known as Operation Anthropoid. For this they were hunted down and killed where they hid in a church crypt. Today there is a monument at the spot where they got him (with a grenade) and you can still see the Nazi bullet holes in the stone where they were caught. By the flowers and offerings you can tell they're still remembered. This made me further admire the Czech spirit and I wish that in the U.S. we were better at paying attention to the kinds of people who made a sacrifice to make our lives better today.









Brno, Mendel's Garden - the Mendel Museum is on the site of the abbey where he lived, and you can see the old greenhouse foundation here. If you have a degree in molecular biology a lot of this smallish museum is redundant, but there is a list of all the geneticists whose careers Mendel made possible and who won Nobel Prizes - and on closer inspection, you can see that they autographed the list when they visited the museum, as an unlikely number unsurprisingly had. There was also a great section on Richard Dawkins, of obvious interest (as well as GMOs, explaining patiently that they are safe.) I was wearing a Darwin T-shirt that day without having planned it. They do sell pea seeds as souvenirs but when I asked the ticket girl if they were actually descended from Mendel's plants, she correctly looked at me like I was an idiot and said "No."

Austerlitz - Just outside Brno is the site of the famous battle that ended the War of the Third Coalition, where Napoleon not only defeated Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, he ended the Holy Roman Empire.





Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) and Jachymov (Joachimsthal) - This is the original Carlsbad (Charles's Bath), used by King Charles and others as a vacation spot; there are hot springs in the area, which is why it became a resort (though admittedly one with a bit of a best-days-behind-it early 20th century feel.)  I went to this area for two reasons.  1) It used to host rich silver mines that minted their own coins, like many mines; these coins came to be called "Joachimsthalers" (from Joachim's Valley), which was shortened to taler, and then dollar.  I always wondered where that word came from and why even the U.K. colonies that stayed in the Commonwealth used this term. If I recall correctly, in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Leibniz complains that silver from his mine in this area is still more expensive than silver from Spanish mines in the New World, even after shipping costs, and for the life of him even the co-inventor of calculus can’t figure out why – and of course the answer is that labor is a substantial portion of the cost, and when your labor cost is zero (i.e. you’ve enslaved natives to work in your mines) that shows up in the market price. 2) Later on, this same area proved to have uranium and radium deposits, and was used by the Soviets during the Cold War, with Czech prisoners forced to mine the uranium.  The silver mines played out long ago and the uranium mines closed by the 1960s, but that didn't stop other enterprising types from capitalizing on the minerals in the ground as you'll see. This is where Marie Curie got her radium. (Note: radon is a nuclear decay product of uranium, and uranium is also found in pitchblende, the type of granite underlying parts of Pennsylvania, including Berks County – which is why some basements in Berks have a bad radon problem.) Thanks to BJ for some of the pics and putting up with my psychopathic muttering during the drive.

Above:  directions to the home of Pilsener.  Below:  a small town within the forest preserve of Slavkovsky Ies (old name, Kaiserwald.)

Above:  hot springs feeding the stream in Karlovy Vary are evident.  Below:  the old resort buildings are present but the place does have a bit of the feeling that its best days are behind it.

Above:  closed uranium mine and blogger being metal.  

Above:  sorry for the size; it says "The first radon spa in the world." Are there others!??! There are probably some places in Pennsylvania that could open one.  At this point we were about 5 miles from the border with Germany, and the normally thorough cleansing of German names from Czech places was relaxed enough to show the German name of a street immediately next to the shuttered uranium mine as Silberstrasse (Silver Street).  Below:  yes, it does say radium palace, and no I didn't go in because I don't want to get special mutant powers like for example cancer. No happy endings in THIS spa!

Karlstejn Castle and Czech Karst Country - about 10 miles past Vaclav Havel Airport, an area of steep forested hills and rocky outcrops begins.  This castle takes advantage of the terrain, as do hiking trails.