Olomouc - Night at the Churches - Day #1
Piatok, 25. V (Friday, May 25) 2018 – (excerpts from my journal The Pressburg Diaries, vol 9.)
Crappity-rainy morning. It was a rough start to the day. It was horribly humid and I was sweating like mad when I arrived for my Friday morning lessons. The usual room in the company where we held our lessons was being used for an audit, so we had to find a last-minute replacement. It was a bit chaotic. I just wanted to get on with the day and get home to begin packing for the trip. Attendance during both lessons was rather low today. As luck would have it, my students in the second group suggested ending class a bit early, which gave me an advantage.
I rushed home and packed. Our train to Břeclav, just inside the Czech-Slovak border on the Czech side, was due at 16:10 (4:10 pm), but was 10 minutes late arriving at Bratislava. Nonetheless, only 30-some minutes later, we were in Břeclav. I’d brought with me the new tourist “Wanderkarte” sticker booklet I’d recently acquired, a special edition 100th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia. I’ll use it for commemorative stickers of all the places I visit in the Czech Republic. I’ve already started a similar booklet for Slovakia. And as if by magic, once we left Bratislava and crossed the border, the weather cleared up.
We had twenty minutes in Břeclav to get our connecting train and therefore we had time to buy snacks and magazines at the shop inside the station. Our train to Olomouc was crowded with Friday afternoon rush hour commuters and school kids, but we had armed ourselves with seat reservations. By nearly seven in the evening, we were in Olomouc.
Olomouc. What an interesting name. OH-loh-moats. Oh, those oats? Immediately after getting off the train, I found a tabak (small kiosk selling cigarettes and newspapers) and bought a city map of Olomouc. Sure, I can use GPS on my phone, but so what? I collect things, and having a map of Olomouc (which I was unable to find in any bookshop in Bratislava) proves we visited it. Next, Zuza hailed a taxi which drove us to our Air B&B lodgings at Denisová Street. The young woman in charge of the apartment arrived to check us into our recently renovated 17th-century unit. It was really nice inside, simple, yet tasteful, all plumbing and furnishings courtesy of Bauhaus and IKEA respectively. So now what?
Entrance to our flat on Denisová Street
Dinner? That took us to Morgan’s Restaurant in the center, where we sat outside on the terrace, next to a group of very giggly young Czech women. I think they were having some kind of bridal shower and they had consumed a lot of champagne. Nonetheless, we ordered. Zuza had chicken wings and I went for grilled chicken with thyme and grilled mixed veggies, and mashed potatoes. Nothing wrong with that dish! And three Radegast beers later (Zuza had a dark beer), just after sundown, we waddled off to explore Olomouc by night.
Olomouc by night
First we walked through part of a park (named Bezručovy sady) that looked as if it had at one time been the moat (an Olo-moat?) that went round the city. People were out and about really having fun. Olomouc on a Friday night is not a bad place to be. Some of the cobblestone streets at night reminded me of Rabat in Malta. Completely different cities, but at night, I guess, they have a similar flavour with light reflecting off the cobblestones. We walked into a simple 17th-century capucine monk monastery called Kostel Zvěstování Páné (Church of the Annunciation, 1655-1661), little did we know what awaited us: we’d stumbled into Night at the Churches! This is an event unique to Olomouc, which was the seat of the archdiocese at one time. It’s sort of like Rome on a mini scale, I suppose. Just as museums in Bratislava fling their doors open to the public and one admission gets you into as many museums as you can manage during the annual Night at the Museums, so in Olomouc do all the churches open their doors and let people walk right in for a look-see. Two very enthusiastic nuns greeted us at the doors and gave us each passbooks in which they stamped that we had visited this church. We walked around, admiring the woodwork and the altar, and then moved on to try and get to as many more churches as we could. Out in front, two capucine monks were playing an orgel and singing funny songs from children’s TV shows to the delight of a crowd of 10-12 who had gathered.
Kostel Zvěstování Páně, or Church of the Annunciation
Next, we went on a hell-bent mission to find the next church listed in our passbooks. Quick! We had only until eleven pm and it was already half-past ten. Our frantic “church search” took us to the ancient and majestic Kostel sv. Mořice (Church of St. Maurice). This rather gothic-like church was like, wow. Impressive! Parts of it were Renaissance and Baroque, too, but the whole thing dated back to the 12th century. Yeah, gothic. It had a beautiful altar, an organ, small, but an organ nonetheless, dating to 1716. We decided to check out the earthen-floored crypt, or what had once been the crypt. Now, with the electrical wiring dating back to the 1930s, it looked like where I imagined the Nazis might have interrogated partisans.
Underneath Kostel sv. Mořice
With our heads spinning from this huge cathedral and all the fascinating things we were seeing, we decided a nightcap was in order. We headed for Olomoucká Citadela for a Svijany (a great Czech brand of beer) on tap for me and a Kofola (that omni-present, rooty, herbal-flavored, quintessentially Czechoslovak answer to Coca-Cola) for Zuza. The thing about Olomoucká Citadela was that we felt as if we’d stepped back into the 1500s. Everything here went for true period correctness. The tables were heavy wood planks, the chairs were simple ones made of wood, simple Michelangelo or DaVinci-style Renaissance drawings adorned the walls, and even the hefty barwoman looked like a character straight out of a Shakespeare play. I wondered how to say in Czech, “Will thou bringst me an ale, Madam?” We were the last to leave when the Madam Barwoman was ready to shut down for the night.
Olomouc
Outside, in the pub’s window display, we saw a mannequin of a knight in armour who’d probably been run in with a sword. He looked really dead, which was exactly how we felt after our first day in Olomouc.
Dead in Olomouc