Day 12: Excursion, Day 1

Thursday, May 24, 2012 

At 8 am this morning, the entire fibers class piled into a bus to begin our three-day excursion into the wilds of the Czech Republic. Our first stop:

Polabské Národopisné Muzeum

The outdoor history museum at Přerov Nad Labem.

Our guide to the museum only spoke Czech, so one of our teachers translated everything for us. 

Apparently, the museum started with just one or two of the village's important houses, and they brought the rest of the historic buildings in later. The museum is now laid out like a small village of its own. There are little wood-beamed buildings everywhere, roofed with tiles or wooden shingles or (in one case) actual thatch. 

Between them are green spaces for chickens and rabbits and little fenced gardens. 

Some of the buildings are furnished and stocked like they would have been in the past - as houses, barns, dairy sheds, and so on.

Sadly, most of those are too dark for good photographs. Others are devoted to a single occupation, such as cooking or beekeeping.

The rest are laid out more like a regular museum, with glass cases and posters about lace or dolls or painted eggs.

As usual, everyone moved through the museum much faster than I did, and we had to leave far too soon. 

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Lunch

For lunch, we went to the Restaurace Sokolovna in Česka Skalice, where we ate outside under umbrellas. I had "Rajská kovězi pečeně, těstoviny," which was pasta with beef and tomato sauce.

The sauce had a startling amount of sugar in it, but I enjoyed it once I got used to it. 

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  Textile Museum 

The textile museum in Česka Skalice is an amazing place. There are collections of elegantly draped fabrics from numerous periods of Czech history...

All manner of printing machines, with the blocks and rollers they used...

A whole room full of blue-printing forms, from the simple to the overwhelmingly ornate...

A room devoted to fabric patterns and paintings created by renowned Czech illustrators...

And a dizzying array of fabrics ten, a hundred, a thousand years old - or more, in the room full of carefully preserved scraps of ancient Egyptian embroidery. 

Here, we also got to see the picture book where the famous Krtek - or Little Mole, in English - first appeared. (He has become something of a national phenomenon and now appears everywhere in the country, to the annoyance of some people who just like the book and disapprove of all the commercialization.) The title is something like "How the Mole Got His Trousers." In the book, the mole needs pockets in which to keep all his treasures, so various other animals - ants, a hedgehog, a tall and elegant stork - help him through the entire process of making clothing. The book follows the process of growing flax, carding the fiber (this is where the hedgehog comes in), spinning it into thread, weaving the cloth, and finally sewing it into a pair of blue trousers with huge pockets.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the book, as I was too busy looking at the pictures in it. 

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Blue Printing 

At the Modrotisk (blue-printing) workshop in Olešnice, we were shown around by one of the men who works there, again with our teacher translating. Blue printing is an old Czech tradition. They use a form of reserve/resist, called "pap," and print it onto cloth with wooden stamps, called forms. The cloth is then submerged in indigo dye - one to seven times, to produce any shade from light blue to blue-black - and the pap resists the dye, leaving the printed pattern in white on a blue background. Each workshop has its own family recipe for the pap, refined to create the perfect consistency and stick to the cloth without running or cracking, and they keep these recipes carefully secret from other workshops. 

We've been learning about the process, but this is the first time we've actually seen it done by a professional. Our guide could simply take a form and stamp it down on the cloth, again and again and again, and create a perfectly aligned pattern in seconds.

It was amazing to watch. Some of the patterns are quite ornate, and it would be fairly obvious if they were lined up wrong.

The forms they use at this workshop are nearly all old ones - centuries old, in some cases. They're made of many layers of wood, to prevent warping, with the printing patterns carved in precise detail on the underside. The more delicate patterns use strips and pins of metal as well. There is just one man in the town who still knows how to make and repair the old forms; he has an apprentice, fortunately (I asked), and we even got to see some new forms the two of them have made. 

If I remember correctly, the wooden dye vat they use has been there in the floor for 100 years; the rolling machine has been there for 150, and they don't know how old it already was when it first came to the workshop. (None of my pictures of it came out, unfortunately.) They expect these tools to last for another 150 years if cared for properly. The engine that drives the rolling machine is a somewhat newer addition; they no longer have to have someone crank it by hand. 

This was one of the most amazing things on most of our stops on the tour - to hear about all this history, going back hundreds of years, and see so much of it still in use.

The various machines were taken by the Communist government for several decades, but now belong to the workshop again. We heard this nearly everywhere we went, actually. "During the Communist times, the state took it, but we got it back in the 1980s…" 

The state during this time also had a whole program devoted to supporting and preserving traditional crafts like this one, though, so many of the factories and workshops we visited seemed somewhat ambivalent about the period. There was good and bad to the way the country was run then. Like most things. 

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And in between… 

The parts of the Czech countryside we passed through were, almost without exception, gorgeous. There were hills and copses and wooded little streams...

Actual haystacks...

Tiny red-roofed villages spilling down green hillsides...

Fields of bright yellow canola stretching to the horizon... 

Electrical windmills stood on the horizon, spinning their triple arms in circles that looked slow until we got close enough to see just how big they actually were.

Higher up, we drove through wooded hillsides and dark, cathedral-like evergreen forests, with tree trunks like lichen-encrusted pillars stretching away into the black underbrush, broken only by the road and the occasional sunlit clearing.

This is one of the more open, sunny sections. None of my pictures came out further in. It was like a landscape out of a Grimm's fairy tale - the sort of place you could imagine stumbling upon wolves or trolls or a hut on chicken legs. (Fortunately, I think that particular house - and its owner - tend to roam much farther northeast.)