Exploring Czechia

Brno has transformed from a rather workaday industrial place known mainly as a centre for trade fairs to a buzzing and very visitable city-break destination. It's thanks to some well-developed recent attractions such as the Water Tanks (Žlutý kopec). They uplift and celebrate Brno's workaday background, a down-to-earth counterpart to Prague's baroque splendour. Once these three vast underground chamber stored water for the thirsty people of Brno, until they were superseded by more modern storage options elsewhere. The city has cleverly reimagined them as places to visit, and they're much more thrilling an experience than their functional origins might suggest: secular cathedrals, a sort of earthly equivalent of Córdoba's grand mosque. Tank 1, from 1874, has curious curved floors, and feels like some sci-fi skateboard park. Tank 2, from 1894, is the most cathedral-like, with endless lines of brick pillars that could be an Escher lithograph. Tank 3, from 19...

Czechia has many underground attractions, including giant water tanks, tunnel networks underneath market squares, and limestone caves. But few of the subterranean adventures are quite as macabre as Brno's Ossuary. The crypt is next to St James's Church, a little north of Náměstí Svobody. Down some stairs, as if to a metro station, is the entrance to the largest collection of bones outside Paris's Catacombs. There are said to be the remains of 50,000 people here, their skulls and femurs and other bony bits rearranged with grisly artifice into columns, pillars, walls and vaults. Yet the atmosphere is not one of fatalistic gloom - more one of wry acceptance of mortality. The chirpy staff are surprisingly upbeat about it all, in a characteristically Czech way. The church itself is a more positively glorious experience: one of Brno's, indeed Moravia's, grandest Baroque church interiors. You can also go up to the restored attic for a multimedia exhibition, and cli...

Brno's 'astronomical clock' (Brněnský orloj) is unusual among landmark civic timepieces, because it doesn't actually tell the time. Neither it is astronomical, except perhaps for its construction cost (12m crowns, about half a million euros). But since it opened in 2010, it's become a familiar sight in the city's main square, Náměstí Svobody. The black, smooth, cigar-shaped monolith gives no clue as to the hour. Except once a day. At 11am, it clicks and whirrs and releases a golfball-sized glass sphere into one of four slots at random. Tourists wait there, hoping for a free lucky souvenir. (You can buy the spheres, which come in various designs, in tourist info centre and gift shops.) The daily event commemorates a 1645 incident during the Thirty Years' War. Brno's bells deliberately tolled noon at 11am, a move which for various clever reasons wrong-footed the occupying Swedish army and led to the liberation of the city from siege. Brno's cl...

Flying to Czechia is easy and often cheap these days, but I much prefer getting there by train. Last autumn I travelled to Prague from England this way, using the overnight sleeper from Brussels. (I'd got to Brussels from London in the morning by Eurostar, and had a day exploring the Belgian capital.) The train is the wonderful European Sleeper . It run three times a week (Mon/WedFri) from Amsterdam and Brussels to Prague via Berlin for as little as €60. (From 26 March 2026 there's also a new service Tue/Thu/Sun from Paris to Berlin via Hamburg.) It's not the cheapest or fastest way to get to Czechia, but it's the most enjoyable. I was lucky enough to get a compartment all to myself, and enjoyed a full night's sleep to arrive in Prague in the morning ready to start exploring. This isn't luxury! The rolling stock is decades old and a bit worn-in, but it's all comfortable and clean. The compartments lock from the inside for security, and there are t...

Czech beer is not all about crisp, light pils. Or even about dark ales. Sometimes it can be both. Řezané ('zhezaneh') is a two-tone beeer: a combination of different density light and dark, carefully poured so that they don't mingle in the glass but settle into two distinct layers. I enjoyed some in my visit to the delightful Moravian city of Olomouc last autumn. A short train ride east, in the town of Velká Bystřice, is the Tvarg Brewery . Since 2020 they've been not only brewing a range of traditional and modern beer styles, but also making the area's famously stinky cheese, tvarůžky ('tvaroozhki') ‒ the perfect snack to go with their beers of any hue. The word řezané means 'cut'. No half measures about this drink, then. Tvarg do tours of the brewery and the cheese factory, and have a restaurant and bar where you can learn how to pour Czech beer. There's more to it than you might expect. But then you can drink it, along with some ...