Exploring Czechia

A ten-minute bus ride east of Sedlec - home of the notorious ossuary - is something just as bleached-white but far more engaging. Kačina is the former stately home of the Chotek family (whose most familiar member is Sophie, assassinated along with her husband Franz Ferdinand in 1914). In a country where almost every palace and mansion is baroque, Kačina is uniquely neoclassical: an Empire chateau, dating from the early 1800s. It's a very pleasant visit, thanks to its proximity to Kutna Hora and Sedlec. (Buses run every hour from very near the ossuary to right outside the chateau, and you pay the small fare simply by tapping your credit or debit card on board.) The grand rooms give an idea of what upper-class life was like in the last century, period billiard table and all. (It doesn't have pockets. Like the nobility who came here, presumably - they didn't need pockets because their wealth was beyond mere cash in hand.) There's also a charming theatre that...

Pardubice is a horse town. There are statues of nags round the place, and even the drain covers celebrate the animal. The reason is its annual steeplechase: the Velká pardubická , Czechia's biggest equestrian event, the equivalent of Britain's Grand National. You can do tours of the racecourse , and they're quite eye-opening. This steeplechase doesn't just go round a circuit, but also weaves round over fences inside it, showjumping-like. Walking the course gives a startling sense of how challenging it is for horse and rider, when you see close up the sheer size of Taxis (the most notorious jump, the counterpart of Aintree's Chair) or Irish Hil's mound. The list of winners shows several three-time, and even one four-time, winner. It seems the smarter horses can gain advantage by remembering their way round the fiendish variety of jumps. You can also see Kladruby horses in the racecourse stables. These are a premium Czech horse breed, made for pulli...

The top three Czech composers - in recognition terms, anyway - are probably Dvořák, Smetana and Janáček. All three were, well, very Czech, using folk themes or native speech-rhythms to infuse their music with a sense of nationality. Perhaps just out of the medals, in that cursed Fourth Place, is Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959). A prolific producer of symphonies, concertos, orchestral and other works, there's a bit of the Czech about his music, but also a bagful of other 20th-century ingredients, ranging from jazz rhythms to Parisian harmony to World War II gloom. Most of his best-known work was done in Paris or the US, where he was exiled in WWII. But the story began in one of the most curious starts for any major composer: at the top of a bell tower in Polička, a town an hour or so from Pardubice in the middle of Czechia. His dad was a fire officer, watching over the city from its highest point in a tiny flat 193 steps up the top of St James church belfry, ready to raise the al...

The Moravian karst is a region of limestone caves north-ish of Brno. You can explore many of them on guided tours, and they're a remarkable underground experience. The most visited caves are those of Punkva, where you can take a boat deep into the system underneath the 138m-deep Maccha Abyss. But for the spookiest alien-world feel, take a tour of Balcarka Cave (Jeskyně Balcarka) nearby. (All the caves are accessible by public transport or bike, but having a car or a taxi may be easier.) Balcarka's labyrinth of fissures, caves, passages, tunnels, vaults and voids has a huge variety of weird shapes on the walls, engraved drip by drip over aeons. Stalagmites and stalagtites. Fossilised ECG traces. Exoplanetary landscapes. Organic cathedrals. Fantasy prog-rock LP covers designed by Roger Dean circa 1976. It's not the only visitable cave of course. Not far away, the very different Výpustek offers a former nuclear shelter, wartime lorry depot (yes, inside th...

The elegant town of Litomyšl, almost two hours east of Prague, is known to classical music fans as the birthplace of composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Very much inspired by Bohemian folk music, his works such as Vltava helped shape the emerging Czech national spirit in the late 1800s. This being Czechia, beer and castles are never far away. Smetana's dad was a brewery manager; and the family home (and brewery) was right opposite the town's magnificent castle. You can visit both his home (now a museum) and the castle. A feature of the museum is how it appeals to kids and families: there's some really good audiovisuals and animations accompanied by a medley of his greatest hits, and the furniture in the old family bedroom is replica. So while you can't quite bounce on the bed, you can sit on the chairs and generally feel at home. The magnificent arcaded Renaissance castle, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a must-visit too. The grand sta...

Kutna Hora is a popular day trip east out of Prague, but there's plenty to see and do to keep you here for much longer. The place's grand, Prague-like architecture was built on a silver fortune: this was a mining boom town from the 1300s, until the ores began to run out in the 1500s. The silver supplied the mint. Václav II centralised all the hitherto sporadic local mints here in the 1300s, establishing a standard currency: the Prague Groschen, a kind of proto-euro. It's in the Italian Court, and is well worth seeing. Like those strong-armed smithies of old, you get to hammer your own Prague Groschen - not out of silver, obviously, but of aluminium. The mines were pretty much exhausted by the 1700s, and all have collapsed or flooded... except for one, which you can also visit. Hrádek, the silver museum, does guided tours of the tunnels. It's great fun - and not for claustrophobics, obviously. You wear a white jacket, just like the miners had, and a helmet...

Pardubice is a substantial industrial town of about 90,000, roughly an hour's train ride east from Prague. It doesn't feature on many visitor itineraries, and when it does, gingerbread, horses and Semtex are mentioned prominently. But while these are indeed a feature of the place, there's much more to enjoy. It's well worth a couple of days' visit. The gingerbread is, well, gingerbread; the horses I'll deal with in another post; and Semtex you won't have any need for, at least I hope not. But in this post I'll talk about some of Pardubice's other attractions. Such as the elegant historic main square, a bit empty in the off season of my visit, but lively with pavement cafes and bars in summer. A short walk away is the castle, definitely worth seeing. Even if you don't go inside to enjoy watching the audiovisuals, dressing up in a suit of armour or playing with marbles, do stroll round the ramparts. They're very impressive. Then amble th...

The town of Kolín, 40 minutes east of Prague by train, is certainly not on the tourist trail. It's thought of as a workaday town of chemical factories, car plants and refineries. But it's worth a stop, and not just for a glimpse of 'everyday Czech life' over your lunch at Robert's bistro in the main square. First, thanks to a once long-standing Jewish community, Kolín is dubbed 'Jerusalem of the Elbe', the river on which it stands. The old synagogue is right behind the tourist information centre, and well worth seeing. In front of it is what's left of the town's Jewish quarter. Behind it is a tranquil garden with a vineyard planted to mark the synagogue's former importance and also to celebrate Bohemia's often overlooked wines. For a small deposit the tourist office will even lend you the key to the Jewish cemetery a short walk away. It's a poignant place, with hundreds of graves - most in Hebrew - dating from the 1400s to the 1800s...

Maybe football is the No 1 sport in Czechia, but ice hockey comes a close second. If you’re weary of the contrived theatricals of glitzy top-flight soccer, a visit to an ice hockey match is a refreshing experience. Like rugby or American football, it’s very physical – hence the old joke of ‘a game of hockey broke out at the ice fight’ – but the sheer speed afforded by the skates makes it a breathtakingly fast and exhilarating sport to watch. Czechia is one of those select countries that does the sport. And it does it in a big way. The national team is in the world top five, along with the US, Canada, Sweden and Finland. Tournament wins are a big deal; they carried off the Winter Olympic gold in 1998, and every Czech remembers where they were when it happened. Anyway, last week in Plzeň I dropped in to watch the local team play Vítkovice (big thanks Helena for wangling tickets at the last minute). Terrific stuff, particularly as Plzeň overturned a 2-0 deficit to roar back and wi...

About 30km east from Plzeň's famous beer works is another, very different sort of factory. At the village of Dobřív, not far from Rokycany, is one of the world's rarest examples of a surviving, working 'hammer mill': a water-powered smithy. It's still working today. Until the industrial revolution, such mills were common. Along the river here, there were many such, burning the local beechwood to make the plentiful red, iron-rich sand into worked metal objects: ploughs, spades, nails, whatever. It involved very hot fires - 1100C - and a lot of banging. First, a huge water-driven mechanical hammer would bludgeon the iron into rough forms. Then the blacksmith would smack it with hammers into the exact shape required. The forge miraculously survived destruction through the centuries at the hands of capitalists, communists, or just impatient planners. In the 1970s, after all the forges around had long gone, it was an open-secret workshop where locals could g...