Come with us to Southern Bohemia!

It happened in the early nineties. I set out to Prague for archival research, but I only got halfway with the Trabant. On the Czech-Slovak border some concrete blocks visualized the freshly created hyphen, and beyond the blocks, the Czech authorities, as if showing their Western character, already required eight hundred crowns for highway toll. So I then turned off, to reach Prague on secondary roads. The first village was Valtice, where I caught sight of one of the most impressive Baroque castles of Europe. Right after it followed Lednice, with the neo-Gothic Liechtenstein palace. The next place was the Renaissance town of Mikulov, that is, Nikolsburg, with the fascinating Jewish quarter and one of Europe’s oldest Jewish cemeteries. Then came the medieval city of Znojmo on a hilltop, the fairy town of Telč standing on an island in the middle of a lake, the Renaissance market square of Jindřichův Hradec, Český Krumlov with the double bend of the Vltava… almost all of which have since been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. It took me a week to reach Prague. And I fell in love for a life with Southern Bohemia, to where, as the posts of this blog show, I regularly go back for further discovery.


To this region of Eastern Europe, perhaps the richest in historical monuments, and at the same time perhaps the least known, we invite our readers for the last weekend of October, from 22 to 26. During the five-day tour we visit in Brno the Renaissance crocodile and the Art Nouveau district, the Renaissance towns of Telč and Jindřichův Hradec, the Jewish quarters preserved intact and cemeteries of Třebíč and Mikulov, the medieval town of Třeboň in the middle of the Southern Bohemian lake region, České Budějovice, well known from Švejk and after the Budweis beer, Český Krumlov, and other centers of the Rosenbergs, the most powerful landlords of Medieval and Renaissance Bohemia: the fortress of Rožmberk, the Gothic Cistercian monastery of Vysší Brod, the pilgrimage church of Kájov, and Prachatice, the wealthy Bohemian end station of the salt road leading from the Danube. We make excursions to the Vltava riverside castles, in the mountains of Böhmerwald, and along the Otter river, the only otter reserve of Europe. And, of course, we also taste the gorgeous Czech cuisine, in the old town of Brno, on the island of Telč, in the fish restaurants of Třeboň, and in the traditional German Gasthäuser of the Böhmerwald.

The costs of the travel, depending on the number of participants, is about 280 euros, which includes bus transportation, accommodation (including breakfast) and the guide. If you feel like participating, please let us know by the end of this week, 7 September at wang@studiolum.com, for now without obligation, just to help us to put together, on the basis of the number of participants, the final program, accommodation list and travel costs.