UNESCO Class Trips - More Europe Stories

Karlštejn Castle 7.21.2010

As part of my Prague program, I took a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) class thru AAU so that I could hopefully learn more about Prague, the Czech Republic, and basically understand what I was seeing while I was there. UNESCO is an organization which was formed after WWII to document and protect architecture, landscapes, etc.. which has been created by humans and deemed as important to save for the world to enjoy. The Czech Republic has around 12 UNESCO sites, and this class was designed to learn about the sites, what makes a place become a UNESCO site, and to tour some of these places to see what they are all about. The city of Prague itself has been declared a UNESCO site, but not far outside of the city limits (about 1 hour by train) is a place called Karlštejn Castle. This castle sits atop a hill above the small, quaint town of Karlšejn. It was Charles’ IV other residence outside of the main Prague Castle. Because we were part of a class, we got a tour of the castle that most of the public doesn’t get to see. The only downside was that we were not allowed to take pictures in most of the areas in the castle. I’m not sure why this is so, but I found out that many places throughout the CZ do not allow photos. We had a nice tour guide take us throughout the castle and talk about all the areas within the castle grounds. Like with other early 1900s renovation projects, we could see where they had attempted to ‘renovate’ the castle only to ruin murals or other important structures of the castle. Today, they are trying to figure out how to renovate the new problems and fix the old renovations without doing any more damage to the integrity of the castle. This castle was composed of 3 or 4 separate towers which were connected by wooden bridges.

The reason for this was that if an outside force were to penetrate one building of the castle, they could be stopped by burning down the bridge in between the two towers so that they couldn’t access the next building. The ‘main’ tower of the castle (during the reign of Charles IV) housed the crown jewels, a church used only by the royal family, and several Holy relics of Christ. Since they didn’t have banks or safe deposit boxes in the 1400’s, this main tower was looked at as being the king’s bank. The walls of the tower were 3 meters (10ft) thick with one wall being 7 meters (23ft) thick. It was funny, because from the outside the tower looked quite large, but since the walls were so thick, when we were on the inside it seemed very small. I had asked our tour lady about the relics of Christ. She said that many kings used these as a means of power or importance or to give as gifts to special people. Supposedly, Charles IV possessed a piece of wood from Jesus’ cross, 2 thorns from his crown, and a bit of sponge that was used to give Jesus water while he was on the cross. Of course, no one knows where these relics are now, but the story says that he did in fact have these at one time.

Kutna Hora 7.23.2010

Another place our UNESCO class went to was a town called Kutna Hora. It’s about an hour train ride outside of Prague. Back in the day, large deposits of silver was discovered here and the population flourished because of the silver mining. There was also a time when they produced the regions currency here. However, over the years, the value and the amount of silver diminished and the town struggled to remain alive. Also, because power changed hands frequently and currency changed with power, the town eventually stopped producing money here, which added to their demise in industry. When we got off the train in Kutna Hora, it was painfully obvious that there hadn’t been much change since that time. It’s not a beautiful city like Prague. It is very run down and grey. There are many buildings that desperately need renovation and there didn’t seem to be very many people around town. Once off the train, we got on a bus that took us to the downtown area. The first building we toured was where they used to mint the currency for CZ and I think it used to have government offices there too. While we were waiting for our tour to start, we were all just wandering around the courtyard of this building. I took a picture of some statue and started to walk away, when I heard this guy say in Italian or Spanish “Un momento! Un momento!” I turned around and he motioned for me to take a picture of him standing next to the statue that I just took a picture of. I said ok, so he posed with the statue and I took his picture. I thought it was super funny and he thought he was being super funny too!

After touring this government building, we toured the main Catholic church, St. Barbara’s Cathedral. Like many churches during that time in Europe, it took maybe around 100 years to complete. I thought it was because of the lack in technology that it took so long to build these great structures. That was part of it; however, it was also to due things like war, change of power, countries breaking apart, countries coming together, architects dying, going years without working on the project , etc.. After the church, we had lunch at a pizza place in town. As a side note, I have to say, CZ has the best pizzas ever. I went to a lot of pizza places, (because pizza was one of two foods that my roommate would eat) and every pizza place cooked their pizza in a wood fire oven. I didn’t get pizza a lot, but I would get Jade’s leftovers sometimes and they were great. For about 5 American dollars you could get a “margarita” pizza (cheese pizza) made from home-made dough and cooked in those wood ovens. Anyway, at this place I just got an ‘anti-pasta’ plate with bread, cheese, and 3 different kinds of meat. It was really good, but the way that most places in Prague cook their meat is a little different then we do. It almost seems like the meat is raw compared to how much we cook it. It’s not really raw, but they must just smoke their meat more-so then cook it. So, even though it tasted good, it got in my head that it was raw meat and it was all I could do to keep from spewing at the table! After lunch, we went over to the Ossuary or “The Bone Church”.

Basically, this church is filled with human bones and they are placed in the Ossuary in an artistic, decorative, albeit creepy way. The story goes something like this: all these people were buried in this one cemetery just fine, but then many years later another power took over and people were fighting over the cemetery land. I think there was a conflict between the Catholics and Protestants again, and what ended up happening was that all these people were exhumed and they didn’t have any place to put all the bones. I don’t know where they put them for the time being, but eventually this crazy Monk took on the task of “organizing” the bones into decorative art and stacked piles and placed them in this church. I thought it would be a bigger deal then it actually was. The church is pretty small and we were done touring it in about 30 minutes. Afterwards, we all just walked back to the bus stop and took the city bus back to the train station to head back to Prague.