Ricky Yates

With Lenka & Phil in the courtyard of Valtice Castle © Ricky Yates

On Friday 10^th September, I conducted my third wedding in just under four weeks when Phil, an Englishman, married Lenka, a Czech. However, unlike the two previous weddings which I’ve described in earlier blogposts, this wedding took place over 270 km southeast of Prague in the small Moravian town of Valtice which lies very close to the border with both Austria and Slovakia.

In order to be sure that I arrived on time for the wedding and in a well prepared state, we chose to drive to Valtice the previous afternoon. The bulk of the journey was along the Prague-Brno motorway which was originally constructed during the Communist era. The section nearer to Brno still has the original concrete road surface which is horribly uneven and extremely noisy to drive on. But other than some slight traffic delays leaving Prague, the rest of the journey was fine except for having to  drive through a couple of very heavy downpours.

We arrived in Valtice around 8pm just as it was getting dark. We managed to make phone contact with Phil the bridegroom who met us in the town square and directed us to Penzion Duo where he had kindly booked a room for Sybille and me to stay for two nights. Once we had unloaded our belongings and safely parked the car, we joined Phil and his father Tim at Avalon restaurace a cajovna for our evening meal.

After a good nights sleep, the Friday morning dawned fine and sunny. We were treated to a late breakfast at Restaurace Albero which is where all the guests had been asked to gather and to where we all returned later in the afternoon and evening for the wedding reception.

Valtice Castle © Ricky Yates

The wedding itself took place in the chapel of Valtice Castle, an amazing baroque structure that used to be the main residence of the Liechtenstein family who now reside in the Principality of the same name having fled Valtice as the Soviet army advanced eastwards in April 1945. It provided a wonderful venue for the marriage service as well the perfect location for photographs afterwards.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the whole day was the keeping of a variety of wedding customs, some of which are peculiar to Moravia. Before the happy couple were allowed to lead their guests into the wedding reception, they had to cut a loaf of bread in two with a wooden knife. Then a plate was broken and Phil and Lenka were given a dustpan and brush to sweep up all the broken pieces, to promote the idea of being able to work together in a healthy manner throughout their marriage.

Phil was then required to carry his bride over the threshold and into the reception. However, because the restaurant is on the first floor, this meant carrying her up two flights of stairs! Then once seated, a large towel was wrapped around the two of them and they were required to feed each other from one bowl of soup using one spoon, once more to encourage them to cooperate together.

The first dance with bubbles being blown © Ricky Yates

Later, when Phil and Lenka took to the dance floor for the first dance, various guests blew bubbles at them, as Sybille and I both agreed, far nicer than having rice or confetti thrown at you! This was a custom that we had already seen previously at Jan and Allison’s wedding six days earlier.

Trying to catch the bouquet! © Ricky Yates

Finally, there was the more widespread tradition of the bride throwing her bouquet over her shoulder with her unmarried female friends and relatives lined up trying to catch it and thus be the next one to get married.

This was the first time we had visited southern Moravia other than driving through it on the motorway on our way to Turkey October 2009. We very much liked what we saw and hope to return there and explore the area further, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Me, Allison & Jan inside St. Clement's Church following their marriage service © Sybille Yates

Yesterday, Saturday 4^th September, I conducted my second wedding of the year when Jan, a Czech, married Allison, an American. Like my Scottish – Slovak wedding of three weeks earlier, Jan & Allison’s wedding took place in St. Clement’s Church with a similar wonderful mix of nationalities in the congregation including Czech, American, Canadian, German, French and English.

Allison and Jan first met whilst postgraduate students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They are both undertaking research in aspects of political science and have spent the past year studying in Berlin.

I first met the happy couple just over a year ago when they attended worship at St. Clements one Sunday morning in August 2009. But it was in December last year that Allison got in contact with me, asking about the possibility of being married at St. Clement’s – wanting to know it was legally possible and what would be involved.

Since the beginning of the year, I have met with Allison and Jan on several occasions, and in between have exchanged numerous emails. More than any wedding couple I can remember, they have wanted ‘Marriage Preparation’; to work through in advance of their wedding, the issues that face any couple entering upon a marital relationship and particularly those additional ones that face a couple who enter upon a cross-cultural marriage.

We’ve also spent much time working upon the content of their marriage service. Whilst sticking to the framework of the Anglican liturgy, as I insisted they had to, between us, we successfully wove in a variety of other material that was personal to the two of them.

All of this preparatory work resulted in a wonderful marriage service with contributions in English and Czech from family members on both sides. A very well produced bilingual order of service allowed everyone present to understand what was being said even if it wasn’t in a language they could understand.

Jan & Allison singing to each other and their guests © Ricky Yates

Following the marriage service in central Prague, the wedding reception took place in the grounds of the home of Jan’s mother Lenka, in the village of Klokocna, about 30 miles / 48 kilometres east of the city. As well as speeches by both the bride and the groom, they also joined together to sing a song, to each other, and to their assembled guests. That certainly was a ‘first’ for me and I’ve been involved in a large number of weddings over the past 21 years!

There was an abundance of food which celebrated the very best of Czech cuisine all prepared by Mr Sapík from the local village restaurant and pension ‘U Kone’. All this could be washed down either by Czech beer or Moravian wine. Music, dancing and entertainment continued until midnight. Then, when festivities ended, Sybille and I just walked 100 metres down the road to ‘Penzion U Kone’ where we spent a peaceful night before driving back to central Prague and St. Clement’s Church on Sunday morning, ready for worship at 11am.

‘Penzion U Kone’ , Klokocna © Ricky Yates

Matthew & Jana leaving Church at the end of their Marriage Service © Sybille Yates

On Saturday 14^th August, I conducted my first wedding for nearly a year when Matthew, a Scotsman, married Jana, a Slovak. The wedding took place at St. Clement’s Church in the presence of about forty friends and family – a wonderful mix of nationalities including Scottish, English, American, Slovak, Czech, German and Japanese.

I first met Matthew in June 2009 when he began worshipping with us at St. Clement’s. He had been living in Prague for nearly a year before he found the Church, teaching English in a Czech school. He had previously spent several years in the British Army seeing service in the Gulf and in Northern Ireland.  I was thrilled when he approached me at the beginning of this year saying he had met Jana and they wished me to marry them at St. Clement’s.

Jana comes from near Košice in the far eastern part of Slovakia. However, she has lived in Prague for a number of years and works as an air stewardess for a Japanese airline, regularly flying between Central Europe and Japan. As well as speaking fluent English, she also is reasonably conversant in Japanese!

All the Scots in their kilts including the Czech bagpiper on the far right © Ricky Yates

As a good Scotsman, Matthew wore his kilt for the occasion as did his best man John, his brother Kim who acted as usher, and his friend Stewart who was his Chaplain in the army and who read one of the Bible readings. Matthew also had found a Czech who could play the bagpipes and who piped Jana into Church, accompanied by her parents and then piped the newly married couple out of Church at the end of the service.

The service was followed by a buffet reception held at Restaurant Kabinet in the suburb of Žižkov. As well as good food and drink, we were also treated to some impromptu musical entertainment by the best man on guitar, his wife on the fiddle and an adult pupil of Matthew on the mandolin.

The wedding party outside St. Clement's Church © Sybille Yates

Lea & Petra at Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates

The newly married couple © Ricky Yates

Earlier this year I received an email from an English young man called Lea, asking if there was a Czech language version of the Anglican ‘Common Worship’ Marriage Service. He was planning to marry a Czech young lady called Petra, at a venue near her home town of Olomouc in the east of the Czech Republic, and this was the liturgy that they wanted to use. As there would be both English and Czech speakers attending the wedding, they wanted the text in both languages.

One of the many helpful things left by my predecessor John Philpott, was a ‘Word document’ containing exactly the text that Lea had asked for. I forwarded it to him but wrote an accompanying note asking who was going to use it? If they were going to be married by an English-speaking minister from one of the Czech Churches, then surely that minister would want to use his/her own Church’s liturgy. On the other hand, if they were going to have a Czech civil ceremony followed by a Church service conducted by an Anglican priest imported for the occasion, then it was common courtesy for me, as the Anglican priest for the area concerned, to be consulted.

In reply, Lea and Petra explained that they didn’t yet have anyone to use the liturgy. But they had booked their wedding venue, the ‘chapel’ in Bouzov Castle, and that they had met with the local registrar and were in the process of completing all the necessary preliminaries to enable  a legal wedding to take place. Once I explained that, because of my status as a priest in the Old Catholic Church in the Czech Republic, I could legally marry them, then they promptly invited me to do so. Thus on Friday 3^rd July, I conducted my first Czech wedding and my first wedding of any variety since mid-August 2008.

Olomouc is a historic city in Moravia, part of the Czech Republic that neither of us had previously visited. Although it should only take about two and a half hours to drive there from Prague, we decided not to risk it and drove down on the Thursday evening in order to ensure we reached the wedding venue in good time the next day. Some good internet research by Sybille found us a very comfortable double room in the Poet’s Corner Hostel, an extremely interesting establishment owned and run by an ex-pat Australian.

Our ‘Lonely Planet’ Guide to the Czech & Slovak Republics describes Olomouc as ‘Prague  minus the tourists’ and it is an apt description. We ate our evening meal in an open air restaurant on the square in the historic centre of the city. The architectural views surrounding us are reminiscent of Old Town Square in Prague. However, other than a small amount of German, we heard no other language spoken that evening except Czech and were far from being surrounded by hoards of people.

The next morning, after leisurely breakfast, we put on our best clothes and set off on the  forty minute drive to Bouzov Castle. The castle is situated in the small village of Bouzov set in the rolling wooded hills of Moravia. It was a spectacular sight to see as we drove towards it. After parking in the official car park, we walked up to the main entrance to await  the arrival of the wedding party. We had been warned that we would need to be admitted as one group all together to avoid any confusion, as the castle is also open to paying visitors. Eventually, everybody arrived and we were all escorted over the castle bridge and up the stairs to the the ‘chapel’.

As we had discussed back in April when I had met Lea & Petra for the first time, everybody had an order of service with the English liturgy on one side and the Czech translation on the other, using the very material that had been the subject of Lea’s original enquiry. Whilst I conducted the service in English, I did manage to greet the congregation at the beginning in Czech. I was assisted by a wonderful lady called Ivana, who helped Petra make her vows in Czech after Lea had made his in English. She also translated my short address into Czech.

My greatest fear was getting the registration of the marriage wrong. In advance of the service, I had filled out a four-page form all in Czech, which being part of Czech bureaucracy, inevitably required an immense amount of detailed information about the bride and groom, their respective parents, both witnesses and me. This included full name and address, date and place of birth, birth number for Czechs, passport number for non Czechs! Fortunately, John Philpott had also left me an annotated version of this form with guidance as to how to fill it out. Having completed it following his instructions, I got the ever-faithful Gerry Turner to double check what I’d done in Czech, before we set out for Olmouc.

It is this form, rather than two sets of Church registers, that is signed during the wedding service. Again, as I have explained previously in this blog, not only signed but, much more importantly, stamped!! As I raised my hand above the stamp that declares us to be the English-speaking parish of the Old Catholic Church in the Czech Republic, I said in English & Ivana said in Czech, “This is the most important part of a Czech marriage service!” Everybody smiled and laughed as I very firmly slammed the stamp down. It is this signed and stamped form which must be returned to the local registrar within two working days. The registrar will then issue the happy couple with their marriage certificate.

The service over, we were all escorted back out of the castle and then the newly married Lea and Petra walked down from the castle bridge hand-in-hand. As you can see, you cannot really have a much better setting than Bouzov Castle for your wedding photographs. An evening reception followed back in Olomouc.