Winter has been rather slow to arrive in North Bohemia in 2019. We were blessed with a wonderful Indian Summer during the second half of October and the weather remained mainly dry and fine, well into November. This allowed me to make a lot of progress in the garden about which I hope to write another blog post in the near future.
But now it has turned cold with overnight frost on several occasions. I noted yesterday afternoon that the the tub into which rain off the roof of my carport drains, was still solidly frozen on the surface. However, we still haven’t had any snow. In my two previous winters here in Stará Oleška, the first snow fell in November.
I have to say that I am very pleased with my new wood-burning stove about which I wrote here, a month ago. It is already proving to be a very worthwhile investment. Here it is, roaring away!
As I said in reply to a comment on that post, I hope that the truckload of logs that I had delivered in January 2019, will last me through the whole of this winter. But as I wrote in a post on 30th March entitled, ‘From Winter to Spring 2019’, that load included these massive cross-sections of tree trunk; twenty-three of them in total.
The only way to get them from where they were deposited, on public land, adjacent to my garden, and into the wood shed, was to cut each of them in two with my chainsaw. Having done that, I then transported each section, one at a time, by wheelbarrow, into the shed. Forty-six journeys in total! I finally completed the task on 22nd April. Here is where they once sat, along with the debris from chainsawing.They did all just fit into the shed!
Being protected from any rain and with the warmth of summer, all the normal-sized logs have developed some cracks whilst sitting in the shed, as the timber has dried out and become seasoned. In turn, this makes them easy to split into a size suitable for the wood-burning stove.
But the cross-sections of tree trunk have only developed a few fine cracks and have therefore proved much more difficult to split. So instead, I’ve had to spend quite some time and energy with my chainsaw, to reduce them into sections of a more manageable size, before they can be used in the wood-burning stove.
However, because the wood from these cross-sections is so dense, it burns far more slowly. This is particularly useful if I want to go out for a few hours in the evening and join the locals at U Soni. Just one of these reduced size sections of tree trunk will keep burning for at least three hours, meaning I return to a warm house and with no need to re-light the fire.
On the front of my house is a well-established vine. In this photograph, you can see the outline of it, in between and along the top of the double-glazed windows that enclose the verandah. The photograph was taken by me in March 2017, at the time I agreed to buy the house. It has appeared previously on the blog, in this post entitled, ‘The new house in Stará Oleška‘.
At some point in the previous six months, the vine clearly had been pruned for which I am most thankful. It was the only thing in the garden that appeared to have received any attention in the months before I purchased the property. I believe that once the previous elderly owners decided to sell, they chose to do nothing further to the garden, meaning that I inherited quite a jungle 🙁
Over the summer of 2017, the vine flourished, as can be seen in this photograph, taken in August that year, when I was painting the frames of the two windows under the apex of the roof of the house. However, it did also produce a healthy crop of grapes.
In February 2018 and again in March this year, I rigorously pruned it. This is how it looked following its serious haircut in March 2019. But in both years, all my rigorous pruning has ever done is to encourage the vine to flourish even more.
As you can see in the photograph above, taken in late September this year, the vine took over virtually all of the front windows, making it almost impossible to see out!
However, it did once again, produce an excellent crop of grapes. These are some of the 2019 vintage!
One piece of helpful advice I was recently given was this. Whilst vines are known for growing prodigiously, if you prune them in the late Summer/early Autumn, rather than leaving it to the Spring, they tend not to grow as much. Therefore, deciding that I would like to be able to see out of my front windows next year, over the past two days, the vine has been once more thoroughly pruned.
When I had the kitchen in my home completely refurbished, back in January 2018, other than the tiled floor and an overhead florescent light, the only other thing that was retained from the previous kitchen, was the wood-burning stove, because it was the only source of heating for the whole house. As part of the refurbishment, two heatproof walls were built, either side of the stove, in order to protect the newly installed neighbouring kitchen units.
Once the stove has been alight for a couple of hours, it does heat the house quite well. But the associated oven takes a very long time to heat up and it is very difficult to judge what should be the correct cooking time for anything one puts in it. Therefore since the kitchen refurbishment, I haven’t used the stove to cook at all, as I now have a very effective electric oven and hob.
Over the past year, I have toyed with the idea of replacing the old wood-burning stove with something both more visually attractive, as well as more heat efficient. My two concerns have been the cost of a new stove, together with the practicalities of getting the old one successfully removed and a new one installed.
Last week I bit the bullet. I visited the Mountfield store in Decín, from where I previously purchased both my lawnmower and chain saw, and ordered a new wood-burning stove. The one I ordered was in their sale, at half its normal price. So I felt I was getting a bargain.
The two staff members who I dealt with, both had some English. One of them was the one who had been most helpful to me when I purchased my lawnmower back in the summer of 2017. I showed them the photo above of the old stove, seeking confirmation that, as part of the deal, they would take the old one away when delivering the new one. They seemed to assure me, more than once, that they would.
I was also aware that I would need some new sections of metal chimney, as the smoke outlet on the old stove is on the right-hand side, whereas on the new stove, it is in the centre. Aided by the photo, the two staff worked out that I needed two new chimney sections which I duly purchased.
At 07.03 on the morning of Monday 30th September, I got a text message saying that my new stove would be delivered that morning and that the driver would phone me about thirty minutes in advance of his arrival. But when the truck did arrive, it was one man on his own, working for the Czech branch of the German logistics company, Gebrüder Weiss. He duly unloaded a wooden crate containing my new stove, but deposited it on my front path. No, he couldn’t take it up the steps into my house and neither could he take my old stove away.
A year ago, at an event in Decín, I met a fluent English-speaking Czech lady called Mirka. She runs a weekly English conversation class and invited me, as a native English-speaker, to help her with her class. It is something I’ve enjoyed doing this past year, and has occupied me for an hour on Monday afternoons, during term time. In turn, Mirka has twice bailed me out with Czech language problems, for which I’ve been most grateful.
Last Monday morning, I made a cri de coeur to Mirka, asking if she knew anybody who could help me out by coming and getting my new stove into the house and the old one out. Over the past few days she has been absolutely brilliant.
She first visited the Mountfield store to ascertain whether they would take the old stove away & install the new one. The outcome was that I had misunderstood what I thought I had been told at the time of the sale – it is a service they don’t provide.
Then, following an exchange of text messages, emails with photographs, and phone calls, this morning, two men with their van, arrived to sort out my problem. Fortunately, the younger of the two guys had quite good English which greatly aided communication.
Firstly, the the two guys successfully moved the old stove out of the house, down the front path to the side of their van. Then they dismantled the wooden crate, to enable them to move the new stove into the house. They discovered that the new stove was actually bolted onto the crate and it took a selection of their tools and mine, to get it disconnected.
But they eventually succeeded, and here it is in situ. And the two new sections of metal chimney that the Mountfield staff got me to purchase, were exactly what was required.
Amazingly, the two guys wanted no payment for their labours. As the old stove still works, they would be able to sell it on. I did press 500kc into the young man’s hand as some ‘beer money’, for which he was most grateful. And I certainly need to find a way of rewarding Mirka, and not just by helping with her conversation class which resumes next Monday, after the summer break.
The first Toleranzpatent / Patent of toleration of 1781, whilst giving some religious freedom to protestants living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was still quite restrictive, in particular insisting that any buildings should not look like churches and should not have an entrance directly onto the street. It was only after Emperor Franz Joseph 1 issued his Protestantenpatent / Protestant patent in 1861, that non-Roman Catholics were finally allowed to build and own places of worship which actually looked like churches, with towers or spires and bells, etc.
Therefore within the borders of what is now the Czech Republic, there are numerous church buildings similar to this one in Litomerice, that date from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth century. Their architectural style is what I would describe as red-brick Victorian Gothic. In Czech they are known as Cervené kostely / Red or Dark Churches.
These Cervené kostely are located in towns and cities where there was a majority or a large German-speaking population and they were built for worship by German-speaking Lutherans. German-speakers were often the owners of factories and businesses and were wealthy enough to raise the necessary funds for their design and construction.
As I have previously written, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, was very keen that the boundaries of this new nation should be the historic ones of Bohemia and Moravia which predominantly follow the ridges of the surrounding hills and mountains. This was to ensure that the new nation had defensible borders and that also, nearly all Czech speakers would be living within those borders.
However, one important consequence of the adoption of these borders was that many people of German ethnic origin were also incorporated into Czechoslovakia. According to a census taken in 1921, just over three million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia accounting for around 23% of the country’s total population. The areas where Germans formed a majority were known as Sudetenland and the people themselves as the Sudetendeutsche.
In December 1918, less than two months after the new independent state of Czechoslovakia had come into existence, the Czech Lutheran Church and the Czech Presbyterian/Reformed Church agreed to unite, forming the Ceskobratrská církev evangelická (CCE) / Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (ECCB). They were then, and still are, the largest Czech Protestant Church and celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of their formation in December last year.
But it was only the Czech-speaking Lutherans who joined the newly formed CCE/ECCB. A separate German-speaking Lutheran Church remained, until 1945.
In 1945, under the Potsdam agreement and the Beneš decrees, nearly all ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia and the German-speaking Lutheran Church within the country, ceased to exist, leaving behind empty Cervené kostely.
It has been interesting visiting, photographing, and trying to discover what has happened to these abandoned Church buildings since 1945. The Cervený kostel in Brno, which I previously featured in this blog post about the city in 2012, is now in the hands of the CCE/ECCB and is used regularly by them for worship.
The Cervený kostel in Olomouc, which I haven’t visited, meaning that I don’t have a photograph, also initially passed to the CCE/ECCB. But in 1957, it was given to Palacký University and for many years, housed the archives of their Research Library. It is now to be revamped to become a new venue for concerts, exhibitions and a café.
The Cervený kostel in Litomerice, which I featured at the beginning of this post and can be seen again, from a different angle, in the photograph above, now belongs the relatively small Czech Baptist Union. But whether the Baptists in Litomerice had their own building prior to 1945, or how they were able to take over the former German Lutheran Church, is a mystery to which I don’t know the answer. There is no relevant information on their website.
The photograph above is of the Cervený kostel in Varnsdorf, a town which lies right on the border of the Czech Republic with Germany. So far as I can tell, the church is not currently used for anything. I believe it now belongs to the town council who appear to be about to carry out much needed repair work, judging by the recently erected scaffolding around the spire.
Kostel svatého Pavla, located in the centre of Ústí nad Labem, is another fine example of a Cervený kostel. Despite appearances, the building is not made of bricks, but of concrete, covered with glued red tiles to imitate bricks. The Czech Wikipedia article about this church explains that after 1945, all German inscriptions were either ground down or whitened so as to be no longer visible.
This Church is now co-owned and administered by the CCE/ECCB and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church (CCSH) who both use it for worship – the CCE/ECCB on Sunday mornings and the CCSH on Sunday afternoons.
I am well aware that there are several more Cervené kostely elsewhere in the Czech Republic which I hope to find, visit, and photograph, over the next few years. In the meantime, if anyone can throw more light on how, post 1945, they have ended up in the hands of their current owners, please do leave a comment here on my blog.
Finally, I once again apologise for the absence of some Czech diacritics. Unfortunately, as I have previously explained, my blog set-up can only cope with certain diacritics. Any it doesn’t like are rendered as question marks, and names such as Litom??ice and ?ervené kostely would appear in the text.
It has become quite clear to me since moving into my new home in Stará Oleška, that the previous elderly owners, had alterations and improvements done to the house, as and when they could afford it. This is reflected in the variety of windows that there are.
The photograph at the beginning of this post, shows the house as it was in April 2017, a few weeks before moving in on 15th May 2017. Please use it as a point of reference for what follows in the rest of this post.
The two windows in the upper floor of the house, directly under the apex of the roof, are quite old. They are double-glazed but have wooden frames. Once I had moved in, I noticed that the exterior paintwork of these window frames was in a very poor state. Bearing in mind that they are located in the most exposed area of the house, back in August 2017, I made getting them painted, one of my first priorities.
Fortunately, it was, and still is, possible to completely remove the windows which made painting them far easier than in situ. Here they are, laid out on a table, under cover at the back of the house, having received their second coat of gloss paint.
Likewise, with the windows removed, painting the surrounding frames was also a much simpler task. I am pleased to report that, following my labours of August 2017, the paintwork still looks in good order, having now survived two Czech winters.
One of the last things the previous owners did, was to have the verandah on the front of the house enclosed. In order to do this, they had two pairs of high-quality double-glazed uPVC windows fitted across the front of the verandah. But they did nothing about the windows on the side of the verandah – the ones nearest the front door in the photo and their twins on the other side. These were single-glazed with wooden frames, on which condensation soon started appearing in the Autumn of 2017.
Having ascertained that Rudolf Cebiš from the village, (Ruda to his friends 😉 ), had procured and fitted the uPVC windows, I approached him about having matching ones made and fitted on both sides of the verandah and also replacing three other small windows on the far side of the house. He came and measured up and in due course, gave me a written quotation for the work.
I accepted his quotation, paid him a deposit and the manufacture of the new windows was set in train. Some weeks later, on the morning of 9th November 2017, Ruda and one of the guys who works for him, arrived with the new uPVC double-glazed windows.
The section of the house stretching back from the front door with roofs at a fairly gentle angle, is clearly a later addition. What was the front door before this section was added, is now the door between my bedroom and the enclosed verandah. The two pairs of windows on the side of this newer addition, which you can see in the first photograph, are double-glazed and quite modern, but still have wooden, rather than uPVC frames. There is also a similar pair of windows at the rear of the house.
I was determined to get all of these painted this summer, not least because the existing exterior paintwork was beginning to go in a few places, especially on the pair at the rear of the house. However, I knew that I would need several successive days of dry weather to accomplish the task. Fortunately, such period occurred towards the end of July.
As is usual with any painting job, the most important part and also the most time consuming, was the preparation needed before I could start to paint. First of all, I cleaned the all the glass, inside and out, discovering how much more light this let in 😉 Then I rubbed back the areas where the existing paintwork was beginning to go and covered those areas with an initial coat of paint. Once that was dry, I then washed down all of the window-frames.
I knew from past experience of painting window-frames, that the only way to ensure paint didn’t end up on the glass, was to use masking tape. Accurately masking each windowpane, inside and out, was a tedious task. Only when this was complete, could I finally start painting. Above is a photograph of one of the pairs of windows, finally ready to be painted. My apologies for the reflection of the photographer on the glass 🙂
Not only did the weather remain dry for several days, it was also very hot and sunny. Fortunately, the two pairs of windows are on the west-facing side of the house meaning that the sun didn’t shine on them directly, until the early afternoon. So I was able to work fairly comfortably each day, until it was time to stop and have a late lunch. And because it was so warm, there was no problem with leaving the windows wide open for several nights, allowing the paint to dry hard.
And here is the pair of windows at the rear, north-facing side of the house, freshly painted, with the masking tape removed and the glass cleaned, once again.
With all this painting complete, with the exception of the front door, (another story), the exterior of the house is ready to face the next Czech winter. However, as a result of my labours, my neighbour Pavel, who lives in the house behind me, has given me a new name – Rembrandt 🙂
