Prague Expat Life

Holy Week and Easter Day 2014 in Prague and Brno

With Rev'd Dr Karen Moritz and Jack Noonan outside St. Clement's Church, Prague on Easter Day © Celieta Leifeste — With Rev’d Dr Karen Moritz and Jack Noonan outside St. Clement’s Church, Prague on Easter Day © Celieta Leifeste

I have to admit that I much prefer it when Easter Day falls well on into April, as it did this year, rather than being in late March as it was in 2013, when I experienced a ‘White Easter’ in Brno. The warm Spring weather we have enjoyed in Prague in recent weeks, has brought all nature alive in a whole variety of colours, which in its own way, does speak of the new risen life of Jesus that we celebrate at Easter.

After the most pleasurable surprise on Palm Sunday, of a congregation almost twice as large as on a normal Sunday, I was also pleased that the number attending on Maundy Thursday evening, was larger than it has been in previous years. Our Good Friday evening devotional service was notable for a couple of things – a reflection on the Cross of Christ by my Licensed Reader Jack Noonan, which you can listen to and read here; and my accidental omission of the final Bible Reading, John 19. 38-42, meaning that I failed to have Jesus laid to rest in the tomb!

With 2014 being my sixth Easter in the Czech Republic, I knew from past experience that our Easter Day congregation would be likely to be in the region of one hundred. The other fairly accurate indicator of attendance is always the number of hits that the Church website receives during Holy Week. This year, these ranged from between two and five times the average daily level, though admittedly, some would be the regular congregation wanting to listen to Jack’s Good Friday sermon, or even to mine from Palm Sunday 🙂

Upon arriving at Church with Sybille, at around 10.20, we almost immediately started the task of assuring arriving foreign visitors that, ‘Yes – you are at the right place for Easter Day worship in English. But no – you cannot go into Church yet. You must wait outside here with us, until the Czech service has ended’. This has then to be followed by explaining that the Church building does not belong to us but to the Kliment congregation of the Ceskobratrská církve evangelické, the main Czech Protestant Church, and that they worship at 9.30 each Sunday, in advance of our service at 11.00.

As in previous years, the clear indication that the Czech service was coming to an end, was hearing the organ strike up with the hymn tune Maccabaeus by Georg Friedrich Händel, with the congregation giving good voice to the Czech translation of ‘Thine be the glory’. Only when a reasonable proportion of the Czech congregation had come out of the Church, could I and those helping with welcoming, move in and start getting the Church set up for our Sung Eucharist. Altogether we got about twenty minutes which was better than in one or two past years!

This year, we started Easter Day worship in a different way, with Celieta Lefeste coming out of the vestry, dressed as Mary Magdelene, and singing ‘Where have they taken my Jesus?’, accompanied by her husband Larry on the organ. You can listen and see her solo in this video.

I then gave the Easter greeting which answered her question. ‘Alleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

It was a great privilege to have both of my ministerial colleagues helping with our Easter Day worship. Licensed Reader Jack Noonan led our intercessions whilst American Presbyterian Minister Karen Moritz, read the first Bible Reading. Together, they then administered our two chalices at the distribution of the sacrament. The photograph at the beginning of this post was posed at the Church door, following the service. Karen has previously joked that when she & I are both robed, we look like the black sheep and the white sheep. With Jack in his black cassock, white surplice and light blue Reader scarf, he must be the the black, white and blue sheep 🙂

The official head count was that one hundred and thirteen people were present at worship. Around half were members of the regular congregation, including a few stray sheep that we hadn’t seen for sometime. The rest were visitors – mainly Americans, (there was a joke amongst them as to how many of the fifty states were represented), together with some Brits. Overall, at least fifteen nationalities were present in the congregation.

After refreshments and fellowship at Coffee Hour, I then jumped in the ‘Carly’ and headed off down the D1 – the Prague-Brno motorway, in order to celebrate Holy Communion for Easter with our Brno congregation. Our evening service there was the first to be held in the Brno congregation’s new home, after we were told with very little notice, that from the end of March, we could no longer use our previous venue belonging to the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, because of the change in time of the host congregation’s service.

The Brno Anglican congregation’s new home belongs to the Jesuits and is known as ‘The Upper Room’. As one of the congregation remarked in an email reply to me, it was most appropriate that our first service in ‘The Upper Room’ was on Easter Day! I promise a further post about Brno, including some photographs, after our next service there on Sunday 4th May. In the meantime, full details can be found here on the Brno page of our website.

The militant atheists are at it again

The Parish Church of Benátky nad Jizerou reflecting Czech cultural heritage © Ricky Yates

I awoke this Easter Monday morning, after a tiring but exhilarating Easter Day, planning to write a blog post all about our worship yesterday in Prague and Brno. I still plan to write that post, but in the meantime, I hope my readers will excuse this little rant in response to a prominent news item that was on the home page of the BBC News website this morning.

During Holy Week, the ‘Church Times’ published an interview with the British Prime Minister David Cameron, in which, amongst other things, he said that Britons should be “more confident about our status as a Christian country”. He then rightly added that saying this did not mean “doing down” other religions or “passing judgement” on those with no faith. The interview was widely reported, such as here on the BBC News website. Whilst I’m not normally in the habit of defending conservative politicians 🙂 , I have to say that on this point, I totally agree with David Cameron. I also believe that in his position as Prime Minister, he has every right to say what he said in that interview.

Today, one of the leading headlines that greeted me on my early morning visit to the BBC News website read, ‘David Cameron risks ‘alienation’, public figures claim’. According to a letter written to the ‘Daily Telegraph’ by over fifty ‘public figures’, David Cameron referring to the United Kingdom as a Christian country, ‘fosters alienation and division in our society’.

Firstly, I do wonder what makes someone a ‘public figure’. I think I have a fairly good knowledge of British life and culture yet I struggled to identify even ten of the signatories that I knew. And even if you are a ‘public figure’, what makes your opinion any more important or relevant than that of anyone else?

However, what did immediately get my attention and made me realise where the letter was coming from, was that the lead signatory was Professor Jim Al-Khalil, president of the British Humanist Association (BHA). Here I hope that long-standing readers of my blog, will forgive me for returning to a topic I previously wrote about two-and-a-half years ago.

According to the website of the BHA, they have ‘over 28,000 members and supporters’. Their website has said this for at least the past three years. Clearly their level of support hasn’t increased in that time, otherwise I’m sure they would have broadcast the fact. Notably, they do not differentiate between ‘members’ – those who have put their hands in their wallets and paid a fee – and ‘supporters’. What makes someone a ‘supporter’? A person who sent a friendly email over five years ago? Or someone who clicked ‘like’ on Facebook?

Back in August 2013, I wrote to the BHA, asking for a breakdown between paid-up members and ‘supporters’ and asking for their definition of a ‘supporter’. Whilst I got an out-of-working-hours acknowledgement of my email, I never got an answer to my questions. There is a clear reason why I got no reply. To reveal their actual membership numbers, showing that they are ridiculously small, would be embarrassing and would damage the credibility of the BHA, as it should. In my opinion, their lack of transparency borders on dishonesty.

The timing of the intervention of the BHA could not have been more apposite. On a normal Sunday, over three million people attend Church services in the UK – somewhere between five and six percent of the population. Yesterday being Easter Day, that number would have at least doubled if not tripled. Once the BHA has that level of support, then it has a right to be heard. Until it does, it remains an irrelevance and in no way justifies the column inches and air time, news organisations unfortunately give it.

The UK has a Christian heritage and culture and there is absolutely nothing wrong in saying so. Whilst I would like the numbers who actively attend Christian worship to be larger than they are, they are infinitely greater than the supporters of humanism and militant atheism. I rest my case!

Farmer’s Market on Saturday – Worship on Palm Sunday

Market 1 — Crowds at the Farmer’s Market © Ricky Yates

In early March, after a two-and-a-half month winter break, the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market at Vítezné námestí resumed. So now nearly every Saturday, we take a short bus or tram journey from the Chaplaincy Flat and explore what the market has to offer. As you can see, we are not the only ones who do so and at times, it can get quite crowded!

There are a number of stalls that we regularly visit each week for supplies of bread, eggs and potatoes. Whilst we can buy such things from our very convenient Kaufland supermarket, the produce from the Farmer’s Market does always seem fresher, is often cheaper, and one can be almost certain that the producer obtains a far better return for their labour.

Stall selling Moravian wine © Ricky Yates

Another of our favourite stalls is this one, selling Moravian wine. Whilst they do sell it by the 0.75l bottle, you can also have a plastic bottle filled from the tanks behind the counter. Two litres of extremely quaffable white wine costs around CZK 150 (just under £5.00 at current exchange rates).

The senior proprietor, (the gentleman behind the stall on the right in the photograph above), is Czech. However, he also speaks reasonably fluent German and has some English. So we frequently conduct business with him in a mixture of all three languages! When we are about to depart, his farewell words are almost always to wish us ‘Ein schönes Wochenende‘ 🙂

Flower stall at the Farmer's Market © Ricky Yates — Flower stall at the Farmer’s Market © Ricky Yates

Czech people do love their flowers and there are always numerous stalls that sell them. I couldn’t resist photographing this colourful stall yesterday which, as you can see, was doing a thriving business.

In the centre of the market area, there are various stalls selling freshly cooked food with tables & chairs where you can sit down and eat. And you can usually do so to musical accompaniment such as this young accordion player/singer was providing yesterday morning.

Our visit to the Farmer’s Market at Vítezné námestí yesterday morning, when all the accompanying photographs were taken, marked the beginning of a busy but enjoyable weekend. Today, not only did we have our Palm Sunday Eucharist, but the service was to be followed by that significant event – our Annual Church Meeting.

Just a few minutes before worship was due to begin at 11.00 this morning, we suddenly had a problem of the nicest sort. We completely ran out of copies of the Palm Sunday Order of Service as the congregation became double the size for a normal Sunday. The cause was a large number of visitors, mainly Americans but also including a delightful Indonesian couple. The biggest visitor group was a party of high school students from Connecticut, along with their teachers. We solved the problem by me asking from front, for people to share, so that everybody could follow and join in the liturgy. Fortunately, we just had enough palm crosses to go around!

After reading the Palm Sunday Gospel – Matthew 21. 1-11, I led the congregation in a procession outside, all around the Church as we sang ‘All glory, laud and honour, to thee Redeemer King’. Fortunately, when we re-entered the Church, we were still just about in time with Professor Michal Novenko on the organ 🙂 Some of those living the apartment blocks that overlook the Church got a bit of a surprise, but at least they were made aware that today was Palm Sunday!

As for the Annual Church Meeting, it was much better attended than in a number of previous years, and despite the serious financial difficulties that we face, there was a real desire expressed to work together to overcome them. Both our worship and the Annual Church Meeting have certainly helped prepare me to enter Holy Week, and with Jesus, once more walk the way of the cross.

Ordination in Vienna

Rev'd John Barker outside Christ Church, Vienna following his ordination as priest © Ricky Yates — Rev’d John Barker outside Christ Church, Vienna following his ordination as priest © Ricky Yates

On the evening of Sunday 30th March, I had the privilege of attending and participating in the ordination as priest, of my friend and ministerial colleague, John Barker. The ordination service took place at Christ Church, Vienna and meant that for the first time in my life, I was part of two services, on the same Sunday, in two different countries.

John was originally a licensed Reader in the Diocese of Durham and since his work for the European Commission brought him to continental Europe, he has helped in the Anglican Chaplaincies of Warsaw and Bucharest. I first met John in September 2008, at the Eastern Archdeaconry Synod meeting in Corfu which I attended, a week before moving from Oxfordshire to Prague. At that point, John had just moved from Bucharest to Skopje in Macedonia.

After establishing and leading the Anglican congregation in the Macedonian capital, last year John’s work took him to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. At the same time, he successfully completed further studies and was ordained deacon in the summer of 2013. In Yerevan, John has re-established an Anglican congregation there after a gap of ten years. Officially, he is the assistant curate of his and my Archdeacon Patrick Curran, the Chaplain of Christ Church Vienna. Therefore when plans for his ordination as priest in Yerevan ran into technical difficulties, the service was quickly and appropriately, moved to Vienna.

I only heard that the ordination service was happening, a week before the event. The official announcement wasn’t issued until twenty-four hours later! But knowing John and the fact that it would be very difficult for many other ordained Anglican priests to be present, I thought the least I could do was to try and see if I could attend.

Therefore on Sunday 30th March, I celebrated our regular 11.00 Eucharist in Prague as normal. Surprisingly, despite being the annoying Sunday when the clocks go forward by one hour, we had the largest congregation so far in 2014. But after a quick post-Eucharistic cup of coffee, I jumped into the car in order to drive to Vienna.

According to my internet research, the journey from central Prague to central Vienna, should take around four hours, providing there are no hold-ups en-route. In fact, the only mishap I had on my journey was finding myself on my first stretch of Austrian autobahn without a vignette. A quick detour into the first service area corrected this error, before falling foul of the österreichische Polizei 🙂

Leaving central Prague at 13.15, I reached central Vienna at about 17.00. But that is where I failed to pull off the autobahn at the correct intersection. I therefore spent the next forty-five minutes, weaving my way back through suburban Vienna, to 17-19 Jaurèsgasse, where Christ Church is located. Fortunately, with the service beginning at 18.00, I still made it with fifteen minutes to spare.

The ordaining bishop was David Hamid, the Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese in Europe. However, one of the great joys when someone is ordained priest, is that fellow priests are also invited to join in laying hands on the candidate, along with the bishop. I’m fairly sure that this was only the third time I’ve been privileged to do this, since my own ordination as priest nearly twenty-four years ago.

A reception held in the nearby Church Centre followed the service giving me the opportunity to speak in person with both my Archdeacon and Suffragan Bishop. Given the far flung nature of the Diocese in Europe, this is something that rarely happens more than once or twice a year!

It was inevitably a long and tiring day but I’m very glad I made the effort to travel and get to Vienna for the ordination service. And in the not too distant future, I do also hope to make the far longer journey to visit Yerevan and see John in action.

John with his wife Ella & daughter Laura, following the ordination service © Ricky Yates

Villa Tugendhat, Brno and the novel by Simon Mawer entitled ‘The Glass Room’

Villa Tugendhat in Brno, was designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van de Rohe and constructed between 1928 -1930 on a hillside slope overlooking the city centre. It was commissioned by the wealthy Jewish industrialist Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta and was their home for eight years before the couple, along with their children, were forced to flee to Switzerland following the dismembering of Czechoslovakia brought about by the Munich agreement of September 1938.

An icon of modern architecture, today Villa Tugendhat is considered one of the finest examples of functionalist design anywhere in the world. A revolutionary iron framework allowed Mies to dispense with supporting walls and massive plate glass windows give the extensive living space a wonderful feeling of space and light. The minimalist interior is famous for featuring an onyx wall and for using rare tropical hardwood.

Interior of Villa Tugendhat with onyx wall on the left © Ricky Yates

Sadly, during the Second World War and the communist era that followed, Villa Tugendhat suffered from inappropriate alterations and with internal materials being removed and used elsewhere. Some of the original wood panelling was found at Masaryk University, in a building used by the Gestapo as their Brno headquarters. In the latter years of communism, efforts were made to restore the building and a few years after the Velvet Revolution, it was opened as a museum under the auspices of Brno City Council.

In February 2010, a second major and expensive renovation project began with the aim of restoring Villa Tugendhat completely to its former glory. This work has included the creation of exact copies of the original furniture which was also designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van de Rohe. The building reopened to the public in March 2012.

An amazing sunset seen from inside Villa Tugendhat © Ricky Yates — An amazing sunset as seen from inside Villa Tugendhat © Ricky Yates

Since reopening, the number of people able to visit each day has been strictly limited in order to preserve the fabric of the building. The advice on the official website is to book an entrance ticket, at least one month in advance! Therefore I was greatly privileged to be able to visit Villa Tugendhat late one afternoon in September 2012, as a guest at a reception organised by the British Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic, without needing to book in advance! The photographs illustrating this post were all taken by me on that occasion.

'The Glass Room' by Simon Mawer — ‘The Glass Room’ by Simon Mawer

At that reception, the British novelist Simon Mawer, read some extracts from his novel, first published in 2009, entitled ‘The Glass Room’. It is a fictional story inspired by Villa Tugendhat, and takes it title from the extensive living space, with its plate glass windows and onyx wall, that is the central feature of the villa. I had been given a copy of the novel a few months previously and my visit inspired me to set about reading it, something I’ve since done twice, always planning to eventually write a blog post. My apologies that this post has taken eighteen months to gestate 🙂

The novel is both excellently conceived and extremely well written. What I particularly like about it is the very accurate retelling of the history of Central Europe over a sixty year period, against which the life stories of the various characters are played out. I very much agree with one reviewer who wrote, ‘Mawer creates a passionately detailed portrait of individuals struggling to snatch order and happiness from frightening, irrational times….a truly enjoyable read’.

As well as reading extracts from his novel, Simon Mawer also happily held an author signing session and so I got my copy suitably inscribed. The book is available from Amazon and has also been translated into several other languages, including Czech.

The author Simon Mawer signing a copy of his novel 'The Glass Room © Ricky Yates — The author Simon Mawer signing a copy of his novel ‘The Glass Room’ © Ricky Yates

My copy of 'The Glass Room', suitably inscribed by the author — My copy of ‘The Glass Room’, suitably inscribed by the author