Before I get back to blogging about truly ‘spiritual matters’, (please forgive the obvious pun 🙂 ), I thought I’d better explain the current situation regarding the ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks exceeding 20% proof which has been the subject of my two most recent posts. As can be seen in this photograph, the ban was partially lifted on Thursday 27th September, much to the pleasure our nearby whisky bar.
Since Thursday 27th September, the Czech Ministry of Health has allowed the sale of any liquor that can be shown to have been produced before 31st December 2011. As far as liquor produced this year is concerned, retailers must get a certificate of the alcohol’s origin within 60 days. Otherwise these bottles must be destroyed.
The death toll from the current outbreak of methanol poisoning now stands at twenty-seven with more than seventy others being hospitalised. However, there is quite a consensus amongst health professionals, that some earlier deaths may also have been due or partly due to methanol poisoning, prior to the problem being identified at the beginning of September. This is the reason that 31st December 2011 has been chosen as the cut-off point rather than a date sometime into 2012.
Whilst the police have arrested several people, confiscated thousands of litres of contaminated liquor and found supplies of fake labels, they still haven’t located the exact source of the methanol poisoning. In particular, they haven’t identified and arrested those who masterminded this deadly crime. They just seem to have caught a few of the ‘indians’ but none of the ‘chiefs’.
The Czech government is promising that in future, there will be regular checks by Health Inspectors of bottles of liquor on sale in both bars and shops, together with a crackdown on illegal production and illicit sales. Whether these words will be turned into positive actions we wait to see 😉
The photograph on the left is of some of the empty shelves in our local Kaufland supermarket following the implementation of the ban. In the middle of the shelves, is a notice on a yellow piece of paper, giving details of the banning order issued by the Czech Ministry of Health.
Whilst the reasoning behind this draconian measure is understandable, not least because the death toll from drinking spirits contaminated with methanol here in the Czech Republic, has risen to twenty three with nearly fifty others hospitalised, it is inevitably having major economic effects too. One particular casualty, as mentioned in response to a comment on my previous post, is our nearby whisky bar.
Whilst I don’t drink anything stronger than wine, Sybille is quite partial to an occasional single malt. So over the past year or so, a few months after the whisky bar opened, we have paid it a visit from time-to-time. Whilst Sybille has enjoyed her ‘wee dram’, I have quaffed a glass of their white wine. This past week, we have paid it a couple of visits to have a glass or two of wine, as a small way of showing our support for their business, as the ban is currently reducing turnover by 90%!
Last night when we visited, there were several Czechs there drinking either wine or cider, we suspect with similar motives to ours. But there was also a man sitting on his own at a table, who clearly wasn’t Czech, enjoying his glass of red wine and holding onto to the 75cl bottle he had purchased, in order to regularly refill his glass. “Where are you from?” we asked in English. The most surprising reply was, “Saudi Arabia” – he was a junior diplomat at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Prague on his first overseas assignment!
The corrupting influence of the West or sheer hypocrisy? I’ll leave you to decide!
But it is quite clear what the owners of the Whisky Bar think of the current situation. The photo is of their shop front window.
Earlier this evening, I saw something I never ever expected to see – the shelves of our local Kaufland supermarket being completely cleared of every bottle of alcoholic drink that is more than 20% proof. The reason for this drastic action is to try and prevent further deaths and injuries from rum and vodka, contaminated by poisonous methanol, which have already claimed the lives of nineteen people in the Czech Republic and two more in Poland. It has also put up to thirty others into hospital, several of whom have lost their sight.
Whilst the contaminated liquor that is responsible for these deaths and injuries is bootlegged/illegal in origin, some of it has been sold in bottles bearing a legitimate manufacturer’s name. Initially, the Czech government just banned sales by street vendors and market stalls. But with the increasing number of deaths and with no definite identification of the source of the contaminated spirits, the Czech government today has taken the somewhat drastic step of banning all sales of of liquor with more than 20 percent alcohol.
As someone who never ever drinks anything stronger than port wine, I’m not in anyway going to be affected by this understandable but somewhat drastic decision of the Czech government. But this ban does affect two of the Czech Republic’s most famous products –Becherovka and Slivovice. Keeping the balance between protecting public health and not damaging the country’s economy, is going to be a considerable problem in the coming days and weeks.
One of the privileges of being a Christian Minister is being part of what sociologists call people’s ‘major life events’ when I conduct baptisms, weddings or funerals. And because of the somewhat unusual nature of the Prague Anglican congregation, I have conducted relatively few of each of these over the past almost four years I have been here. This in turn has meant that I have been able to give each of these ‘occasional offices’, (as they are collectively known), more attention to detail than might normally otherwise be possible.
All but two of the weddings that I have conducted since arriving in Prague have been cross-cultural – between an English-speaker and a Czech/Slovak/Belarusian. These have inevitably raised cultural and linguistic issues about which I have written previously in this blog. But they have also, without exception, been most enjoyable occasions as relatives and friends of each happy couple, despite their different nationalities and languages, have joined together to celebrate.
Two years ago tomorrow, I conducted the marriage of Jan, a Czech, to Allison, an American. Late last year, I was thrilled to hear that they had taken notice of the third reason that marriage is given according to the preface to the Anglican Marriage Service, ‘as the foundation of family life in which children may be born and nurtured in accordance with God’s will, to his praise and glory’ – Allison was pregnant!
Little Martin Morris Rovný duly arrived in the world early in March of this year. In this era of social media, he had already appeared on Facebook even before he was born with his mother posting pictures of ‘her scan’. Since then, numerous photographs of him have also been posted online by his proud parents.
Jan and Allison currently live in Sweden, where Jan is a research fellow at the University of Gothenburg and Allison has successfully completed and defended her own thesis, as well becoming a mother to her young son. As they were intending to spend a good part of August in Prague with Jan’s family, they asked whether it would be possible for Martin to be baptised at St. Clement’s as in their current rather peripatetic existence, they do see it as their spiritual home. Therefore on Sunday 26th August during our Sunday Eucharist, I baptised Martin Morris in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, using the font that stands just a couple of metres from where his parents had stood almost two years previously to make their marital vows to each other.
As our opening hymn, we sang ‘Come, thou fount of every blessing’ to the American folk tune Nettleton. This was the hymn that Allison’s family, together with the bride and bridegroom, had sung to the rest of the congregation at their wedding – a cappello in four-part harmony! It is a hymn virtually unknown this side of the Atlantic although it does now appear in ‘Common Praise‘, the successor to ‘Hymns Ancient & Modern‘, published in 2000. Not being in the hymnbook we use, I had to reproduce the words on our ‘Weekly Bulletin’ – fortunately they are out of copyright! In doing so, we also made Larry from Texas happy, who was playing the organ for us that Sunday, by for once singing a hymn he knew to what he deemed to be the ‘correct tune’ 🙂
Whilst we had a large number of Jan’s Czech relatives present for the service, the only members of Allison’s family able to be present were her parents, Morris and Mary Elizabeth who had flown over from the USA, especially for the occasion. However, I was very pleased that Morris accepted my invitation to lead our intercessions, immediately following the baptism of his grandson, just as he had led the intercessions at his daughter’s wedding some two years before. It did make once again, for a very special occasion.
As I explained in my previous post, we spent the last weekend of our recent holiday, in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic. Brno is just over 200 kilometres south-east of Prague and is situated at the confluence of the Svratka and Svitava rivers. With a population of about 400,000, the city is about one third of the size of the Czech capital.
Within the historic centre of Brno, there are a whole variety of different Churches. The one pictured on the left here, is dedicated to Sv Jakuba / St. James and is a fine example of baroque architecture. According to my ‘Brno City Guide’, the top of the spire is 92 metres high.
We were pleased to be able to walk around the interior of the Church and observe the very high pillars which in turn, support a fine vaulted roof. Being a Church dedicated to St. James, we were not surprised to find a photographic display of a group of parishioners who had made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela a few years previously. But they clearly had started walking to Santiago at some point in Spain, unlike their mediaeval forebears, whose pilgrimage would, no doubt, have begun at the west door of this Church!
The Church pictured on the right is known as Cervený kostel or in English as ‘The Red Church’. It is one of several similar red brick Churches that can be found in various parts of the Czech Republic, all dating from the second half of the nineteenth century. They were built following a ‘Toleration of Protestants’ act of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1850s, which for the first time allowed protestant groups to build and own church buildings which actually looked like Churches with towers or spires and bells.
When first built, this Church was used for worship by German-speaking Lutherans. There was a large German-speaking population in Brünn, (as German-speakers still call Brno), until the expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche in 1945 following the end of the Second World War. It now belongs to the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, the largest Protestant denomination in the Czech Republic who came into being in December 1918, when the Czech-speaking Lutheran Church amalgamated with the Czech-speaking Presbyterian/Reformed Church.
Below is pictured the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. Although situated on the site of previous Churches dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the building obtained its current Neo-Gothic appearance when it was reconstructed in the early years of the twentieth century.
Immediately west of the historic centre of Brno, is a rocky outcrop on which stands Hrad Špilberk / Špilberk Castle. Founded in the second half of the thirteenth century, the castle has been altered, extended and rebuilt many times since. It also has a chequered history, (please excuse the pun), which in many ways, reflects the experience of the Czech people over the centuries. One of its many claims to fame is resisting a siege lasting four months, by Swedish troops in 1645, thus changing the eventual outcome of the Thirty Years War.
The fortifications are impressive which I hope will be well illustrated by the photograph below. At various times Špilberk Castle has been both a prison and a military barracks. Since 1960, it has been part of Brno City Museum and we spent most of our Saturday afternoon in Brno, visiting two different exhibitions within the castle – one explaining the numerous centuries of central European history – the other, a wonderful collection of art work from the late nineteenth century through to the beginning of the Second World War.
Below are two photographs that I took when exploring the castle complex. One shows the depth of the moat that surrounds the central part of the castle. The other shows part of the casements, a series of rooms constructed within the castle walls which have been used over time as both prison cells and for the storage of military armaments.
Just as in Prague, it is possible to walk the streets of the historic centre of Brno, and see a whole variety of different styles of architecture and artistic decoration on the exterior of buildings. This one photograph doesn’t do justice to the wealth and variety that there is to be seen.
Likewise as in Prague, Brno has an excellent public transport network including many trams. At weekends, this historic tram runs along a central circuit, a reminder of how public transport used to be many decades ago.
Over the weekend, we enjoyed the company and hospitality of our friends Lynsey and Johnny who walked around with us all day on Saturday 28th July. Late in the afternoon, they took us for some well-earned drinks at one of their favourite Brno cafés.
