Wedding at Bouzov Castle

Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates
Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates

On Monday 29th July, I conducted my first wedding of 2013, when Daniel, the British bridegroom, married Iva, his Czech bride, at Bouzov Castle. The castle lies in the rolling wooded hills of Moravia, about thirty minutes drive north-west of Olomouc.

As long-standing readers of my blog may know, this was not the first time I have conducted a wedding at Bouzov Castle. For I conducted my first-ever wedding in the Czech Republic at this same venue just over four years ago, also between a British bridegroom, Lea, and his Czech bride, Petra. You can read all about it and see the photos, here.

It was finding this post about Lea and Petra’s wedding on my blog, that prompted Daniel to contact me earlier this year, asking if I would be willing and available to conduct their wedding. As with Lea and Petra, Daniel and Iva had met whilst both living in the UK, but were very keen that their wedding should take place near to Iva’s Czech family home. What I really liked about Daniel’s initial email enquiry to me was his declaration that, ‘Faith is an important and growing part of our lives’, and how he then went on to explain that they were attending an Alpha Course being run by their local Anglican Church on the the Staffordshire/Cheshire border, where they currently live.

I was able to meet with Daniel and Iva earlier in February this year, whilst they were visiting Iva’s family, following a week of snowboarding down the Austrian Alps! But a lot of planning for the wedding service has taken place by email, over the past few months. As with both of my English-speaker to Czech weddings in 2012, it was very important to make sure that both the English and Czech speakers could understand and follow the service. So I was most grateful that my friend and Brno service coordinator Katka Bánová, was able and willing to help me on the day.

It has to be said that my journey from Prague to north Moravia, got off to the worst of possible starts. My plan was to drive there, following our Eucharist in Prague on the morning of Sunday 28th July. Daniel had already booked and paid for me to stay overnight in a hotel on the outskirts of Olomouc, where many other guests were also staying in advance of the wedding.

Additionally, I had arranged to drive on further on Sunday afternoon/evening, to Kuncice pod Ondrejnikem, in order to meet a Czech young lady called Dagmar, who currently lives and works in Portsmouth, but was home visiting her family. Dagmar is currently exploring a possible vocation to train for ordained ministry in the Church of England and has been in email contact with me. This was to be our first chance to meet in person, rather than just online.

Therefore, instead of travelling into St. Clement’s from the Chaplaincy Flat by public transport, as we normally do, I instead drove in by car, with all my necessary gear for being away for two nights, to which I was to add my cassock-alb and stole, following the Prague service. Unfortunately, just after crossing the Vltava River and waiting to turn left into Lannova, where it is possible to park the car free-of-charge on a Sunday, the car engine died!

Four police officers kindly pushed the car to a parking place outside the nearby Clarion Hotel and told me to go and ‘take my mass’ 🙂 and then come back to the car afterwards. So I duly did, but was at a total loss as to how I was to then fulfil my commitments both to Dagmar and to Daniel and Iva.

Aided by a member of the congregation and one of the hotel staff, we were able to push the car to a nearby parking place where it was free-of-charge to park until 08.00 on Monday morning. Then, to cut a long story short, I eventually combined my hanging clothes with my cassock-alb and stole over one arm, and put all my other belongings in a bag and carried them in my other hand, and headed by tram to Prague’s main railway station.

All this happened during one of the hottest and most humid periods of weather I have ever experienced in Prague. Therefore on arrival at the railway station, I happily paid CZK 20 (£0.66), to avail myself of a toilet cubicle, in order to change out of my black clerical shirt which was covered in white perspiration stains, into something dryer and more comfortable. I also did get my money’s worth and used the facility for the purpose for which it was primarily intended 🙂

Such are the joys of public transport in the Czech Republic, that even on a Sunday, there is an hourly train service between Prague and Olomouc. Thus I arrived safely in the centre of Olomouc just before 18.00 that evening, and a short taxi journey took me to my hotel. En-route, I texted Dagmar, to apologise for not being able to meet her.

The next morning, I made contact by email and phone, with an English-speaking staff member of our local Renault Garage. He kindly organised a tow truck to pick up the car before it got a parking ticket, and even arranged for the truck to call first at the Chaplaincy Flat, to pick up the spare car key from Sybille. With that all finally sorted, I was then able to concentrate on the wedding.

The wedding party in front of Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates
The wedding party in front of Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates

Katka kindly picked me up from the hotel and drove us both to Bouzov Castle in advance of the rest of the guests who were travelling there by private coach. This gave us plenty of opportunity to talk through how we would conduct the service and sort out all of the practicalities, well in advance of the event. Consequently, the service went extremely smoothly. As with both my English-speaker to Czech weddings in 2012, I had many guests afterwards expressing enjoyment of the service, especially Czech speakers who appreciated all that had been done to ensure they understood and could follow what was being said.

Daniel and Iva feeding each other soup © Ricky Yates
Daniel and Iva feeding each other soup © Ricky Yates

The reception took place under a marquee within the castle courtyard. This was possible because of the wedding taking place on a Monday when the castle is closed to the public. The couple were made to fulfil various Czech marriage traditions, some of which I’ve written about previously. One is the requirement to feed soup to each other from a single bowl, while protected by a sheet. The idea is to encourage cooperation between the newly married couple.

Daniel enjoying his wedding cake © Ricky Yates
Daniel enjoying his wedding cake © Ricky Yates

Other traditions are more universal in nature such as cutting the wedding cake. As you can see, not only did Daniel enjoy cutting the cake, he also enjoyed consuming some of it!

Despite all of the hassles I experienced on the Sunday, I still did enjoy being part of Daniel and Iva’s special day. The happy couple are hoping to relocate to the Czech Republic in the not so distant future and have assured me that they want to become part of either the Prague or Brno Anglican congregations.

As for the car, the problem was the failure of the alternator, meaning the engine was no longer charging the battery. Combined with the replacement of both metal straps under the petrol tank, work strongly recommended when the car passed its STK in June, together with being towed, I ended up with a bill for CZK 11,157 (approx £372.00). The better news is that I still managed to meet up with Dagmar, as she came to Prague to see her cousin and we managed a chat over a couple of beers, last Friday evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first Czech Wedding

 
 

Lea & Petra at Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates
Lea & Petra at Bouzov Castle © Ricky Yates
The newly married couple © 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 3rd 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 hordes 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.