Ancient Czech City Centers

There is something of the beehive or perhaps anthill about ancient cities – houses attached to one another, forming organic lines and irregular alleyways with mysterious openings at irregular intervals.  Centuries of settling and flooding have brought the ground level up above first floor windows while sub-cellars extend down into the earth, interconnected by silted-in passageways.  Generations lived and died within the walls through sieges, occupations and plagues -- life issuing forth from death and decay.  Like Blake’s infected rose, the exquisite architecture protects an unfolding culture, yet the poison which periodically winnows out the people, is never far away.  A moment in history and it will again be time for new Plague monuments.

Drawing the architecture of central Europe is much like painting beach pebbles or sunsets: one must bring something to it, lest one squander one’s days making shabby imitations of a far superior creation.  What I bring to this work, is a hybrid perspective.  I speak Czech and know the culture, but grew up in the USA. 

Returning to my ancestral culture is deeply satisfying and answers an unmet need to be part of something ancient and whole, but also reopens a troublesome wound.  I enjoy speaking our ‘secret language’ in public and being understood.  I enjoy passing for native, yet am also indisputably different.  How could it be otherwise when most of my life has transpired in English, when the places I walk are haunted by Native American spirits and all is suffused with Great Lakes waters.   Being attached but from a curious distance, I see these places differently than do others and that has value. 

The ancient walled cities are not only aesthetically pleasing, but they’re also historic centers of commerce, culture and worldly power.  All new ideas, inventions, weapons, and resistant forms of bacteria have historically followed the ancient trade routes and refined themselves in their population centers.  Plague monuments, war memorials and ossuaries  naturally abound.  One such Ossuary near Kutná Hora contains the remains of 30,000 people exhumed from mass graves dating to the thirty years war.  Altars were made of skulls and chandeliers decorated with human pelves strung together.  Coats of arms were constructed of fingers, mandibles and forearms – Mementa mori -- reminders of that which we too shall inevitably become.  Plagues and war were killing people faster than they could be buried, resulting in a population reduction of nearly 80% from 1620 - 1650.   In the close quarters under which people lived, crowded with malnourished refugees from the ravaged countryside, the cities were incubators of disease.

The American in me craves engagement with places that have seen the big picture of history unfold, where Napoleon passed through and Kafka was born.  I’m fascinated by the rootedness of ancient indigenous cultures -- with cities continuously inhabited for a thousand years, whether it be Prague or the Taos Pueblo.

My roots in Kalamazoo don’t even extend to my own birth.  In this land of clean well-lit places with easy social mobility, I wonder if we don’t envy others their history and secretly want to warm ourselves by their fires. We haunt antique fairs where period pieces from the 1970’s are traded and take nearly prurient interest in foreign royalty. This is where looters of other peoples’ legacies come to sell stolen altarpieces and archeological booty.  Why do they find so many eager buyers here?  I think it’s because we are uprooted and crave intimacy with history while enjoying the feeling of liberty that the new and historically unencumbered place provides – irreconcilable opposites. 

Czechs speak easily of  invasions five hundred years ago, calling up the lists of lost lands and looted libraries with a passion that reveals barely concealed intentions to reclaim it all some day.  Like rust, they never sleep.  “Our” DaVinci,  looted in 1631 by mercenaries is being openly held in the fifth floor Upsala University treasure vault - stolen goods - imagine that! 

Libra Giga - the largest book ever, hand-written and lavishly illustrated by medieval monks on specially prepared donkey vellum.  The book contained a mix of sacred writings, songs and luscious pictures of demons and diabolic fiends in turbans with pantaloons - hell ion the turkish style. Bound in thick leathers with brass corners and decorations -  this volume was too heavy to be lifted by one man alone....and stolen by bands of roving Swedish mercenaries in the seventeenth century –  just yesterday. 

We Americans may love our antiques and dote on the past, but it’s a decorator’s approach, rather than anything too personal.  We don’t actually share a common heritage.  Blacks, Indians, Whites – we don’t even agree who ‘done our people wrong’ – who the good the bad and the ugly actually were.  

How many people know anything about their ancestors – names, origins, languages they spoke?   History is not casually discussed here, nor is it presumed that others have background knowledge. Watergate is already ancient history.  The Civil war far back enough that accuracy is no longer any sort of prerequisite for having  opinions.  Most peoples’ ancestors  were at best starving peasants and at worst horse thieves on the lamb -  but speaking in their favor at least the ones with some initiative and the capacity to put together the money for passage.

I heard tell of a man at customs and immigration at the Sidney airport  being asked if he had a criminal record and his reply getting him promptly deported.  he said that he wasn’t aware it was still a requirement.  Not funny, I guess.   A film comes to mind in which a newly rich buffoon staying in a fancy hotel carelessly destroys a Louise the fourteenth bed.  “That’s nothing”, he tells the distressed hotelier, “I once had a bed that went back to Sears Roebuck the First”. This bit of American cinema with its finger on our collective pulse was a scene from the Three Stooges.

Sitting before a twelfth century tower is conducive to states of reverie during which images and associations come to mind, much as they do looking into cloud formations.  The city is a field of human potential that has generated mystics, massacres, art and inquisitions.  It is all there, written in the stones and comes up unbidden in moments of meditative stillness.  Clustered around the city gates, you can feel the souls of those slaughtered defending or attacking it.  The natives rushing by, getting in to work, might be amused at my sentimentality and gladly trade the burden of history for a Green Card and a Miami condo, but to me it’s all alive and infinitely more interesting.  Of course parasites and viruses too are alive and interesting in their own charming ways. 

The city is not only pregnant with the meaning of human-driven history, but contagion too is always lurking nearby.  It never goes completely away.  It may arrive through a salesman infected by a flea, come wrapped in the deceptions of love or perhaps nestled deep into the nurturing folds of a new ideology.  Perhaps it will come howling in through the gates, or it may seep in surreptitiously through the sewers, gradually suffusing everything in tainted vapors.  Perhaps it’ll encounter resistance -- hygienic technologies, new drugs, even quarantine.  In these ancient plague cities, they should know by now –  there is always an opening, a new bug and weak spot in the walls, but then again has anybody ever really been ready for the new pestilence.

Mounted on stone walls and slate roofs, are the ubiquitous round reflectors aimed at the eye in the sky and bringing the beast into their homes.  These are the currents and eddies you see coalescing in my drawings.  Beyond the walls and flowing through the abandoned streets are those new incursions, just now finding form.   It’s the contagion we  know will come.  Perhaps it will be a fertile cross-pollination of the new and the old --  wonderful ideas entering the life of the polis and perhaps it will be the grim reaper, elegantly dressed, well spoken and mysteriously seductive.  He’s wired. He carries a cell phone. He’s connected by microwave transmitters to satellites overhead. The electromagnetic invasion is as harmless looking as viruses in a far off Chinese barnyard, the recombining genes of pigs, fowl and people coalescing and quietly moving out. 

Epidemics break into well-orchestrated human events and hijack the course of history. Fortune smiles on one and damns the other.  Death becomes the great equalizer, mocking class structure as disease dances among them all, picking from among the rich and the poor – the virtuous and the sinful.

I find the myth of Pandora’s box helpful in examining my fascination with ancient cities. Being trapped within the walls of a city during epidemics and massacres is the very embodiment of the horrors released from Pandora’s box. The last apparition at the bottom was however Hope and that I see as the other side of the coin.   Hope too is most obviously manifest in the concentrated context of the human drama taking place within the city.  I have no desire to experience the horrors, yet I find the cultural continuity that cities represent, very satisfying.  The gift of Hope dwells in the cyclic nature of life and primarily in its capacity for regeneration.  Our love of art, of one another, of our higher spiritual nature is expressed in the public life of cities.  It is here that we return after every war, depression and plague – to reassemble once again, those scattered building blocks of Hope.  That too, is exuded from the ancient stones of the fortified polis and has perhaps found its way into my drawings.

Genesis of the Exhibited Artwork

These drawings were done during several art symposia within the Czech Republic -- a variant on the artist in residency.  Instead of working in isolation, artists were brought together, to interact while interpreting a place already rich in art history.  Housed in a single hotel, our days were spent out drawing or painting and evenings in collegial company over beer with a mix of Czech, English, Slovak, French and German spoken. The locations were provincial cities of architectural significance: Loket in western Bohemia, Vimperk in the south and Pardubice in the east.

Until now, this artwork has only been exhibited within the Czech Republic: City Halls at Loket and Zďár nad Sázavou, at the east-bohemian archives in Pardubice and in the Vimperk Castle hosted by the Šumava International Biosphere Preserve.

Vimperk

Long a fortified trading center on the trade routes connecting salt mines in Austria and Bavaria with Prague and points north, all the way to Baltic amber traders, Vimperk has its provincial quiet, but also attractive architecture being adapted to contemporary use

Loket

The Gothic architecture of Loket is contained by a loop in the Ohře River with steep hillsides to all sides. Without room to expand, they’ve been forced to use space efficiently. The castle, dominates the heights and is said to have once had a dragon in its underground lairs.  Gothic period houses recede from the marketplace in concentric circles down to the water where there are small gardens subject to periodic flooding.  Goethe was a frequent visitor and every hotel has beds in which he slept – truths pronounced with authority by unread innkeepers who bank upon his name.  Nearby are natural rock formations called Svatošske Skály – which I have fancifully introduced marching through in pilgrimage, transforming the town again into the stone from which it was built. The plague monument is also there, with its comet tracing an oracular arc across the heavens.  

Pardubice

Pardubice is on a flat fertile plain and an old center of commerce.  Nearby is the castle built on Kunětická Hora, a volcano frozen in its eruptive force, looming above the fertile plain on the Labe River.  This golden breadbasket of Bohemia generated wealthy and powerful nobility, who contended with Prague for power.  The ruling family of Pernštejn however descended into the intrigues of European power politics and spent so much time away in conquest that they eventually died out by the sword, leaving no heirs. Sometimes on a quiet night, the streets of Pardubice seem to glisten with blood -- other times you merely smell the Semtex plant quietly making plastic explosives.  All the residents have a mild case of the sniffles from whatever is being released surreptitiously into the night air, hours after the inspectors have gone to sleep.  Known to all, this cost of the current prosperity is always there – quiet and foreboding.  Hussites and Crusaders still appear as disembodied spirits.  Gestapo patrols roam the night after last call at the bars. The apparitions of the past are never fully erased from memory.  The city is a meaningful place, but not easy to inhabit.

Near Pardubice, the ancient Oak at Lichnice was planted with the dedication of a new Castle in the eleventh century.  The passing centuries were not kind to the various brigand knights and aristocrats trying to make a go of it.  The castle periodically came under siege and succumbed twice to Swedish mercenaries who sacked it during the thirty years war.  Today it is a ruin; the thick stonewalls tumbled all about.  The Oak however, lives on in that irony that, biological beings, seemingly so vulnerable to fire, drought, flood, lightning and vandalism -- can be more resilient than granite.  The fate of this Oak moves me as much as do the travails of the Pernštejns or of my own humble ancestors, who were forced to work fields they didn’t own around Pardubice in the equally ancient but unremarkable villages of Choltice, Nemošice and Mnětice, for more centuries than are recorded.