Images from where I grew up

Part 2


The village of Svincany. A church tower like this is a typical dominant of many Bohemian villages.

An apple tree on the outskirts of the village of Raskovice. There are many fruit trees (apples, cherries, pears, plums) growing in orchards and along the roads in that region, giving more fruit than people can process as witnessed by this picture. The apples were still good so I had plenty of refreshment on my hike (from this and several other trees).


By the way, one can also find many abandoned fruit trees and even the whole orchards bearing tasty fruits for example in many places in British Columbia, in Idaho, or even in Japan. I really like apples and all kinds of other fruit ....

This is a very old village house (note the widening of its walls at the base), which still used to have a thatched roof when I was a little kid, recently converted into a recreational cottage for weekend use only by somebody living in a city. Village of Chrtniky.

Many more recreational cottages were built from scratch all over Czechoslovakia during the communist era when a lot of people channeled all their creative potential into this activity. These modern structures are usually much smaller than the converted one of the previous picture, and now dot the Bohemian countryside especially around all kinds of water bodies. The two in this picture are part of a large cottage colony surrounding a pond on the outskirts of Svojsice (see previous page). Nowadays some of these cottages are getting less visits than before 1989 because their owners are either busy making money and then visiting faraway places, or do not have enough money to come often enough because the prices of gasoline and bus tickets went up considerably in recent years.

And here is one more such modern recreational cottage built in the middle of Ledec. This one is bigger than average and could easily serve as a permanent home for a smaller family.