Digging deep into Bohemia
IN A country brimming with romantic monasteries and clifftop castles that have inspired writers and composers from Goethe to Chopin, I was taken to a coal mine. The Czech Republic is, after all, the country of Kafka, and the bizarre is to be expected.
And yet this hellish vision of the beautiful Bohemian countryside turned into a surface ocean of coal, where gigantic machines rip through the earth at a frightening rate of 88,000 cubic feet (the volume of an Olympic swimming pool) every hour, proved utterly fascinating.
I watched jag-toothed behemoths excavate the earth, scoop the underlying coal, and transport it on belts at up to 25ft per second.
These mechanical dinosaurs, I learnt, are fed 24 hours a day by men on 12-hour shifts and are halted only when temperatures fall below minus 15C, and the dinosaurs freeze.
It was in 2009 that some PR genius came up with the notion of ‘coal mine safaris’, since when the Czech Army Mine in Most has welcomed 16,500 visitors. The health-and-safety brigade would be appalled, but for anyone in search of an offthe-beaten-track activity involving hard hats, with four hours and £4.20 to spare, I would recommend it.
As an apology for the environmental scourge, the coal companies have, over the past 60 years, invested in land reclamation. Once a site has been purged of its lignite (the ‘brown’ coal mined here), it is turned into a scenic lake or sports facility. And so forests and vineyards – for which this region of north west Bohemia has been known for 1,000 years – are replanted, and now carpet the surrounding slopes.
Perhaps their greatest achievement can be seen in ‘the church that moved’. It sits in its new location, near the old town of Most, which is now drowned beneath a lake.
‘When they dug up the old town, the government decided to save the 16th Century Church of the Assumption,’ says Petr, who has worked for the mines for 42 years. ‘And so they lifted and transported the church, in its entirety, to this location, in 1975. It took 28 days to move it along a half-mile rail.’
Ironically, after all that, the Vatican refused to consecrate the church, as its altar faced south, rather than east which is the norm. It would take five years for the Church to relent.
After the industrial west, we drove north, skirting the Elbe river. Our destination was near the German border and a huge national park known as Bohemian Switzerland.
After the belching factories, the pure, pine-fragrant air of this undisturbed paradise was intoxicating.
Trout frolicked in the burbling waters of the stony Kamenice river, birds trilled overhead, and kingfishers swooped.
The path we took petered out after about a mile and – while hardier souls climbed to the famous Pravcická Gate, the largest rock arch in Europe – we boarded punts to navigate a dramatic 450ft-high gorge of sandstone, twisted and fragmented into bizarre shapes.
At one point, three tiers of balconylike projections emerged from the rock. We paused beneath them, as our ferryman produced a harmonica for a solo recital. ‘Is it not,’ he said, ‘just like the Paris Opera?’