Bohemia
August 2017
I rented a car and drove out of Prague, west through the Bohemian countryside on a winding highway through rural towns and farmsteads. The barns had a different style than the ones back home — steeper roofs, more stone — but the countryside looked remarkably like the rolling hills of Wisconsin. Just higher. The same green. The same light falling across fields in the same late-summer way.
I was stuck behind big rig haulers on the two-lane roads, but I was taking my time anyway. I stopped for a hike in the hills for a couple of hours because I couldn’t resist, even though Plzeň was waiting ahead. I laid in the grass and thought about my ancestors — why they chose my part of the United States to relocate to. Standing in those Bohemian hills, the answer was obvious. The temperature was the same. The landscape was the same. They hadn’t left home. They’d found another version of it.
I took my time, stopping often, enjoying a perfect sunny day with the windows down. The kind of driving where the road isn’t a means to a destination but a thing worth doing on its own.
In Plzeň, I checked into Hotel Slovan. Slovan, Wisconsin is a town close to where I live. So is Pilsen, Wisconsin. It was something to see so many familiar names — the Czech place-names that had been transplanted to my corner of America by people who’d driven these same roads a century and a half before me.
The hotel was perfect for me. Stuck in time, with a lot of built-in woodwork — as if it had been fancy when it was first built but had since settled into being a cheap hotel with good bones. I liked it for exactly that reason.
There was just enough daylight left to walk to the Cathedral of St. Bartholomew in the center of the city and climb the bell tower. Two hundred ninety-nine steps. I was the only one up there — must have been the wind deterring people. It was quite a view. The best in the city, I’d assume. I could see everything: the grid of the old town, the brewery smokestacks, the hills beyond. I went back down, visited the nave, found a small dinner, strolled around, and headed to bed.
The next morning I had breakfast and coffee at the Walter Mitty Café — yes, I had to check it out with a name like that. James Thurber is one of my favorites. The café knew what it was doing with that name.
Then the Pilsner Urquell Brewery tour, to see where the beer I’d been drinking for the last five weeks was made. The cellars were cool and dark and stretched on forever. Tasting it at the source, unpasteurized, from the barrel — it was a different drink than what arrives in a pub glass. Softer. More alive.
And then the Puppet Museum — Muzeum loutek v Plzni. This was a big one. Puppets spanning the entire history of Czech puppetry, from the earliest traveling rod marionettes to the mid-century golden age. Some you could handle. Stages you could perform on. Most behind glass, but the glass didn’t diminish them. All the dragons and devils. Death as a persona — skeletal, grinning, a recurring character in Czech puppet opera the way the fool recurs in Shakespeare. Kings, queens, more Kašpárek — the Czech everyman trickster — villagers, and a whole section devoted to Spejbl and Hurvínek, the father-and-son duo that became national icons. I was building a vocabulary for something I’d been doing instinctively. Every museum on this trip added another layer.
The next morning I drove south to Prachatice. This little town had amazing, well-preserved architecture — the kind of place where the buildings in the square still wear their original sgraffito like tattoos. The Church of Saint James the Great was started in 1359 and finished in the sixteenth century, which means someone’s great-great-grandchildren completed what their ancestors began. That kind of patience is hard to imagine now.
There was another puppet museum here, equally filled with extraordinary displays and informative didactic panels. A whole section on the devil in puppetry and opera — his many faces, his function as moral counterweight, the way Czech puppet tradition used him not just to frighten but to teach and to laugh. The devil as entertainer. The devil as mirror.
Prachatice was quiet. Hardly anyone in the museum or the town square. It wasn’t hard to imagine a puppet wagon rolling into that square centuries ago — setting up beneath those painted facades, telling stories of devils, saints, and salt to whoever gathered. The tradition I was studying had started in places exactly like this.
Only a couple of hours there, then on to Holašovice Historic Village for a pitstop — a UNESCO site of South Bohemian folk baroque farmsteads, impossibly tidy, the kind of place that makes you want to sit on a bench and just look at proportions. Then to České Budějovice to see the Black Tower, drink a Budweiser Budvar at the source, and sleep for the night.
The next morning I made it to Český Krumlov.
The town feels almost impossibly composed — like a miniature world folded into a loop of the Vltava River. It curves in on itself, wrapped by water, crowned by a castle that rises in layers: tower, courtyards, bridges, and painted walls that shift color with the light.
It’s one of those rare places where the word picturesque doesn’t quite cover it. It feels staged — but not artificially. More like something that has been rehearsing itself for centuries.
I could barely get my car to my Airbnb on the narrow cobblestone road. Eventually, with some guidance from a local who waved me through like he was directing a ship into port, I made it.
I had enough time that first afternoon to visit the Egon Schiele Art Centre. His mother was born here, and he lived in Krumlov for a short while before being pushed out — too progressive for the town’s comfort. A century later they’d built a museum in his honor. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The work was raw and confrontational and beautiful, the way Schiele always is — bodies rendered with a tenderness that looks like violence until you sit with it long enough.
The next day I spent entirely in the Castle Complex. It hangs on the rocks like a nest, unfolding in layers. Bridges connect sections like suspended thresholds — you cross one and the world changes slightly. But the Baroque Theater was the revelation. Original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stage machinery. Candle-lit illusion systems designed to create storms, heavens, and underworlds. Hand-painted backdrops that slide, rotate, and transform scenes. This was puppetry’s older sibling — the same impulse to make small worlds and fill them with wonder, just scaled up to human size. I stood in the wings and looked at the ropes and pulleys and counterweights and thought: someone built this to make people believe in magic. And it still worked.
The town was busy with tourists, but it was fun to roam the streets and pretend I was in a medieval village — which, in a sense, I wasn’t pretending. I had dinner by the river, sat for a long time, and wrote and sketched while the light changed on the water.
The next day I went to the Marionette Museum — the Fairy-Tale House. Fairy-tale nooks concealing water goblins, demons, dragons, bandits from the surrounding forests, and other mysterious creatures. It was geared more toward children, but I liked it all the same. Maybe more than the children did. The best puppet work doesn’t condescend to its audience — it trusts that wonder is ageless.
That evening I got a beer right outside my Airbnb and listened to locals playing guitar and violin — folk music, unhurried, the kind that sounds like it’s been played in that spot for generations. I went to bed with the music still drifting through the window.
The next morning I was off to Vienna.