Editor Pick
Regional Museum in Cesky Krumlov
The former seminary of the Jesuit order is a large boxy building set on the narrow neck of land linking the Vltava-surrounded New Town to the open land to the east. The butterscotch Baroque seminary has now been refurbished as the Regional Museum of Cesky Krumlov, and for 50CK it is a decent way to spend half an hour.
The history of the era spreads from the paleolithic era through Celtic and Roman interest, and exhibits from these periods are displayed, though the museum does not really get into its stride, in my opinion, until we hit the medieval period and the first stage of Cesky Krumlov's rise under the powerful Vitkovi and then Rozmberk families, an independent power base rivalling that of the Czech royal family for some six centuries. The coats of arms of the powerful families and towns are displayed.
The narrative continues through the arrival of the Jesuits (with a pretty good reconstruction of their pharmacy, with a waffle iron for making communion wafers) up to the nineteenth century, with examples of folk dress, and - interesting for someone who had taken the train from Linz to Ceske Budejowice the previous day - a model of the original horse-drawn railway that linked the two towns. There was also a scale model of Cesky Krumlov with interactive buttons that narrates the history of the town. Sadly however someone appeared to have stolen the castle!
One further intriguing section detailed the initiative to restore old lay crosses and shrines in the Sumava area that had lain abandoned following the displacement of communities in the 1930s and '40s. Interestingly it referred to the expulsion of Germans following the second world war as a tragedy comparable to the Nazi occupation. Germans had always made up a sizable proportion of the urban population here - in 1918 Germans outnumbered Czechs in Cesky Krumlov by 3:1. However, representatives of Christian groups from both communities acknowledge that if any section of the populace suffered the most, it was clearly the Jewish community. However, these statements were just made in passing. I personally would have liked to see more modern history - the history of the referenced Jewish population, the polarisation of the interwar period, the effects of the German occupation during the war, and how the hand of Moscow lay on the town afterwards. Strolling the romantic streets of Cesky Krumlov and visiting the tangled woods, forested hills and lush meadows of the region I could not help but wonder what impact the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century could have had on a landscape that appeared timeless.
At best, the museum was sporadically interesting, rather than a must-see. However for a 25p entrance fee there are a heck of a lot of worse ways to pass half an hour.
From journal Bohemian Rhapsody