Brno, Moravia, Czech Republic

Greetings from a nice long weekend past in the Moravian district, Czech Republic.

On Friday, September 11, my group and I left Prague for a nice long weekend in Moravia. Moravia is the second of the two unofficial, yet official territories in the Czech Republic. Moravia is also know as the Czech Republic's wine district.

We left Friday morning and headed off to Brno, the city we would be staying in Moravia. We stopped once for lunch, and a second time to look at a very old, very beautiful cloister in the town of Tisnov. This cloister is very famous for the entrance way to the church known as the Porta Coeli (Gate to Heaven). We stayed for about an hour and then headed on our way to Brno. We arrived in Brno, unpacked and then went to a wine cellar for dinner known as the Templar Order Restaurant. This has been a wine cellar in existence for centuries and has since been turned into a beautiful restaurant. Dinner was excellent and the wine was wonderful.

Saturday began with a tour of Brno and some exploration of the local churches and some experimentation with what is referred to as young wine. Young wine is a a wine that has not aged for a very long time at all and tastes very much like grape juice. I had a cup while watching the festivities. The festivities consisted of people dressing up and singing their praise for the new wine (wine production, and the celebration of young wine is very important in Moravia). We there visited the Gregor Mendel Museum which was quite awesome and then moved on the the Basilica of Assumption of Virgin Mary, one of Brno's oldest and most beautiful churches. I have become very fond of all the churches over here and love taking pictures of all the ones I can visit. The last place we visited on Saturday was the Austerlitz Battlefield. Austerlitz is a battlefield outside of Brno where Napoleon defeated the Russian and Austrian armies in 1805. There was a massive memorial in place on location and was magnificent to look at.

Sunday consisted of a lot of sitting on the bus to get to a few specific places in Moravia. We packed up in the hotel and got on the bus to visit our first place of the day, Adamov. Adamov is a small town known for St. Barbara Church, where a very large, very intricate wood altarpiece is found. The piece was massive and full of detail. We then headed to the Moravian Karst Caves where we took a walking tour and a boat tour of the caverns. The caverns were very cold with limited area to move, but they were definitely worth seeing. Before heading back to Prague we stopped at the most beautiful church I have seen outside of St. Peter's Basilica. The church is in the small town of Krtiny and is truly the focal point within the whole town. The church was decorated top to bottom with paintings, statues, woodwork, stone work. Every art form was used to enhance the beauty of the church. I could only feel warmth when walking through the church looking all around me.

Tomorrow my Intensive Czech Class begins, so my school work will finally begin.

Until next time....