Bohemian Treasures of the Czech Republic

The lands of Bohemia have always occupied an ambiguous and fertile position in European history, neither quite Western nor Eastern, neither Germanic nor Slavic, yet profoundly shaped by all of these worlds. It was here that the Gothic ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperors found some of their most spectacular expression and that the Renaissance arriving from Italy was transformed into something distinctly its own. The result is a landscape of extraordinary cultural density, where Romanesque rotundas stand in the shadow of Gothic cathedrals, where Renaissance graffito facades line cobbled market squares unchanged since the sixteenth century, and where baroque architects deployed the full theatrical vocabulary of the age with breathtaking confidence.

Our journey moves through this landscape beginning in Prague, travelling south and east into Moravia to Telc and finally descending into Southern Bohemia and Ceský Krumlov, a town coiled within a great bend of the Vltava. Throughout, Tom Abbott will illuminate the art, architecture and history that give each place its particular character, turning what might otherwise be a journey through beautiful landscapes into something altogether richer: an understanding of how these cities came to be, and why they matter.