20 juin 2007
TRIP TO HRADEC KRALOVE
Yesterday, i went to Hradec Kralove with my project leader and a friend, Radka. My project leader is studying there to become teacher. She had a piano test, but enough time to lead us through the town and to help us to find the good place, in spite of the unbearable hot weather. Of course, she passed it and now she is in holidays and she has all the summer to focus... on her pregnancy. :)
I became aware of something yesterday : nothing looks like more to a Czech town... than another Czech town. You have the central square, a kind of long and wide road, with arcades on each sides, you have the tower which is usually the tower of the townhall (but here it was just a fire watching tower), you have the big cathedral/church very close from it, and in the center of the square, you have a column to celebrate the end of an epidemy... usually of plague. It really shows all homogeneous the country is. You dont have such differences as you could find for example in France between Strasbourg and Marseille. But also I think it is also because the Czech really took care of their historical cities. Through centuries, the historic towns have been kept in order, restored, and they look like, grosso mode, as they looked like centuries ago.
So, in that aspect, Hradec Kralove is a very Czech... Czech town. What is interesting also about that city is the way the town eventually grew up and her architecture. Hradec Kralove had always been a big military center, supposed to protect the north-east of the Czech countries, and later to protect the Austrians agains the Prussians. You can see on this photo that the town was a fortress (in the XVIIIth century, the town had 6000 inhabitants and 2000 soldiers in its walls!). But in the XIXth century, the architects Kotěra and Gočar got rid of the big walls, so that the city could breathe at last and spread on both banks of the rivers surrounding it, according the plans of the famous architects.
To end with it, some trivia:
- Hradec Kralove means Queens´Castle.
- The city is built at the junction of the Elbe River and the Orlice River.
- The G in the seal of the town directly refers to Gočar.
