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The Bend in the River

A Day in Český Krumlov

By Trotternama

August 2^nd, 2025

The tour bus wheezed to a stop. Diesel fumes mixed with medieval stones. Forty-three passengers disgorged into the square like pilgrims with cameras, following a woman holding a plastic sunflower above her head.

My inbuilt cynicism wanted to escape immediately. But I wearily realised I myself was one of them.

The ticket seller at the castle gate spoke perfect English with rehearsed efficiency. "Audio guide? Castle tour? Bear pit?" Each question delivered with the weary precision of someone who'd asked these same words ten thousand times. Thirty euros vanished from my wallet.

The crowd pressed forward, shuffling toward culture.

But then the morning light caught the tower's red tiles. Each one placed by hands that never imagined tour buses, never conceived of plastic sunflowers leading strangers through their streets. The castle rose above the Vltava's bend like something from a fever dream—founded before 1250 by the Vítkovci family, descendants of Witiko of Prčice, who built their Gothic fortress on this rocky headland where the river curves like a protective arm. Too perfect, too preserved, too aware of its own beauty.

The audio guide crackled to life in my ears. "Welcome to Český Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1992." The voice was American, probably recorded in a studio by someone who'd never walked these stones.

I pulled out the earphones. Better to be lost than guided.

I climbed the narrow streets where tourists photographed each other against painted facades. Click. Smile. Move on. An elderly Czech woman swept her doorstep . She didn't look up. Forty years of this parade had taught her not to see us.

The castle's painted tower dominated everything. Trompe-l'oeil windows gazed down at a Japanese couple posed beneath the archway while their teenage daughter rolled her eyes and checked her phone. Three generations of response to beauty, each one valid.

From the gardens, I watched the river curve around the town like a protective arm. Medieval architects understood something we've forgotten—that beauty and defense are the same thing. The Vltava was both moat and mirror, reflecting back centuries of faces that had looked down from these same walls.

An overheard conversation in German drifted past. I caught fragments: "...not like it used to be..." "...too many tourists..." The irony was lost on them. We were all complaining about crowds while being the crowd.

I wandered down through Latrán, the oldest part of town that had grown organically around the castle's base. Here the houses leaned into each other like gossips sharing secrets, their ground floors converted to shops selling everything from hand-blown glass to wooden marionettes. A woman emerged from a pottery studio, clay still under her fingernails, to hang fresh pieces in the window. Across the narrow street, a bookshop displayed titles in five languages—guidebooks for the tourists, poetry for the locals, philosophy for the university students who came here to write their theses on authenticity and tourism.

The shop selling medieval weapons looked suspiciously authentic until I spotted the "Made in China" sticker on a battle axe. But the bakery next door was real enough—the smell of fresh bread and sweet kolache drawing lines of locals who ignored the tourists photographing their breakfast pastries like artifacts. A small boy pressed his nose against the glass case, pointing at cakes shaped like the castle's famous tower. His mother counted coins. Some things transcend tourism.

The Seidel Photographic Studio caught my attention. A museum of old photographs, family portraits from when this was still Krumau, still Austrian, still whole. Before the Germans were expelled. Before the Communists arrived. Before the tourists discovered it. The faces in those sepia prints looked directly at the camera with an honesty modern tourists wouldn't manage.

I found myself in a tavern beneath the square. The waitress was maybe fifty. She spoke four languages, and moved with practiced efficiency between tables of Germans, Americans, Koreans. She navigated global tourism like her ancestors had navigated empires—adapting, surviving, finding dignity in service. The cash register sang its electronic song.

Every transaction a small victory.

The goulash arrived thick and honest. Real food for real hunger, not the Instagram-ready plates served in Prague's tourist quarter. The beer was Budvar, the original Budweiser, the one the Americans stole the name from. Small victories in a globalised world. While I ate, I thought about William of Rosenberg, who in the late 16th century had the castle rebuilt in Renaissance style, hosting artists, scientists, and alchemists from across Europe. His chronicler wrote that he transformed "old, unkempt, narrow, dark and gloomy" Krumlov into "a merry and spacious palace." The irony wasn't lost on me—tourists today came seeking the darkness, the authenticity of age.

Outside, the afternoon light transformed the painted facades into something almost alive. The artist who created this trompe-l'oeil five centuries ago understood that sometimes illusion serves truth better than reality. These fake windows and painted stones had outlasted real wars, real occupations, real changes of nationality and language.

I crossed the bridge over the bear pit, looking down at houses reflected in the still water of the mill channel. A string quartet played in the main square, their music floating up through the narrow lanes like medieval enchantment. Shopkeepers watered flower boxes beneath their windows—geraniums the colour of the Rosenberg rose, petunias in Habsburg yellow. The buildings themselves seemed to bloom: lime green house with white trim next to coral pink with cream details, all of them crowned with those famous red tiles that caught the light like burnished copper.

Through an archway, I glimpsed at a hidden courtyard where laundry hung on lines strung between Renaissance windows. Real life persisting behind the tourist facade. A cat sunned itself on a windowsill while below, a shop sold crystal and amber to visitors who would never see this private moment of ordinary beauty.

I walked to the bear pit. Two brown bears padded around their enclosure while tourists dropped coins and made wishes. The last bears of Český Krumlov's medieval tradition, maintained now for tourists, many of who didn't understand the symbolism. The Rosenberg family's heraldic bear, trapped in a concrete circle, performing authenticity for cameras. The original bears had been added to the coat of arms in the 16th century—an attempt by the Rosenbergs to associate themselves with the powerful Italian Orsini family, whose name was a pun on orso, Italian for bear.

Politics, even in medieval heraldry.

The guards changed at the castle gate. Young men in medieval costume, university students earning summer money by pretending to be fifteenth-century soldiers. Their halberds were authentic reproductions. Their boredom was completely genuine. They stood where real guards once watched for armies, where the Union of Nobility imprisoned King Wenceslaus IV in 1396, where Habsburg emperors and Bohemian princes had passed. History as performance.

An American woman complained that the castle tour was only in Czech and German. "Don't they speak English here?" she murmured to her husband, who shrugged and photographed a window. The ticket seller, overhearing, offered an English audio guide with infinite patience. Her job was accommodation, not education.

As evening approached, the day-trippers departed. The tour buses rumbled away, leaving behind silence and shadows. The real Český Krumlov emerged from behind its performance. Locals emerged from buildings, walking dogs, buying bread, living lives that had nothing to do with UNESCO or heritage or tourism. The town exhaled. Shop owners rolled up their awnings and turned off their window displays, transforming tourist attractions back into neighbourhoods.

I climbed to the castle gardens one final time, following the covered bridge that connects the upper castle to the theater—a baroque marvel suspended over a deep moat, its windows framing views of the river bend like a gallery of landscape paintings. The view from above was breathtaking: the entire old town spread out like a medieval manuscript illumination, all those pastel houses clustered within the river's embrace, church spires pointing heavenward while red roofs rippled toward the water. The Vltava caught the dying light, turning silver and gold as it curved around its precious cargo of stone and history.

Here was where the Baroque Theater waited in its perfect preservation. Built in 1680-82 by Prince Johann Christian I of Eggenberg, renovated with new machinery in 1765-66 by Josef Adam zu Schwarzenberg. Three kilometers of rope hidden beneath the stage could change scenery in twelve seconds, operated by fifteen sweating men in darkness, listening only to music and voices above. One of only four surviving baroque theaters in the world, the only one with original decorations from the 1760s still intact. The unique mechanisms for changing the scenes and other decorations were prepared by the Viennese carpenter Lorenz Makh, while the wall paintings, ceiling mural, and curtains and wings were created by the Viennese painters Hans Wetschel and Leo Märkl. All those rope-and-pulley dreams, preserved in amber.

The setting sun painted everything gold. This was the hour when travel becomes pilgrimage, when tourism transcends itself. The stones remembered their builders. The river remembered all the faces that had gazed into its waters. The castle remembered its purpose—not just defense or display, but the human impulse to create something beautiful and lasting.

I thought of Perchta of Rosenberg, the White Lady whose ghost supposedly walks these corridors still. Born around 1429, daughter of Oldřich II of Rosenberg, she had a happy childhood in these walls before being married off at twenty against her will to Jan of Liechtenstein. Her letters from that hellish marriage survived—ninety-two remarkable documents, some in her own hand, describing years of abuse and pleading with her family for rescue that never came. When her dying husband finally asked forgiveness, she refused. His curse, according to legend, trapped her spirit here. Local residents still report seeing her—a woman in white with keys at her waist, appearing before births and deaths, caring for children when nurses fall asleep. Even the Nazis, according to one story, couldn't unfurl their banners from the tower—Perchta's ghost pointed an accusing finger until the young women dropped the swastikas in fear.

I left understanding something I hadn't expected about power and its aftermath. The Rosenbergs ruled for three centuries until debt—debt!—forced the last lord, Peter Vok, to sell everything to Emperor Rudolf II in 1602. The Eggenbergs followed, then the Schwarzenbergs, until the Communists seized it all in 1947. Each dynasty believed they were building for eternity. Each was undone by the same forces that built them: ambition, money, politics.

The real revelation wasn't about preservation or authenticity. It was about the stubborn persistence of ordinary life beneath the grand narratives. While lords schemed and empires rose and fell, someone had to sweep the courtyards, tend the bears, light the theater candles, serve the goulash. Today's sixty -year-old waitress speaking four languages, yesterday's scullery maid speaking only one—separated by centuries, united by the simple fact of getting on with it while history happened around them.

The last tour group gathered around their plastic sunflower. Forty-three strangers who would remember this place differently, each taking away their own version of what they'd seen. The guide counted heads, checked watches, pointed toward the bus. Tomorrow there would be another group, another day, another performance. But tonight, the castle belonged to itself again.

The bear settled down for the night. The painted windows watched over empty streets. And somewhere in the castle, night guards walked corridors that had known emperors and peasants, soldiers and tourists, all equally temporary, all equally convinced of their own importance. In the Masquerade Hall where Rosenberg lords once held their Green Room feasts, surrounded by suits of armor and trophy antlers, crystal chandeliers caught moonlight through windows that had witnessed the rise and fall of kingdoms.

I walked toward my own departure, carrying with me the image of that old woman sweeping her doorstep. Empires come and go. The sweeping continues. That, perhaps, was the most profound thing Český Krumlov had to teach—not about preservation or tourism or authenticity, but about the quiet heroism of persistence.

The stones would outlast us all, but someone would always be there to tend them.

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