Trip to Prague - January 1999

Part Four -- Nove Mesto nad Metuji (or in English "simply" New-Town-on-the-River-Metuje)

Cousin Olda and his family

I last saw Olda, my cousin from Nove Mesto, in 1994. We hiked to the summit of Velka Destna, a mountain in the Orlicke Hory which proved quite an chore, having celebrated with plenty of wine the night before...
On this trip, Olda came to pick me up in Prague. We found a quaint lebanese restaurant near my parents' house called "The Cedar" where I introduced him to middle eastern food and other spicy things...

Olda's panelak

Nove Mesto is a sity of about 12000 in the foreland of the Orlicke Hory near the Czech-Polish border in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. It is very dear to me because i practically grew up there before going to school.
Olda lives in something called a panelak, an apartment building assembled from prefabricated panels (thus its name). The Communist government, struggling with a chronic shortage of apartments, built thousands of these spartan buildings throughout the country. During Communism, most families lived in buildings like this one, often having to wait for years for an apartment to become available.

Libor, Olda and Radim at the Hotel Metuj

We met with Libor, my boyhood friend. I have not seen Libor since 1990. By now, you know what the Czech way of celebrating such an encounter is...
Olda and I spent two days skiin at Destne in the nearby mountains. I got a kick out of skiing on the slopes I learned to ski as a kid. Destne is not high; the summit of the mountain is barely 3000 feet high.

Olda shows appreciation
for his favorite
watering hole

The good part about it is that there is actually air to breathe while skiing (unlike at 14000 feet in Loveland or Keystone). The bad part is that the weather can turn warm and destroy most of the snow in a matter of days. We, unfortunately, caught one of such warm spells. Destne, by the way, means "rainy".

Radim too shows appreciation
for Olda's favorite
watering hole

    It was still fun - skiing inbetween big grassy spots and drinking gluehwein between runs...
    Olda introduced me to a very nice wine cellar in the basement of the Nove Mesto chateau. The space, dug into the cretaceous siltstone bedrock, was for centuries filled with rubble and only recently cleared out. Enterprising Czechs automatically thought that this would be a nice place for a wine cellar. The two pictures left and right show some of the interior.
    Nove mesto was founded in 1501. Ownership of the chateau changed hands until the last 20th century owners, the Barton (with a Czech hacek on the n) family of Dobenin. In 1948 after the Communist coup d'estat the Communist government expropriated the chateau (apparently for the "greater good of the socialist wonderland").

Most of the family emigrated and lived in exile in Canada. The current owner of the chateau (as well as the textile factories and thousands of acres of forests) is Joseph Barton of Dobenin who returned from Canada in 1992. I heard that in Canada Joseph was a helicopter mechanic... :-)
Nove Mesto is a very pictoresque town. The buliding on the right is a townhouse near the renaissance central square.

Pertinent links:
1.- Nove Mesto home page (in Czech)
2.- The castle of Nove Mesto
3.- Radio Metuje 92.8 FM (in Czech)
4.- Destne ski resort (in Czech)

p a r t f i v e > > >
< < < p a r t t h r e e

Last updated on April 5, 1999

created with unix vi editor
"real men use vi"