Visiting Tabor

Tabor's new town.
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We took a 50-minute train ride today to explore Tabor, a town of some 40,000 people. It’s a vivid combination of prosperous new town and historically rich old town. We loved the architecture of the old town, and we also spent quite a bit of time in the Jan Hus Museum, partly because of its interest and partly because of the pouring rain for most of the afternoon.

Hus is one of those seminal Czech figures who barely registers in American consciousness. He was a church reformer—a sort of proto-Protestant some 100 years before Luther—who ran afoul of Rome because of his attacks on church corruption and his insistence that not only bread but wine should be shared by all communicants in the congregation. (It was normal practice then for only the priest to partake of the wine.) He was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in 1415, but this was just the beginning of the Hussite story.

Main square in Tabor's old town.
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His followers started a social, religious, and national rebellion, and the most radical of his followers—based in Tabor and called Taborites—proclaimed a world of no servants or masters. When the Pope sent in a crusade to put down this heresy, the Hussites—with a chalice on their flags of war—fought off the Pope’s legions for some 15 years. The Taborites were eventually put down by a coalition of Catholics and more moderate Hussites (known as utraquists from the Latin word for “both,” referring to both bread and wine). Despite the defeat of the radicals, the outcome was a reformed church in Bohemia well before the Lutheran Reformation.

House in Tabor.
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Some of the items on display were pitchforks and other farm implements converted into mace-like weapons. I thought how antiseptic swords and guns look by comparison. There were also some early guns: harquebuses and what were called pipe guns, the Czech word for pipe being pištola, from which we apparently get the word pistol. It seems that the Hussite war was innovative in its use of musketry against knights, and also in its use of cannons mounted on wagons to create an early form of tank.

Bechyne from train bridge.
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We also toured (in Czech, no English available) some of the underground paths dug under the city. These originated as storage cellars, but were eventually connected to create some 15 kilometers of underground warrens to serve as refuge for the people living here.

We came back to Bechyně for a late dinner at what felt like a very traditional old hotel. The menu was one of the easier ones to follow, with rough German and English translations. I asked for trout in Czech (pstruh), and then deciding on wine rather than beer, asked for a Grüner Veltliner. The waiter noted that I didn’t ask for the Green Veltlin, as the English translation had it, and so spoke to us in German for the rest of the evening.