Hanging with the brothers
This morning we awoke to the cold and rain of a late Czech winter. We left the Equitana Resort without having a chance to ride horses or do any hunting, but we had a monastery to find. As I’ve said before, our rental car is a small Skoda (a Czech-version of a Volkswagen). Specifically, we have the smallest model with a little 1.2 liter engine. Despite its small engine, Doug still thinks it is a rally car and we spent the entire trip from Březnice to Želiv on two wheels as raced through all the gears taking hairpin corners on the Czech country roads. No four-lane highways for us on our adventure.
We arrived in Želiv and easily found the monastery. The monastery dates back to 1149 which would make it the second oldest brewery in the world if it weren’t for the Communist-takeover in 1948. Much like an American microbrewery, much of the equipment in Želiv’s brewhouse is handmade. The fermenters and kettles are only two years old and they are producing three micro-brewed beers. They have a very limited capacity and are happy selling to local patrons and a couple specialty restaurants in Prague. Father Richard has been in talks with one the American importers we do a lot of business with and we are hopeful they can work out a deal for a very limited distribution in the States.
As a working Abbey with 7 priests in residence and 26 priests in the parish, the beers they produce are truly Abbey ales. The members of the Abbey are not in the Trappist order, but rather the Premonstrian order. Their flagship ale, Gottschalk, is named after Father Gottschalk who founded the abbey in 1149. We sampled it straight out of the secondary fermenter in its unfiltered glory. It is a dubbel with a rich chocolate character a significant hop bite. The brewmaster, who we chatted with through Father Richard, said they used a combination of Saaz and some other rare type of Czech hops whose name did not translate into anything Doug nor I was familiar with. Nonetheless, it was an awesome beer. The second beer we tried was a mixture of Gottschalk and Slovakian mead called Castulus. This drink had a bizarre aroma and made the Gottschalk even more drinkable while lending it a bit of sweetness and a thinner mouthfeel. Their third beer, which we did not sample, is a brew infused with sour-cherry.
After a quick lunch of soup and spaghetti with father Richard and his fellow priests and novices, we were given an incredible tour of the monastery. When you get up close and personal with the Czech and Slovak people, it is just incredible to imagine the tyranny they faced under the Communist regime. In 1948, the Communists gathered-up priests from around Czechoslovakia and imprisoned them here at the abbey for two years. Then, in 1950, they turned the monastery into a psychiatric facility. During the next 41 years, the Communists would destroy much of the original furniture and other religious artifacts in the buildings. Some very important pieces were smuggled out of the abbey and kept safely hidden by locals in their homes. Finally, in 1991 the psychiatric hospital was closed and the monastery was returned to the church.
Surprisingly, some areas of the monastery were left unharmed. Our tour of the building included the library, rectory, and several other significant rooms which had frescos that looked like they were recently conserved, but haven’t been touched since the 17th century. Other areas, like the main church, are undergoing extensive reconstruction with the help of the European Union. By the beginning of the next decade, this monastery will be one of Bohemia’s crown jewels.
Father Richard offered us their guest room in the cloister so we decided to spend the night with the brothers. After a few hours of kicking back in the abbey to “rest and reflect”, we attended the 52nd birthday of one of the priests in a nearby parish of the abbey. It has been a tradition for the past ten years on his birthday to have a smoked pig and Father Richard promised it would be very tasty. A lot of the priests at the abbey are Slovakian so instead of offering us the traditional Czech before-dinner shot of Becherovka, they gave us Slivovice (sp?) which is a pear brandy. It does not taste like Christmas and we’ll leave it at that. It was a very interesting night being surrounded by Czech and Slovak priests, brothers and the abbot of the monastery. Father Richard was kind enough to share many stories with us including the following:
When we woke up this morning, we knew we would be going to a monastery to sample some beer, but we had no idea we would end up being immersed this deeply in Czech/Slovak culture. Tomorrow, we will be driving south to Český Krumlov for a day of sightseeing.
View photos from today’s spiritual adventures.