Showing posts with label Czech customs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Czech customs. Show all posts

Friday 18 November 2011

Calendar

I came across this calendar in a Czech second-hand bookshop or antikvariat. It dates back to 1975 and features the art of Cyril Bouda. Each month is decorated with traditional Czech scenes for the month in question. Above we see Cervenec (July) - note the delighted mushroom finder at the bottom and the woodsmen bringing a raft of logs down the river to the sawmills. In the centre is a list of name days for the month.  And below is Brezen (March) with easter celebrations, the traditional execution of winter and the arrival of the stork heralding spring.


What I love about the calendar is that it features both customs that still are alive and some traditions which have died out.

As for the artist: Cyril Bouda was one of the best Czech twentieth-century draftsmen and illustrators. A student of Kysela and Švabinský, he was famous for his illustrations (such as The Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini or Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift) but he was also known for his tapestry designs. His motto was “Not a single day without a line”, attributed to Apelles, an ancient Greek painter and he kept to it, by the time he died in 1984 he had produced thousands of works of art. This means you can collect examples of his work relatively easily - why you could start with some of the 30+ stamps he designed!

Saturday 26 December 2009

Themes in the Blog - Czech Customs and Culture

As the blog gets larger I thought I might help readers interested in certain topics by creating some pages which list the blog's content by theme. I promise to update the pages as new posts are added.

The themes are: Czech Nature, Czech Customs & Culture, Places to visit in South Bohemia, Buying and Restoring a Czech House, Czech History and Politics, Day to Day Life in the Czech Republic. This post covers Czech Customs and Culture, click on the links above for the others.

CZECH CUSTOMS AND CULTURE

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