Bučovice - Part 1: The Town

Back in June 2011, me and my sister visited a little Moravian town with a special little chateau, which turned out to have some very interesting other buildings as well... and I never posted about it. Maybe because I took well over a hundred photos in there (namely, 185), and before I worked my way through them, there came the long Baltics trip I never finished posting about either.

The first thing I photographed in Bučovice was the Catholic rectory/vicarage/whatever do you call it? (Lisa, could you please help me out here?) I had a hard time fitting the whole thing into the photo from across the street.

This is the town hall. It helpfully tells you so, but in Czech. Now you can say "town hall" in Czech. (Or at least, now you can recognise the word in a text.)

If I am not mistaken, it is a cubistic building.

In case you didn't know, yes, there is such a thing as cubism in architecture.

(As an aside, though, I'm rather annoyed with the Wikipedia article; it lists Czechoslovakia as one of the few countries that experimented with the notion, but fails to mention anything else about it in the rest of the article. Even though the little town of Pečky in the Czech Republic now boasts the only cubist church in Europe and, according to this Czech site, the only cubist church interior in the world. Hello!
Come to think of it, though, I am annoyed with the Czech Wikipedia article about Pečky as well, because it also fails to mention the church.)

But back to Bučovice.

 

On your left, the Czech national coat-of-arms (with the words that literally translate "town office", meaning the town hall and related bureaucracy), on the right, Bučovice's.

Next to that marvel of modern architecture stands a very classic (classicist?) house.

I have a feeling this green house probably used to be a pharmacist's, but now, I believe it houses a bank.

This mixture of styles was one of the things I loved most about Bučovice. You never knew what came next.

Well, next came the town square. On one side...

... a house dating to 1913. On the other side...

... one dating to 1733.

Housing a tobacconist's and a drugstore.

There was also this building that could have been awesome had it been renovated.

On the upper end of the town square, there is a church. It sits across a busy street, so it was rather impossible to photograph it without some pesky streetlamps getting in the way...

There is this smallish statue of who I believe to be St. Cyril and Methodius, really popular in Moravia (for obvious reasons).

"Donated by the Civic Savings Bank in Bučovice".

The church is rather simple, which I liked...

... even though it has an elaborate altar, so typical of Roman Catholic churches in the Czech Republic.

And then, on the lower end of the town square, you can see the chateau. But since that ate up most of the 185 photos I took that day, and this post is long already, I leave the chateau for Part 2.

One of the last photos I took in Bučovice was of this pub/restaurant - it did not look particularly like the kind of restaurant we would enjoy (we had our lunch in a pizzeria instead, another fairly stable fixture of small Czech towns these days) - but it looked fairly pretty in its own right. And somewhat fun: the name of the pub is "At the Green Frog".

You can see the rest of my photos from Bučovice - well, still somewhat more carefully selected than 185 - here. Chateau photos to be added at a later date.