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Monday, September 19, 2016

Vojna Memorial, hemp growing, and Pisek

Off from Prague now and our first stop of the day was the Vojna Memorial. It was a former prison built for German prisoners of war, and then converted by the Communists for "re-education" of political dissidents. Working 12 hours a day in the nearby uranium mines cannot have been very healthy, or much use for "re-education."



 wonderful sculpture of escaping prisoner:





leather miner's "helmet"

ore cars


On the way to our next destination, we stopped for a closer look (no, not a smoke) of some hemp fields:


Onwards to Pisek, a 13th-century town based on gold panning in earlier times. It has a wonderful parish church dating from around 1240 CE:








There's a wonderful castle and a bridge over the Otava River, where there was some kind of event that necessitated making huge sand sculptures:






As seems invariable with Czech bridges, there's a statue of St. John Nepomuk, a Bohemian saint drowned in Prague's Vltava River on the order of (not very good) King Wenceslas because he refused to divulge the secrets of his wife's confessions.

 The making of sand sculptures on the banks of the Otava is a tradition started in 2006 .




 Besides all this, Pisek has a lot of charming buildings and squares:






 




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