North of Prague

January 17, 2021

This Sunday we explored the north of Central Bohemia, namely the Mělník and Mladá Boleslav regions. We started in the city Mělník, where we viewed the city’s chateau, as well as the chateau in the nearby town of Hořín. One interesting fact about the city is that while it was still a castle, Mělník chateau served as the residence of kings’ widows.

Not too far away from Mělník, we strolled through the grounds of the chateau in Liběchov. The dilapidated chateau, which was damaged by the 2002 floods, was used to exhibit Asian art during the Communist era (something my dad still remembers) but is now privately owned.

Only a few minutes north of Liběchov we intended to visit the Devil’s Heads, a pair of faces carved into sandstone in the 1840s. Nine metres tall, they are said to belong to the largest stand-alone carved heads in the world, second only to Mount Rushmore. However, the path was so steep and slippery that we quickly abandoned the mission and contented ourselves with taking a few pictures from the base of the hill.

Our next stop was Kokořín where, I found out, they not only have a castle but also a chateau. Kokořín was built in the fourteenth century but was damaged shortly afterwards during the Hussite Wars. Under the Habsburgs, the castle was considered a “cursed castle”: its reconstruction was prohibited, as the emperor deemed its strategic location a threat to his power. Mystical in its state of disrepair, it was a favourite haunt of romanticist poet Karek Hynek Mácha, but it was finally reconstructed in the early years of the 20^th century.

The next stage of our tour was added by our dad, who grew up in the region and had many memories of the “pot-lids” of Mšeno, a bizarre geological feature that, to me, resembles a group of mushrooms. The “pot-lids” are actually a layer of conglomerate (i.e. a harder type of rock) supported by sandstone columns. We also visited a few other rock formations nearby, including the “giant head and the frog” and the “transversal rock.”

We eventually reached Mladá Boleslav, the city where my dad grew up and a key location from which to enter the D10 highway, after short stops at the nineteenth century windmill in Vrátno and Skalsko Chateau. On our way back, we also passed the city Benátky and Jizerou.