Column: An unsettling visit to a castle

Out of the fog in Czech Republic

Agolden sun slants through the afternoon fog to reveal a fairy tale scene: a glimpse of a beautiful old building emerging from the mist. As if it’s a fragile enchantment that might vanish back into the fog, it sits in a snowy field edged with tall trees. Its battlements and corner towers contrast proudly in the warm light with the white lacy trees. “Wow, what do you suppose that is? A castle?” my husband asks. I haven’t a clue. We are exploring the Czech countryside in the little car I had rented for the two weeks of my his visit from Idaho. We’ve driven into an area that is all new to us. “Let’s go find out.”

A small road winds down into the field and ends in a parking lot near the building. Three or four small cars are parked together at one end.

The building is shaped like a U with a casetta or ticket booth in the open part. As we pause in front of it, a bearded man sitting behind the high window just smiles and waves us on. Apparently, no tickets are required, so we climb the broad staircase to the main entrance. Beyond the creaky doors is a wide corridor with gleaming wooden floors. Not another soul is in sight. How different the inside is from the outside! Here all is utilitarian —no baroque carvings, as might be expected, nor curving marble staircases, no crystal chandeliers. Rather, it reveals the bare evidence of Communist era architecture and décor.

We wander along, turning occasional corners and climbing more stairways. Most doors are closed and we don’t dare venture to open them, but once far down a hallway, we see a person emerge from one doorway, walk across the corridor and disappear into another one. “I feel a little like Alice must have felt when she went through the looking glass,” I whisper. Occasional faint sounds of subdued A D V E N T U R E S murmurings echo through the empty O F A N E X P A T hallways, but their sources are vague

Dixie and impossible to determine. We meJohnson ander on. The building is surprisingly warm, so I loosen my winter coat. Through an open door we poke our heads into a large plain room. It’s completely empty — no furniture, nothing; only bare windows looking out into the winter light.

“Must be some sort of a school or office building,” my husband says.

“Maybe, but where is everyone?”

“Yeah, it’s strange. I thought maybe it was an old castle converted into a hotel.”

We hear a door open and close, but no one is to be seen. Becoming uneasy I say, “This is getting downright creepy. Let’s get out of here,” pulling my coat closer around me in the heat. We hurriedly retrace our steps and, as the front door closes behind us, we look at each other and laugh with relief. The casetta man smiles again as we pass, and on impulse I go to the window and ask, “Informacija?”

He hands me a booklet; I pay him a few Czech koruna and we leave. The spell has been broken and the fog returns in full force as we wade through the snow to our little car. We continue on to the city of Olomouc, where we join an outdoor ceremony honoring Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia. Incidentally, the U.S. also honored him with postage stamps under the heading “Champions of Liberty.”

Following a delicious dinner of fried cheese, we start home. After a few wrong turns that result in stopping to read our road map and peering through the gloom at very small and very indistinct road signs, we find our way back.

That evening over a hot cup of tea, I open the booklet from the casetta and find one section, luckily, is in English. “You’ll never believe where we spent the afternoon. That lovely old building actually is indeed an historic site — a castle like you thought — but do you know what it’s used for now?” I say to my husband. “We were wandering around loose in, as it’s called here,” I say tapping the page, “a lunatic asylum!” “Ah,” my husband says with a wink, “It was enchanted.”

Johnson, of Grangeville, worked in three European countries — Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovenia — in the 1990s and early 2000s. She can be reached at johnsondixie@hotmail.com.

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