Medieval Czech list: Cesky Krumlov known for its architecture and art

In historical Cesky Krumlov, my medieval makeover was a downright dud. In the ritzy Hotel Ruze, the dress attendant had fussed frantically over the coiffure, rolling my long hair around the golden laced diadem.

I had held my breath to wriggle into the silk undershirt and embroidered red velvet long frock. I tucked my tummy in as she tightened the strings of the bodice.

"Look at the mirror. You seem straight out of a 13th century Baroque opera," Radka Neumannova of Czech Tourism Board announced teasingly. I turned timorously towards the mirror that once belonged to the 16th century Jesuit Monastery University. Gawd! Was that I?

I peered hard at the mirror. Did the dress attendant beam me back into Czech antiquity? Was I headed to a masquerade party? Had I just signed for a role in a Baroque burlesque? Or, would I do the half steps of a polka and take a bow at the world's best preserved Baroque theatre inside the Cesky Krumlov castle?

In that red Doudlebsko, a traditional Czech costume, I sure looked ridiculous. Thankfully, I did not look anomalous; I melded with the baroque extravagance of a squat town that is so proud of its UNESCO World Heritage Site tag.

"Cesky Krumlov is known for its architecture and art of the historic old town," David Chlum, the guide, began the history lesson as I walked on the cobbled path flanked by ornate buildings, elaborate sculptures, rococo churches and the gushing Vltava river.

The large Town Square was caught in the hullabaloo of an ordinary evening, as men yodelled limericks that got lost in translation, women hurried home to rustle the scrumptious Medovnik, a honey cake, and cook Svickova, an old style Czech meal, and tourists moseyed up the stone staircase to Cesky Krumlov Castle, one of the largest castles in Central Europe.

A man dripping with fake blood was standing outside the Torture Museum, but I ignored the gory. All that was missing from the perfect medieval setting was a knight in shining armour. Alas!

BAROQUE GRANDEUR

However, before I met the knights, I saw black bears that live in the castle moat. Big, fat bears lazing under a tree. The knights (and stuffed big, fat bears) were beyond the nutwood doors and exquisite carpets of the castle that comprises 40 buildings.
Not one knight. Not two. Countless knights in the lavish castle that was built over three centuries - knights looking handsome in breeches, curly mops and stovepipe hats, their rooms embellished with marble stoves, pewter decanters, darkwood desks, painted porcelains, intricate tapestry and even a colossal chariot with 24-carat gold layering.

Sadly, the castle was not resonating with the onomatopoeic sounds of the horses, for the knights lay frozen in time – there were no real knights, merely their images framed in gilt in what is often touted as the world's most Baroque living room.

My sojourn in the Czech Republic began with a medieval motif, but I soon swapped the diadem for gleaming silver coins in Kutna Hora, where Bohemia's first Cistercian monastery was built in 1142. However , Kutna Hora's fame lay not in piety but in piles of silver discovered in its mountainous belly in 1260.

Soon, rapacious silver diggers and pushy Bohemian nobles trudged to the town that borrows its name from monks' cowls. Nearly 2,000 tonnes of silver were shovelled out and the royal mint added to the allure of the Kutna Hora. The Italian Courtyard that once boomed with the din of hammers of the royal mint now buzzes with the babel of curious tourists.

All that remains of the mint are the ancient silver coins stashed under glass lids of stone pillars and a minter in velvet cloak who still stamps silver (it is actually aluminum) coins for delightful photo-ops . Tourists were jostling for a piece of history, harrying the minter for coins.

I stood in a corner pitying the minter. No, I did not want the coin, I'd rather let the old man catch a breath. Forget the minter. Even I needed to catch a breath. No, I had not thumbed open a flame to heat the absinthe, a traditional bitter liqueur made from wine and wormwood...

I lost my breath in a pint-sized 13th century church in Sedlec, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. "This is the Bone Church and it has the world's most dazzling chandelier . It is absolutely unusual. Walk in quickly, there's a surprise," Chlum solemnly threw in mystery.

The chandelier? What could be so unusual? I let my imagination run amok.
Yes, the chandelier was unusual. My jaws dropped. My eyes popped out. No, it was not made of silver. It was not swathed in gold. In the Bone Church, the chandelier was made of, well, bones. Human bones. Inside, bones of 40,000 dead are the artifacts!

The church is festooned with human skulls; in the alcoves, ‘bony' chalices look ghastly; behind iron bars lies a mound of bones; on the wall is the Schwarzenberg family's coat of arms sedulously replicated with, what else, but bones; angels smile beatifically on bone candelabra and tiny skulls are tidily lined up as souvenirs.

Legend has it that an abbot of the Sedlec monastery returned from Palestine with a handful of soil and sprinkled it on the cemetery turning it into the most-sought-after burial site in Central Europe. When the burials outgrew the space, bodies were exhumed and bones preserved in the church.

A blind pastor started arranging the bones geometrically, an eccentricity that turned bones of 40,000 dead
into one of the most visited sites in the Czech Republic. I winced.

I needed to gulp down such macabre piety. In the world's largest beer- drinking nation (each head guzzles 160 litres a year!), morbid thoughts are washed down with pilsner beer, the original pilsner that was first concocted on October 5, 1842.

I, the teetotaler, chose a sugar cube (it was invented in the Czech town Dacice in 1843), yearned for Amadeus Mozart's Prague Symphony and headed to Café Louvre in Prague to gaze at the mistletoe twigs, order poppy seed strudels with plum and sit where once Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka sipped their coffee.

I knew I would never leave Prague, thereafter.