Holasovice

Holasovice is a working village that happens to be a complete example of a vanishing building type. Around a long grassy green with a pond stand roughly two dozen farmsteads, each turning a whitewashed gable to the square, decorated with curved volutes, pilasters and painted trim in pastel colours. The style is called South Bohemian folk baroque, a rural echo of the great baroque churches applied by village masons to barns and farmhouses. The plan of the village is far older, a medieval layout that survived because the area emptied and was resettled. There is a chapel, a smithy and a couple of farmyards opened as small exhibitions, and little else.

History

Holašovice is first mentioned in 1263, and in 1292 King Wenceslaus II gave it to the Cistercian monastery of Vyšší Brod, which owned it until 1848. Between 1520 and 1525 the plague nearly wiped it out, leaving only two survivors, commemorated by a column over the plague grave at the north end of the village; the monastery resettled it with people from Bavaria and Austria, and it became a mainly German-speaking enclave. After the Second World War many farms stood empty and fell into disrepair, which left the medieval plan and the South Bohemian folk Baroque buildings intact; from 1990 the village was restored and lived in again, and it was designated a World Heritage Site in 1998 (Wikipedia, Holašovice).

What to look for

• The painted gables - curved volutes and pastel trim on every farmstead facing the green.
• The village green and pond - the long open space that the farms are arranged around.
• The chapel of Saint John of Nepomuk - the small chapel standing at the centre of the green.
• The farm interiors - one or two courtyards opened as exhibitions of rural building and tools.

When to go

May to September gives the best light on the painted facades and the best chance that the exhibition farms are open; outside summer most of the village is simply people's homes with nothing to enter. Weekday mornings are quiet. A folk festival fills the green in July, when parking becomes difficult.

Good to know

This is a twenty-minute walk around one square, not a half-day destination, and it is easy to feel you drove a long way for a photograph. The farms are private, so you look at facades rather than going inside. Public transport is poor, and there is one pub and almost no other facilities.

Nearby

Ceske Budejovice lies fifteen kilometres east, and Cesky Krumlov is within an hour by car.