Bohemia Village Voice  Bohemia Village Voice

For bohemians everywhere

I was married in a Bohemian Castle

RIchard and Eva getting married at Karlstejn Castle, Bohemia in 1966.

RIchard and Eva getting married at Karlstejn Castle, Bohemia in 1966.

Part 5 (of 8) The Wedding

St Peter’s Road resident and technical author Richard Slater recounts his days in Bohemia. [Bohemia is the western province of the Czech Republic; the eastern one is Moravia.]  In this fifth part, Richard describes the wedding to his wife Eva. 

My parents, sister and brother drove across Europe to attend the wedding, which, in a communist state, was of course a civil ceremony. However, my wife had discovered that there was a registry office within Karlstejn Castle, so we (OK, she!) chose to get married there, rather than in Prague town hall. Karlstejn is a very impressive structure: if you want to know more about it, just Google ‘Karlstejn Castle’ and visit some of the websites that come up.
After the wedding, we flew to Luhacovice for our honeymoon. While we were there, England won the World Cup (it was July 1966!). This was amusing, too, because it was then (and maybe still is) the custom in tourist hotels to put a national flag on each table at dinner. Since Germany is very close to Bohemia, nearly all the foreign tourists were German. It has to be said that, then at least, the Czechs really hated the Germans: it was only 20 years since the end of World War II, so every adult Czech remembered them all too well and all the children were taught in school. The hotel staff gave us a free bottle of champagne and took great delight in placing a very large Union Jack on our table at dinner that night (I guess they didn’t have a St George’s flag). All the German flags were put out at half-mast!

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