Intertale/Eutopia Stop 2: Broumov

Situated in the north-east mountainous pocket of land that juts out into the Polish border, you find Broumov with a massive Benedictine monastery in which I had the good luck to reside. Žaneta Vávrová and her colleagues work tirelessly from here, running multiple projects and festivals of multiple art forms from multiple platforms including APRBroumovska and Broumov2028+. Here, they almost succeeded to be the capital of culture for 2028 for the 7000 souls counting town, based on their ambitious multi-year Cultural Pilgrimage programme, a notion very close to my heart.

Following my Transformational Fieldwork talk to an enthusiastic group of Broumovers, we walked the town to see what it has on offer. While blessed with an opulent baroque art history, good beer, thriving textile industry, plenty of dumplings and fresh air, Broumov (formerly called Braunau) comes with a checkered past, based on the country’s painful 20th century history. Before WW2 the area was home to a large German-speaking community who in 1945 were expelled together with other 2.5 mio Sudeten Germans. The ethnic mix was totally transformed after the war, with people coming from all corners of Czechoslovakia to repopulate the farms and houses. During the Soviet occupied era the monastery saw the incarceration of some 500 nuns into the monastery used for working the farms and other industries.
Plenty of past and current materials for artists to bite themselves into.

Thanks also to Pavla + Maroš for the lovely BBQ and Adam and Anna at Hoprich in Martínkovice (formerly Märzdorf) for lunch and conversation in their wonderful artist residency in the making.