[ May 2017 ] I continue talking about the free walking tour in Brno in Moravia region in Czech Republic.
After Cabbage Market square, we went up the small hill where the Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul stands.
On the way we saw a big face on the wall.
He was President of this country, Milos Zeman.
With the face, the writing said “If you can be a president, anyone can”.
The wall nearby was famous for political graffiti.
Then we arrived at the Cathedral.
First, our guide, Martin said “Does anyone have a 10 koruna coin? 
Look at the coin”.
I see, the coin has a picture of this cathedral on it.
For the Brno citizen, this is very important and an honour.
Martin complained that Brno was not well presented in the world, saying “For example, the guidebook of our country by Lonely Planet is called ‘Prague and the Czech Republic’ which is making light of the area other than Prague”.
He continued ” Brno is not only the second biggest city in Czech, but also it is the capital of Moravia”, showing his pride.
Certainly, Moravia was once a kingdom until about 10th century.
More recently during the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, Brno was attacked by Swedish forces but successfully defended themselves for four months.
Towards the end when both sides were exhausted, Swedish decided “we will withdraw if we cannot get through in one and a half days”.
Hearing that, people in Brno rang the bells of the Cathedral at 11 am instead of noon, and made Swedish withdraw earlier.
Therefore, 11 o’clock is significant in Brno and even now the cathedral bells ring at 11 and the ball jumps out of the Bullet Clock in the Freedom Square.
The Cathedral was built in the 14th century, but because it is located just inside of the city wall, it was attacked and damaged many times and they restored every time.
Around here on the hill, the view was nice and we could see the Spilberk Castle on the opposite hill.
The fireworks we saw around here on the first night is apparently held twice a week during summer.
By the way, Martin, our guide repeated a few times “If you want to see something interesting, look up”.
One of the interesting things up there was a statue of the indecent little man on top of one of the south windows of St. James’ Church.
The little man shows his buttocks towards the cathedral.
And depending on the angle, because it has two heads, it looks like a man and a woman having sex, too.
The legend is that when they were building this church at the same time with the cathedral being built, the stone mason employed here was better than the one for the cathedral and he worked very fast.
Feeling jealousy, the cathedral people used their power of wealth and made this mason be sacked.
So the angry stone mason added this statue as his last work on this church.
There were much more things we learned during the one and a half hours’ walking tour.
Because it was a free tour, we did not go into any places such as museums where we needed to pay, but the guide explained about them and I felt like visiting some of them.
To be honest, Brno is not as beautiful as Prague, so only wandering around does not give us much.
I am so happy that we joined this tour.
At the end, Martin made us laugh saying “I hope you enjoyed the tour. If you did not, my name is Hans. If you did, my name is Martin”.
