Trnkas, the Czech name for the wild plums (blackthorn, sloe, "prunus spinosa") used to make Slivovitz (plum liqueur) and also Sloe Gin. Was not able to find any growing wild when I was in south Bohemia, but did find this picture later and also a nursery in Oregon offering the plants for sale!The Story of Sviny 21, built of stone sometime in the 1600s and the Malecha farmstead since at least the early 1700s:
Sviny #21Josef Malecha, born 1901, his wife, Marie David, born 1905, their daughter, Marie Ludmila Malecha, born 1928, her husband, František Nestával, born 1921, and their son František, were living on the farmstead when the collectivization process started. Though the communists had been pressuring them to leave and wanted to evict them since 1952, the Nestával family did not leave until 1955. The elders were forced to “gift” the farm to the communists. By “giving” the farm away, they were allowed to remain in one room of the farmstead with no land, animals, or means of support for themselves. They were physically not able to maintain the farm on their own and it fell into disrepair. Josef died there in 1976 and his wife in 1984.
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Marie (Malecha) NestávalThe Nestával family with 5-year-old František left in 1955 and went to Veselí nad Lužnicí, a middle sized village about 5km away. As a married woman from a wealthy family (a kulak) and a churchgoer, Marie had two black marks against her. She had been a nurse, but was forced to work in the same factory as her husband, while still caring for her children, and eventually her grandchildren. Her daughter Jitka was born in 1956, after the family left.
Link to Malecha Family Photos from Jitka (Nestávalová) Ševčíková
The former fire hall (and the village mayor)After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, it took 11 years for her son, František, to get the farm back. One of the buildings on the farm had been given to the village for use as a fire hall (požárni zbrojnice) in 1967, and the village was reluctant to give it back. It took a lot of convincing, but eventually the village sold it to him for 1 Kč (20 cents!) What he got back were the ruins.
František NestávalHe and his children have been slowly rebuilding the place from the rubble, and he has promised his mother that she can sleep there “one more time” before she dies.
Rebuilding underway (with the village chronicler)Josef’s older brother, Karel Malecha, born in 1886, was educated as an engineer and an artist (painter). At one point a mural he had painted of the Virgin Mary was on the barn of the farmstead. Unmarried, he was cared for by the priest in nearby Veselí nad Lužnici during a fatal illness. He died in 1918 at the age of 32 and is buried in a Novak family site in the cemetery of the church in Veselí nad Lužnici.
Novak tombstone with Karel Malecha
Ing. (Engineer) Karel Malecha buried with "the Novak Family from Sviny"Sviny Numbers 8 and 48: The Trnka Farmstead
#48 with part of #8 on the left
#8 with part of #48 on the rightWhile the archival documents from the early 1800s state that Trnka births and marriages happened in #8, the Village Chronicler said that his mother remembered when there were Trnkas living in #48, the larger farmstead next door, and that this is currently the house that is considered „U Trnků“ by the village. A young couple has bought #48 and the place next door, and they are renovating it and raising horses there. I met the woman of the couple who spoke good English and was very welcoming.
This drawing is a mirror image of the Trnka farmstead and many of the buildings are being put to similar uses as they had in the past.
Blata Farmstead Layout From Komárov: A Czech Farming Village, by Salzmann and Scheufler, 1974, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, page 29.
The current owner, the chronicler, the mayor, and my guide Zuzana (left to right)
The Living Quarters
Horsehead in the grotto
The barn, now a stable
Out the back to the pasture
The side opposite the living quaters
The sun had come out
#48 viewed through the trees
The village pond with #48 behind the treesThe Village Chapel
Seating for about 20 - too small for weddings or funerals, but mass is occasionally celebrated here.
The Chronicler
These are the village chronicles begun in 1924. Records older than that would have been kept by the church.
The current chronicler in his home, with my guide, Zuzana. He took over the chronicles in 1964, and has been keeping them ever since. Before the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he had to submit everything he wanted to write down to the censors and only what they allowed could be written in the chronicles.Veselí nad Lužnicí
This is the main town for the nearby villages, and weddings, funerals and burials for the people of Sviny happened in the church here.
STARÁ RADNICE (OLD TOWN HALL)
At the train station
KOSTEL POVÝŠENÍ SV. KŘÍŽE (Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross)
where my great-great-grandparents, Matej Trnka and Rosalia Malecha were married Jan. 27, 1835.
The new reception hall "for Christians only." There seemed to be a lot of pride in the renovations that had happened in the church here following the Velvet Revolution after the 40 years of communism when being a church goer was a mark against you. I was told the Czech government had been offering restitution money to the churches in the past 20 years.
"Be doers of the word and not hearers" James 1:22
The oldest part of the church from 1658
An old painting likely to have been in the church in 1835.
The Baptismal Font
The parish priests from 1635-1900.
View of the organ from below
The view from the balcony
Two old graves
"Family Malecha and Nestával"
Karel Malecha
Other graves
Memorial to those fallen in WWIBLATSKÉ MUZEUM WEISŮV DŮM (Blata Museum in the Weisův House)
An elaborate musical disk player
A musical chair!See also the postings on Czech cabinetmaking and Blata Kroje for more exhibits from this museum.
Background Information on the treatment of "Kulaks" (middle-class farmers) during the collective farming years:
The excerpts below are from an anthropological study published in 1974, co-authored by a professor from Prague and one from Stanford. These two excerpts set the context for the pictures and narrative from my visit. The communists were still in control in the Czech Republic during this time, so the authors could only make veiled criticism of the collective farming system then in place. Komárov is 4 miles from Sviny, my Trnka/Malecha ancestral village, and the descriptions in these excepts give more detail to the stories I heard from both the village chronicler and my surviving relative, who had been a "kulak" and removed with her family from her home as described below.From Komárov: A Czech Farming Village by Salzmann and Scheufler, 1974, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, page 51:
By 1975, 80 percent of the assessed value of livestock and machinery, subject to the financial ability of the cooperative, is to be repaid to those farmers whose original landholdings were below 10 hectares (ca. 25 acres). Strictly speaking, the land owned by the farmers has remained their property, but all decisions concerning its use are made by the cooperative. Forestland belonging to the village came under the state forest administration. Living quarters remained in the personal possession of those who owned and occupied them, as did utility buildings for which the cooperative had no urgent use.From Komárov: A Czech Farming Village by Salzmann and Scheufler, 1974, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, page 121:
At the very beginning of the transition to cooperative management the three largest Komárov farmers were evicted from their farmsteads without compensation and branded as kulaks --members of the rural bourgeoisie bent on exploiting the landless or the small farmers. Prosperous though these peasants were, the rest of the villagers had never considered them anything but wealthier members of the community, and the official wrath directed against them was largely due to their reluctance to cooperate with the efforts to collectivize. All three farmers, together with their families, were moved from the village, resettled, and then given menial work assignments. Their Komárov farmsteads have remained uninhabited but are utilized by the cooperative. One farm houses a clubroom for the government-sponsored cultural youth organization in a portion of the former living quarters, and about thirty head of cattle are kept in the utility buildings. The second farmstead has been converted into offices for the cooperative, with the service area used as a pig-feeding station, and the third has served as a place for keeping brood sows and storing their feed.
The consequences of standing in the way of collectivization were not lost upon the other villagers, and only two farming cottagers, each with about 2 hectares (5 acres) of land, waited until the early 1960s to join. All in all, the Komárov Unified Agricultural Cooperative was set up with no special difficulties, but with even less enthusiasm on the part of the peasants. The economic prospects for the villagers under the new agricultural regime appeared to be bleak.
The attitude toward historical and dialectical materialism as the ideology of socialism is somewhat controversial. The harsh pressure on the villagers after 1948 to join the cooperative system, as a result of which the three largest farmers in Komárov were turned out of the community as kulaks (prosperous peasants who refused to cooperate with the efforts to collectivize) and their property expropriated, and the uninformed farm policies handed down by those ignorant of local conditions and usages could scarcely generate enthusiasm or acceptance.
Sympathy for the expelled kulaks did not grow out of any particular affection on the part of the other villagers but came about because the community had lost valuable workers and storage areas, and because their farm buildings, unused and unattended, began to deteriorate; to date many of these have not been put to regular use.
But there is no question that compassion played its part, too, aided by the memory of Nazi persecution and the indirect remembrances of the serfdom and the labor obligation of the distant past. Some of the external features of contemporary socialist management have been seen as but a variant of feudal legal norms.
Among these similarities are the difficulties encountered when one wishes to resettle, change employment, emigrate abroad, or enroll for university study; the periodic screenings of individuals and groups for attitude and loyalty toward the government; the cult of personality; the more or less compulsory work brigades; and the practical impossibility of securing redress of the decision of party and state organs.
From the peasant's point of view, the philosophical system underlying the socialist form of government itself appears to be completely irrelevant. None of the local political functionaries managed to go beyond the superficial understanding of socialism acquired from popular brochures, short-term courses, and working meetings called to discuss and solve concrete problems. The villagers realized very quickly that these officials were often more concerned with deriving personal advantages and prestige -- the power to be able to "rule," to manipulate others -- than with the establishment of true socialism and its ideological foundation.
On the other hand, the villagers were equally quick to appreciate the rapid electrification of communities and the establishment of telecommunications, improvement and construction of roads, and the advantages brought about by the transition to cooperatives. Among these benefits were health and pension insurance, child allowances, fixed working schedules (even though this was largely in theory since a labor shortage forced most agricultural workers to work overtime, for which they received additional compensation), the right to paid vacation time (taken for granted in other sectors of the economy), group excursions to theaters and other cultural events as well as to places of special interest, and help provided by work teams of students and military personnel during harvest.
Members of the older generations -- those born prior to 1918 -- are of the opinion that the present system uprooted the old order without replacing it with something more valuable.
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