Prace and Austerlitz (Slavkov)

I pick up my travel companion at the "Eurolines" bus stop in Brno to leave the town immediately. We decide to do some shopping on the way to the bus stop at "Tesco" since Prace is a small village with probably no supermarket.

It is about half an hour by bus when we get off at a corner in the small village where the decisive battle of the Battle of Austerlitz took place on December 1 in 1805. The battlefield is a lot bigger than the city Slavkov (Austerlitz) and that in that city nothing at all happened on the paperwork. Here in Prace the real action took place.  

From the bus I notice already the large monument on the hill. On the way up the hill we ask some boys, who are busy in their garage, for some water. With the water on top of our bags it’s all getting even more heavy and while it’s only 1,5 km we are relieved to get on top. From here we are able to overlook the entire valley and only now it becomes clear why this hill was so important and so decisive. Yellow rapeseed fields, green lawns and here and there some houses or trees - but at the top of the hill stands behind some shrubs and bushes the big monument, behind it the building what the museum should be and then a piece of forest where we will soon try a find a spot for the night.

The museum is a truly rural regional museum - there is a large terrace and it looks a bit like an old club canteen from the 70s. Unfortunately it is already closed. We take some pictures and the sun alternates the clouds where occasionally a splash of rain falls. The wind also blows properly. Through a gravel path we come behind the museum. 

Yesterday we found a spot in the litte forest and only then we realized we were trying to sleep on the actual battlefield. In the morning it’s light early; the wind blows and some pheasants jumping from branch to branch.

A watery sun appears in the sky and we decide (also because we are quite open with our tents) to pick up our tents and things before we eat something. After our meal we walk the same way back to the monument and the museum where when we arrive a whole school class is ahead of us. Unfortunately the cafe is closed and we decide to go to the chapel first. 

When the two school groups of children continue their tour, a woman comes to us, gives us a stack of paper with English text and presses a button to start the television. The museum consists of four rooms - after we have left the hall we enter the first real room - it is dark and a large screen pops out of the ground. We sit down on a chair (Pete almost falls asleep) and we hear the situation in Europe before the battle. In the rooms next we see uniforms in large shop windows, scale models, stuff found on the battlefield and hear details about the war, see pieces of an old movie etc.

One of the things that strikes us is that the actual battlefield is much larger than we knew and had expected and that the village of "Austerlitz" itself was not a battlefield at all.

Because public transport is a problem here we hitchhike to the village of Austerlitz. Near the Zamek (castle) we are dropped and we thank the friendly lady for bringing us here. There are only tours in Czech and we get a thick map of stencils with English tekst on it (again) but we are happy to leave our big bags at the reception.

We pay the entrance fee (120 Kr) first. We are with a group of eight people, 5 of whom do not speak Czech. We get to see about 15 rooms and see portraits of the owners and other wall drawings, paintings and 17th century furniture. It is beautiful to see but it is not really spectacular (you are not allowed to take any photos anyway) and there is really only one space that we come to see.

Two large doors open and we see rows of chairs standing against each other with two large statues in two niches. Here the peace conference was held between France on the one hand and Austria and Russia on the other after the battle that Napoleon won. Austria lost a lot of land in the south and would never again become the power it once was (this vacuum was taken by Prussia). Later on in the tour we see the sincere bed where the big little man should have slept. According to insiders, Napoleon always slept on his cot, he would have slept next to the white bed. After the tour (and all the doors and windows behind us are closed) we make a walk through the garden which is a small replica of a Versailles garden. 

Not far from there we find a place to stay for the night.