Petrovice and
Ústí nad Labem
"Then the road rose upward."
"Then the road rose upward."
Stage two, passing through...
Petrovice is a Czech village just south of the German border, about 22 km from Pirna. Its historic German name is Peterswalde, and this is the name Seume uses in his account of the Stroll to Syracuse.
Our inn at Peterswalde was as good as one could ever wish with proper modest contentment. The customs officer who stamped my passport was friendly. The meal was not bad, and the maid—most charmingly neat and pleasant.
Seume seems content in Peterswalde: a welcoming inn, a good meal, a relaxed official, and the pretty Bohemian maid all make for a promising start to his travels in the Habsburg lands.
A decade later, however, the scene was very different. In September 1813, Napoleon passed through Peterswalde during his final German campaign. The historian F. Loraine Petre describes the dismal scene:
At Peterswalde the Emperor lodged at the house of the parish priest; all the other inhabitants had fled.
All Saxony was ruined by the constant advance and retreat of the tide of war; the part adjoining the Bohemian frontier was perhaps the worst; for within the last few weeks the allies had advanced and retreated through it twice, and the French the same.
There was no forage for the horses, the frontier villages were entirely destroyed.
By then, Seume had been dead for three years; his hopes of a better world with Napoleon had died several years before.
I cross the border, physically stepping from one country into another for the first time. I go back and forth a few times, just to see how it feels. There is no passport control, no customs.
More than two centuries later, Petrovice is a quiet village, its streets lined with shops selling alcohol, cigarettes, and miscellaneous tat to German tourists.
The only thing of interest is the Air Restaurant, housed in a Tupolev Tu-104.
It was mid-morning and I wasn't hungry. I had planned to follow Seume's example and have a hearty lunch, but decided against it and caught a bus to Ústí nad Labem instead.
Before I continue, I want to plug the Czech IDOS transport app. I found it useful throughout my entire trip: easy to use, very reliable, and good for buying bus or train tickets. Highly recommended.
Ústí nad Labem is a city in north-west Bohemia, about 25 km south-west of Petrovice, on the River Elbe, or Labe in Czech.
The city was an important industrial centre and river port, closely linked to the North Bohemian coalfield. This heritage has scarred Ústí somewhat; one wouldn't call it a beautiful place.
The road from Peterswalde to Aussig is rough but beautiful; from Aussig, where one rejoins the Elbe, romantically wild, with high mountains rising left and right along the river, full of ravines, cliffs, and sharp peaks.
In Seume's time, Ústí, then known as Aussig, was still a small riverside town. It only began to develop as an industrial centre in the later part of the 19th century.
British linguist and Sanskrit scholar Arthur Anthony Macdonell described Aussig as “odious” when passing through in 1890.
Aussig is the great coal harbour of Bohemia. Huge barges are moored a long way down the bank, and lines of railway trucks are drawn up in front of them continually disgorging their swarthy contents. Bohemian coal seems to be of a peculiarly soft and grimy nature.
Aussig is far and away the ugliest port of Seaboard Bohemia.
James Baker , writing in 1894, also noted the downside, but was more upbeat about the river and its cruising opportunities.
We have caught a glimpse of the Elbe again, by which we entered Bohemia, and a very short run indeed brings us across its waters to the busy town of Aussig and here we are almost in the Black Country of Bohemia, in the heart of the coal and iron district. Aussig itself is dirty and noisy. Smoke and steam and coal-dust speak of its importance to the commerce of Bohemia, but a day can well be spent in its neighbourhood, and frequent steamboats on the Elbe allow the traveller to escape in the evening.
The images above are from Dresden und die Sächsische Schweiz (1904).
I didn't stay long in Ústí, which is a shame. I like cities the guidebooks suggest avoiding; I like cities by rivers; I like a gritty, working-class industrial city. But I was in and out within 90 minutes.
I started off at the tourist information office and picked up a map and postcard. My aim was to find the Elbe, walk along it for a short way, see the river port, and grab a glass of beer. But on the way down I passed the train station and saw an information board showing that my train to Teplice was due to leave in ten minutes. I made an instant decision to buy a ticket and catch it, which I did.
The train interior was attractively old-fashioned, and reminded me of the British Rail carriages that used to take my sister and me to see our nan in Sidcup, south London, in the 1970s.
A few minutes later, the train pulled out of the station and I had my view of the Elbe: the industrial landscape along its banks, and above it the castle of Hrad Střekov (you can see the castle in the first image above).
