Brno

Why Brno? A place, many would say, distinguished only by its lack of distinction, set at the very heart of Europe but always in the shadow of its mighty neighbour Vienna or its more distant cousin, Prague. A capital of course, but only a regional capital, of South Moravia. The writer Jirí Kratochvil, a native of the place, makes it clear in his prose poem ‘How to Paint a Picture of Brno’: ‘Brno is a city on which there lies the curse of provincialism.’
And yet in a curious way — I’ve never lived there, and visited only a handful of times — Brno has occupied a large part of my life ever since the day, four years after the Iron Curtain came down, I first crept cautiously into the city. Read more