A Cold War legacy: peaceful hiking in Bohemia

The border between the Czech Republic and Austria was less than a kilometer away, when an old man mysteriously appeared in the middle of the leafy one-lane road. A generation ago, he might have been shot for being this close to the former buffer zone of the Iron Curtain.

“Dobry den,” I said, wishing him a “good day.” But he just stood there in frozen silence, a you’re-not-from-these-parts look on his face. So I soldiered on, merrily continuing on my scenic hike through the Bohemian woods.

During the Cold War, this slice of Central Europe was verboten to anyone but residents of a few ancient villages and the guards patrolling the frontier. The Czechoslovak government cleared the buffer zone of locals and populated it with card-carrying members of the Communist Party. That might explain why, two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, a haunted stillness hung over this coniferous landscape of low-rolling hills.

It is also a reason the network of hiking and biking trails in those hills of southern Bohemia remain among the Continent’s most pristine and untrammeled.

The Czechs, known for their prowess in making beer and playing hockey, are also a nation of prolific hikers. Etched throughout this Central European country are nearly 40,000km of color-coded hiking trails, stretching from Karlovy Vary in the northwest to Ostrava in the east. Much of it is maintained by the Czech Hiking Club, a private organization, dating back to 1889, that splashes painted trail markers across trees and installs signposts.

With so many trails to explore, how does a non-Czech hiker choose the right route? For my wife, Jessie, and I, the answer was simple. We would spend five days walking trails of the Czech Greenways, a network of old trading routes that were recently restored by the Friends of Czech Greenways, a nonprofit group based in Brooklyn, New York.

The network, also called the Prague-Vienna Greenways, is the brainchild of Lubomir Chmelar, a retired architect who splits his time between New York City and Mikulov, a small southeastern town near the Austrian border. He was inspired by the Hudson River Valley Greenway, a revitalization project in New York that has spurred recreation and culture along the riverfront from just north of New York City to Albany, the state capitol.

Chmelar assembled a team of landscape architects and Harvard MBAs and set off on foot to find the most scenic route between Prague and Vienna. The result is a 402km-long network of trails, zigzagging between the two European capitals past ruined castles, cute villages, dense forests and the once-forbidden Cold War border.

A few weeks before my hike, I met up with Chmelar, 73, hoping that he’d help me decide which section of the greenway I should hike. Chmelar, a tall and dapper man who spoke with an Oxford-educated accent, excitedly threw out numerous itineraries. Eventually, we settled on my jaunt: we’d start halfway between the two capitals, in the picturesque town of Cesky Krumlov, and head east and northeast about 129km to the medieval town of Slavonice, about a kilometer from the Austrian border. The hike offered a mix of gorgeous Baroque towns, varied terrain and a dose of history in a part of the country that tourists rarely see.

Chmelar offered a little history lesson himself. Under communism, he said, even hiking was politicized. “The government preferred keeping people in the pub,” he said, “not deep in the forest where they don’t know what they’re up to.”