"My love walked with me - on a high mountain, higher than the mountain I walked over..."
Karel Hynek Mácha (Two Songs of Gypsies)
Karel Hynek Mácha was a true poet-pilgrim who, during his short life, undertook a number of long walking expeditions across Bohemia and beyond its borders, to Venice. His literary work was particularly inspired by his travels to Kokořínsko and Bezděz, which he undertook in the years 1832 – 1834 (Cikání, Máj, Večer na Bezdězu). However, the key importance for the birth of the romantic poet seems to have been his legendary pilgrimage from Prague to Sněžka and back (20.8. – 6.9.1833), which played a fundamental role in Mácha's life and work; it was connected with the poet's tragic confrontation with death, with meditation on transience and the mystery of human existence, which he portrayed in his mystically tuned prose. Pilgrimage of the Giant Mountains even in his main work, the poem MayThis existential experience gave Mácha's poetry extraordinary power and at the same time awakened in him a deep love and loyalty to the land.
From this perspective, it is possible to perceive Mácha's Krkonoše pilgrimage as a rite of passage. This led us to the idea of establishing the Karel Hynek Mácha pilgrimage route as a "poetry route", following in the poet's footsteps. This pilgrimage route would therefore start from Prague and pass almost three hundred kilometers across the Czech basin - from the lowland landscape of Povltaví and Elbe, through Mělník, Kokořínsko, Podbezdězí, Pojizeří, Bohemian Paradise, the Baroque Jičín Basin, Novopacko, Podkrkonoší and Krkonoše to the highest Czech mountain, Sněžka, on the border with Poland; this route, among other things, offers a very interesting picture of the natural and cultural diversity of the Czech cultural landscape.
The purpose of creating such a Mácha pilgrimage route is not only to commemorate the legacy of the great poet, who is inscribed in the landscapes of this journey – Kokořínsko, Podbězdězí, Jičín Basin, Bohemian Paradise, Krkonoše –, including the work of some other poets. We also see this project as a challenge to how we could unite more deeply with the landscape in which we live and truly begin to care for it. In this sense, we understand the pilgrimage route of Karel Hynek Mácha as a potential initiatory creative zone for searching for ways to restore the belonging of our human culture to the living land around us. In other words, as a zone for the revitalization of the Czech landscape. It could develop into a complex artistic-landscape and socio-ecological project in which contemporary "pilgrim artists", poets, ecologists, biologists, landscape architects and other cultural-creative creators who today strive to transform culture, to transform our worldview, lifestyle and values, could meet and connect.
"The country needs new poetry.""
Becca Tarnas
In this spirit, I understand the creation of Mácha's pilgrimage route as a healthy and necessary counterbalance to the current dominant trend of building highways, whose universal structures cast on the landscape are increasingly distancing us from the perception of the organic integrity of the landscape and our belonging to it. In contrast, a slow multi-day walking journey through the landscape opens up the possibility for us to truly immerse ourselves in the breathing body of the living earth, to listen to it, to learn to live and think in terms of ecosystems, to harmonize our desires with the desires of the biosphere and, thanks to this, to develop an awareness of the interspecies community of the great family of life. I believe that poetry could also contribute greatly to such a reorientation, in the sense of coexistence with the world. As philosopher Becca Tarnas urgently says: "The Earth Needs New Poetry." It seems that perhaps more than the highways on which we transport new and new and increasingly redundant goods at ever greater speed, we need pilgrimage routes today, on which we can once again perceive the earth around us and celebrate it with our songs: on which we can once again become earthlings. The earth needs to hear our songs, to feel our admiration!
The route of the Macha Pilgrimage Route crosses half of the territory of Bohemia and leads through several types of landscapes. If it were officially established, it would create a field for possible artistic and ecological creative activities (festivals, celebrations, workshops, creation of works of art in the landscape) and would offer pilgrims the opportunity to better get to know the Czech landscape and its diverse nature and rich cultural history. At the same time, it would create a natural and much-needed zone of ecological and cultural stability, defending the organic integrity of the landscape, a “landscape without barriers”, without unnecessary fragmentation and devastation. At the same time, it would arouse in people a natural respect for the Czech landscape as a whole. Such a great pilgrimage route, based on local cultural tradition and also connected with poetry, would undoubtedly be unique even in the European context.
