The Chodsko Folk Festival – a time to eat, drink and make merry
One of the oldest and most colorful folk festivals in the country, the Chodsko Folk Festival, starts on Friday, offering visitors three days of bagpipe music, folk dancing and delicious Chodsko pies which are famous across the Atlantic. So if you want to see the real thing –Domažlice is the place to go this weekend.
Chodsko is an area in western Bohemia, which is rich in folklore traditions that are very much part of present-day life – be it the Chodsko cuisine –with its delicious, richly decorated pies, the local dances, folk costumes or bagpipe music. The people of Chodsko are proud of their traditions and the annual Chodsko Folk Festival is a celebration of that legacy.
Every year, the organisers welcome around 600 performers – soloists and members of folklore groups from at home and abroad. Dancers rehearse their steps, bagpipe players prepare their repertoire and local bakeries work around the clock to make thousands of pies with poppy-seeds, farmers cheese or quark whipped with egg yolk, plum jam, vanilla, raisins and almonds. Just like the décor on the local Chodsko ceramics or the regional folk costumes, these pies too must be decorated according to age-old traditions reflecting the folk style of the region. And given the expected 70, 000 to 80,000 visitors that’s a tall order! Lenka Vondrovicová, head of the Bořice bakery says it’s a team effort.
"Everyone has their specific task – making the dough, decorating the pies and putting them in the oven. It’s like an assembly line. We had to buy 900 kgs of flour, 700 kgs of sugar, 6,000 eggs, 2.5 tons of quark and lots of rum – because you can’t make a Chodsko pie without rum!"
Another Czech specialty that you will not find anywhere else and one that intrigues foreign visitors is that many Czech pies or “koláče” as they are called in Czech have a poppy-seed filling. Many foreigners regard them as opiates and are afraid to try them, but in small quantities such as you get on pies they are perfectly safe and give the pies a very special taste. Poppy seeds have a long tradition in the Czech cuisine and even small children eat them. The seeds and plum jam are used to create ornaments on large and small pies. Marie Johanková explains.
“In the lower Chodsko region we cover the pies with quark or farmers’ cheese –which serves as a background for the décor and then we use plum jam to create ornaments like birds and flowers, which you will also find on our folk costumes.”
Visitors will be able to buy these pies on the open air market along with various regional arts and crafts souvenirs, such as the Chodsko pottery.
The Chodsko festival also has a spiritual aspect – it is held to coincide with the St. Lawrence pilgrimage. As every year, there will be an open-air mass on Saturday and Sunday on the hill of Vavřineček in front of the Church of St.Lawrence.
St. Lawrence pilgrimages were held in Domažlice from the start of the 20th century. After 1948, the communist regime did not want to continue the tradition of church festivals and the religious aspect was suppressed, with an accent on the folk traditions. In the early 1990s, the tradition of combining the festival with the pilgrimage was restored.
