Czechia · Old Town
Třeboň
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Třeboň is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Schwarzenberská hrobka 1,500 points
It is out past the edge of town, on the far side of the pond, in a park of its own. The way there is a long straight track: pond on one flank, flat country on the other, and no reason to hurry. Nothing else on this level stands that far from everything else.
Masarykovo náměstí 500 points
The long one, Renaissance and Baroque house fronts down its whole length. The old hall's face was painted in 1742 with three coats of arms, and one of them is this city's own badge, the one that got you here. The tower above it is open to visitors. At number 103 somebody has modelled the entire place in marzipan. I think about that more often than is good for me.
svatý Jiljí a Panna Marie Královna 500 points
Do not stop at the front door. The good part is beside it: a covered walk running round all four flanks of a courtyard, kept almost as it was laid out, and the street outside is called klášterní nádvoří, so the address tells you what used to run this corner. The tower over the lot of it is the tallest thing in town.
zámek Třeboň 500 points
The biggest thing on this level by a distance, out on the south-west side, with a park behind it that keeps going until it stops being a park. The street named after it is forty-four metres long, the shortest one here. A modest address for a house that size.
Hradecká brána 250 points
All four gates here are named for the road that leaves by them: this one points at Jindřichův Hradec, the others at Nové Hrady, Trhové Sviny and Budějovice. Stand underneath and look west. You get the whole length of the market place in one go, which is the best free view in town.
Husova kaple 250 points
The youngest thing I hand you all day, by centuries, and the easiest to miss. It stands on Seifertova wearing a house number like the doors either side of it, out past the ring where the streets get newer. Count the doors.
Novohradská brána 250 points
This is the door to the long way round. Go out by it and the level stops being streets: it becomes a bank with a pond along one edge, and it holds that for the better part of a kilometre. Half of what I like about this town happens outside its own ring.
Palackého náměstí 250 points
The west end of the level, and the plainest open space on it: wide, flat, and used rather than admired. Walk east from here and you enter the Old Town by the fourth gate, the one nobody puts on a postcard. Wide and flat is easy eating.
Žižkovo náměstí 250 points
The southern of the two big open spaces, and the one people cross rather than linger in. Short, narrow, and the point where the level runs out of streets and starts thinking about water. Fifty-eight metres of lane is all that separates it from the other one, which makes them nearly one place with two labels.
Name origin
Why it is called Třeboň.
Two names, and they never agreed. The German one, Witingenow and later Wittingau, is Vítek plus an old word for a wet meadow: somebody's soggy field. The Czech one is either a man called Třebon, whose place this was, or the verb for thinning out a wood, which is what has to happen to one before anyone can live in it. Scribes wrote both, side by side, for centuries. I had no opinion. I was underneath all of it.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 5, www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 6, www.trebonsko.cz
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The whole basin was a lake once, and what the lake left behind is marsh, fen and peat: country the record calls unfriendly and hard to get across. A road from the Austrian side into the interior had to cross it somewhere, and a market grew where it did. So this ground was chosen because it was bad ground. A bog keeps people out as well as a wall does and never asks to be repaired. It is also flat. The town sits between 430 and 440 metres, and nothing on this level is uphill.
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The settlement is older than the founding. A market stop on a track through the border forest is here in the second half of the twelfth century; the founding proper is credited to a younger Vítek, somewhere between 1213 and 1236. The first person to write the place down was doing it from abroad: it turns up as Witknov in 1240, in a charter of a monastery over the Austrian border that owned it for a while. It was being called a town by 1341 and was given the rights of a royal town in 1376. A place can stand here for a century before anybody bothers to spell it.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 5, www.mesto-trebon.cz
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1213–1366
The Vítkovci, who colonised this corner of the forest and are the reason there is a rose on everything. The founding is put between 1213 and 1236. Then the place spent a stretch belonging to a monastery over the Austrian border, until two of Vítek's sons, Pelhřim and Ojíř, bought it back after 1250. Their line, the lords of Landštejn, held it until the day they sold it on.
- 1366–1611
The Rožmberks. Four brothers bought the town in 1366 and it stopped being a small place: a monastery the year after, the rights of a royal town in 1376, and in 1378 a privilege from Charles IV to bring in two wagon-loads of salt a week. Somebody here had their priorities in order. Two hundred and forty-five years later the line ran out, and the town's best century went with it.
- 1611–1660
Then it changed hands twice in a hurry. The Švamberks, who carried a white swan, took over in 1611 and lost the estate to the emperor, who kept Třeboň for himself. In 1637 the next emperor pawned the whole town to the king of Poland and took ten years to redeem it. For a decade this place was somebody's receipt.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 8
- 1660–1848
The Schwarzenbergs, who bought the estate in 1660 out of the sovereign's private property and then stayed. What they took on was thin: in 1661 only 81 houses were lived in and another ten stood empty and unrepaired. By 1696 every one was occupied again and the number of craftsmen had gone from 33 to 51. Recovery is slow, and slow suits me.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 9
- 1850–
Nobody's, in the old sense. Manorial administration ended on 1 February 1850 and the town has answered for itself since. It was made the seat of a political district in 1855, lost that in 1960, and was handed a spa statute in the same year. An office for a bath is a fair swap.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 9, www.mesto-trebon.cz
The emblem
What the shield means.
A blue shield, a silver wall with battlements across it, and behind the wall two square towers with red pointed roofs and a gold ball on each. Between them hangs a small silver shield carrying a red five-petalled rose. That rose belonged to the whole Vítkovci clan, and its branches told themselves apart by colour: red on silver for the Rožmberks, silver on red for the lords of Landštejn, who held the town before them. So Třeboň wears its second family's colours. The official arms, granted in 1994, also fly a little banner out of the upper window of the left tower, and at the size of an icon that was the first thing to go.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz, www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 5, cs.wikipedia.org
Emblem: Original drawing from the published blazon — no third-party file traced
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The Zlatá stoka is a ditch that farms. It runs 45 kilometres across the basin, feeds and drains fifty-seven ponds through side channels, and falls 28.5 centimetres per kilometre, which is a slope nobody can see and a surveyor around 1500 had to hit anyway. The plan is dated 1506 and the digging was finished in 1518. On the east side of town the same channel doubles as the moat, so the fish supply and the defences are one trench.
Sources: www.pamatkovykatalog.cz, www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 7, www.pamatkovykatalog.cz
This town has been rebuilt more often than it was built. Fire took 83 houses and part of the town hall in 1618, then 52 buildings including the town hall again in 1723, and on 12 July 1781 it destroyed or badly damaged 68 houses, leaving 21 buildings untouched. Every recovery arrived in the taste of its own decade, which is why a place this old reads mostly as classicist. Nothing here is as old as it looks. The ground is.
The other local industry is mud. The basin holds some of the richest peat and fen deposits in the country, and fen mud carries heat about seven times more slowly than water does, so they warm it to between 37 and 39 degrees and put people in it. The modern baths opened in May 1883 beside the Zlatá stoka, named after the daughter of the man who built them. None of this is new behaviour: the list of what stood inside these walls in 1379 already counts two bathhouses.
Sources: www.mesto-trebon.cz, www.mesto-trebon.cz p. 6
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- náměstí
- A square. There are four of them on this level, which for a town this size is showing off: Masarykovo, Žižkovo, Palackého and Trocnovské.
- -ova
- The ending that turns a person into a street. Krčínova belongs to Krčín, the regent who ran the estate's ponds; Březanova to Březan, who wrote the lords' chronicle; Tylova to a playwright whose name is also on the theatre by the market place. Then Jiráskova, Havlíčkova, Seifertova, Klofáčova. Half the level is a surname bent into an adjective.
- Na / U
- Czech names a street after what stands there and puts a preposition in front. Na Chmelnici is on the hop field, Na Sadech is in the orchards, U Barborky is by a small shrine to Saint Barbara out on the west edge. Two of the three name crops, and I like a street that admits what used to grow on it.
- Valy
- Ramparts, in the plural. Valy runs along the south side, where the town's outer earthwork used to be. A defence that outlives its purpose ends up as a street name.
- Hráz
- A dam. Hráz Světa is the bank of the Svět pond and the longest single stretch here at nearly nine hundred metres: water on one side, town on the other. The man who had the pond made stands on it.
- Masné krámy
- The meat stalls. This is where the butchers stood, and the name stayed on after the trade moved out. Ninety-four metres of street named after meat. I do not need it to be anything else.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 32streets
- 411dots
- 6.8km of street
- 8.8km on foot
- 2.5hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.