If you take a train heading south from Cesky Krumlov, you cannot avoid the Jirabek station. And even if you did not avoid it, you might easily miss it. Maybe it\’s because the sign says so, or maybe it\’s because the train doesn\’t always stop here. But the route is pretty monotonous and you might get bored, so at least here, one stop before Černá v Pošumaví, you can focus a little better. Just in case.

I could see farmhouses in the immediate area that had been devastated for decades. It was an agricultural building left behind after the Germans were evacuated, and it had been rotting away for years.

For a few years it was used to keep cattle, then it became a chicken farm, and when the only two local residents retired and no one could take care of it, or rather no one When that happened, it was simply left as fallow land. This continued until the Velvet Revolution.

That did not happen. Because of the beauty of the surrounding countryside, some Swiss were intrigued by the building and were willing to buy it, despite its dilapidated condition. They wanted to take care of it. They wanted to turn the building into a guesthouse. And it was a pretty good idea. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, a lot of tourists came from the west, and there were very few accommodations, and it seemed quite promising.

But these Swiss only built part of the driveway into the building. They then turned to the municipality to repair the road leading here, which looked like a tank yard. This was our first disappointment. Because this road belongs to the state. And the state had no interest in such a place.

So they came up with the idea of building a small sandy beach on the local Lipno Bay. Then they ran into the environmentalists again. They said there would be no beach because the asp spawn here.

And it was over. It remained, as did the subject. Who would invest in something useless? Tourists would not go there just to wreck their cars in the driveway, it was too big to build cottages…

And so the place fell, partly figuratively, partly literally. And who cared? Until recently, no one.

And suddenly, years later, …… almost as fast as lightning, suddenly a farm was built. Suddenly it was privately owned, and he gradually transformed the entire place into a very nice looking barn. He also tended to the fields and pastures and built roads, all with the help of the European Union.

So today you never see ruins from a train. There is nothing to be ashamed of there anymore. And I, like so many other places in this country, wonder why it is here. It almost had to crumble before someone took it down in a meaningful way. And while no one cared about the cows, a few tourists were not welcome because of nature conservation.

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