Brno, Bolsheviks and Mendelian Miscellany...

Pronounced Bur-noooooo (add a hint of sing-song to it,) this quaint little city in southern Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia) came with a bundle of surprises. For starters, this ex-commie town sports a Mc Donald’s and TESCO supermarket every two kilometres or less! But an interesting fact unknown to a vast majority is that, Brno is the birthplace of modern genetics! It was here, in an Augustinian abbey (St Thomas’ Abbey) that Gregor Johann Mendel, a monk, decided to meddle with the sweet pea plants in his garden and thus were born the fundamental theories of genetic inheritance. (Speaking of the abbey, St Thomas’ is the only ‘Augustinian’ abbey in the world since the head of Augustinian orders is generally a bishop and not an abbot.)

Meet Mendel Mama!

This statue of Mendel has quite a history behind it. When theCzechs came under the reign of the communists, a statue of a Christian monk in the middle of the town square was the last item to figure on their wish list and soldiers stormed the abbey seeking to destroy the statue. However, the locals hid the statue behind the currently invisible foliage in the garden and the issue was forgotten. But a surprising fact is that the commies seemed not to have minded or realised that a main street leading to the abbey was named after the very same Augustinian abbot!

Mendel (staring at a fuchsia), with his pals…and the blinding light in the center is my Brahmatejas aka camera flash

There is no greater curse than to be ahead of one’s times and Mendel was not going to be spared either. Today he may be a genius to us, but this mathematician-meteorologist-monk was thought to be an absolute nutter, totally off his rocker! He published his ground-breaking earth-shattering work in a practically unknown (must check the impact value of that journal!) inconspicuous journal. The results of his research were proclaimed empirically non-reproducible and hence baseless by one Professor Nagaeli. The word of a trained university professor was certainly more convincing than a totally out-of-league friar!

It’s a pity I could get any pictures inside this abbey…simply stunning…I did get photos of the original location of this abbey, which was so pretty that the ruling monarch at that time threw the priests out and took it for himself! I suppose this is what they call relocation of faith. There’s something interesting about this abbey (the original abbey which is not the original abbey of this write up!) but that will come later on.

Don't be fooled by the facade

Next came Mendel Museum, the floor of which has the entire genetic sequence for either the BRCA (breast cancer) gene or the CFTR gene (cystic fibrosis)…as to why either of these genes of all things, I have no idea. The museum also has the original paper that Mendel published in 1866.

And the code begins here…
(and those are Ruth’s feet!)

Sweet peas have now been replaced by the Begonias and the greenhouse is nothing but a silhouette in the grass, but one can still feel Mendel looking upon his precious research subjects from his room.

That’s the window from where Mendel would check if anyone was sabotaging his experiment…

Architectural Quirks...

The city is absolutely chock full of them...from strip teasing angels to crooked steeples...you name it and Brno has it! St Thomas' abbey (ah yes...the same place where Mendel, left to himself, would've banned pea soup!) has an interesting stained glass window...in a botched attempt to bomb a neighbouring brewery (what apalling aim!),during world war II, the Germans ended up destroying one wall of the abbey...now when they rebuilt that wall, which had the window I mentioned, they couldn't recreate it with a religious theme for fear of incurring the wrath of the commies...and voila! we have a stained glass window, in a church, with an abstract modern artsy theme!

St. Thomas Abbey

The abbey also houses Brno's kaaval deivam, the Black Madonna...a gift from the then king, whose name I can't remember for the life of me. This photo of the Madonna is from St Peter's...

Now St Thomas' originally used to be in the city centre, right opposite St Peter's...these were being built by rival architects...and so the guy building St Thomas' who had a weird sense of humour, put this on a window facing his rival monument...

Czechs must really make very temperamental architects...one more such act of a maverick is the entrance to the old town hall...if you choose to ignore the fact that the entire hall is done up in a crocodile theme (a crocodile, they choose to call a dragon!) you will notice that the centre of the seven headed candelabra carved on top of the entrace is conspicuously crooked. Czech beer-induced inebriation was not the reason here. The architect was not paid his promised fare and hell hath no fury like a builder refused his pay!

University Masarykova