The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Thursday, June 25, 2026 ~
I have been in this guesthouse for three weeks longer than I intended. The owner has stopped commenting on it. After Kokořín I thought the work was nearly done. I was wrong. The notebook had one more section I had not properly read.
~ Monday, June 8, 2026 ~
I have all three marks. Three families, three centuries, three different kinds of custody — a merchant family in Prague who asked for the sign, a monastic succession at Sázava that passed the mark from abbot to abbot for seven hundred years, a Protestant household in the Kokořín sandstone that survived everything and buried its last member with the symbol fixed to the rock above the grave. I have them. I have the photographs. I have the sketches. I do not know what to do with them.
~ Tuesday, June 2, 2026 ~
Three weeks. I have been in the Kokořínsko region for three weeks. I am writing this from a guesthouse in Mšeno that I have been using as a base since mid-May. The owner stopped asking when I was leaving after the second week.
~ Saturday, May 9, 2026 ~
I drove to Sázava on the eighth. The eighth of May is Liberation Day here and the roads were empty. Sázava is less than an hour southeast of Prague. I arrived to find the monastery closed — national holiday, no exceptions noted on the sign, opening hours listed as ten to five on days that were not the eighth of May. I sat in the car park for twenty minutes before accepting this and driving into Benešov to find somewhere to stay.
~ Tuesday, May 5, 2026 ~
I arrived in Prague on the third. I spent the first day going through the notebook again — the full notebook, not the excerpts I have published. On the morning of the fifth I went to Olšanské hřbitovy.