Miroslav Seidl

“Packing the church into carts, that was fastidious work. All the walls had to be undercut and put onto cartwheels that would, using hydraulics, it had these giant cylinders, lift them up. We controlled the carts using this computer that would send an impulse every thirty seconds with either a positive or a negative signal. The negative one meant that there was a decrease, the positive one meant that there was too much pressure. This was combined to create a sort of an average in order to prevent the church from falling apart. Any cracks in the church were monitored using these resistance transmitters, if the crack was getting bigger the whole thing would be stopped immediately.”

“You know, I now have great-grandchildren and I feel sorry for them that they can't have the childhood I had. Childhood can obviously look different to everyone, I had to walk three kilometres to get to my school in Slaný, every day, in winter, in summer. I would come home from school, and my schoolbag flew into a corner and we would go have fun, we had this group of people from my generation in our village. Together we would shepherd geese, go swimming with horses, play football. Exactly like Menšík, in one of his stories he says that everything growing within twenty kilomentres was theirs. We were the same. On our way from school we knew where the turnip was, where the pears were, where the plums were. Everything. Often we would come home covered in dirt because on the way we made a campfire, we dug out some potatoes, roasted them and ate them… You don't know what that is like, neither does today's generation. Climbing trees and rocks, that was our thing.”