Why Macha´s country?

K. H. Macha visited Doksy for the first time in August 1832, being invited by his friend from university Edward Hindl, who was working on the Waldstein farm and lands. The hilly country, full of mysterious gulches, surrounded by hills with castle ruins, deep woods, in which famous highwaymen used to rage was a place close to the poet’s romantic soul. Edward Hindl acquainted his friend with the local myth of the robbing knight Pancir. The barkeeper Antonin Tietze told Macha the tragic story of a patricide caused by unhappy love, which happened in May 1774 in Duba, in the family of a rich farmer, Schiffner. Tietze knew quite a lot about those matters, because he was blood-related with the Schiffners’ family. Macha used the character of the barkeeper in his poem Maj (May). In the living memory of local inhabitants, there also used to be the inglorious end of a redoubtable robber, Vaclav Kumra, also known as Czech Vasek, who was apprehended in one of the Doksy pubs in 1798. All these stories and myths, and the lake, which didn’t used to be hidden in shady shrubbery at the time, the ruins of the Gothic castle of Bezdez and the romance of the whole region got projected into Macha’s lyrical-narrative poem Máj (May). As the author said himself:

“The plot of the poem takes place near the town of Hirsberg, among the mountains, on which the castles of Bezdez, Pernstejn, Houska and Roll in the distance, point eastwards, westwards, to noon and to midnight.”

In the 1930’s, a tourist club in Doksy made an effort to connect the places of tourist interest with the name of K.H. Macha, for example the renaming of the Big Lake to Macha’s Lake. The official title of the lake became an object of racial dispute over the border in 1928. In the year 1936, The Nomenclature Commission of the Geographical Committee of the National Exploration Counsel refused to recognise the renaming of the Big Lake. In the same year, the Czech Tourist Club dedicated a monument to the poet K. H. Macha on Jarmilina skala (Jarmila’s Rock) above the lake, near Stare Splavy. It happened on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, and of the first release of his poem, May. The propagation of Fascist ideas and the expansion of the Henlein movement caused a break-off in the struggle about the renaming of the Big Lake to Macha’s Lake, and Macha’s monument was taken away from Jarmila’s Rock. After World War II, Czechs used the name Macha’s Lake commonly. In a travellers’ guide from the year 1956 the lake is referred to as Macha’s Lake only, and in the year 1961, another travellers’ guide with the title Macha’s Region was released.

See you the pilgrim there, hastening on his quest Through the long, sunset fields, beneath the dimming west? Strain your eyes as you will, the end you cannot see, As over the edge of vision he falters and finds no rest. Never-ah,never! And this is all life offers me! Comfort? Who comforts me? What charm this heart can move? Love is without an end!-And bitter is my love!