Humour inspired by viticulture and wine

Directly in the settlement 20 cellars are to be found, the oldest of them dating back to the 16th century. Bořetice boasts a vast cellar complex to the north of the settlement in a hillside under Kraví Hora (Cow Mountain) that owes its name to a former pasture. Over the rivulet Trkmanka a wine colony stretches with 230 cellars with pressing houses in two rows. ‘Horní Frejd’ and ‘Dolní Frejd’ (Upper and Lower Hedgerow – the names come from a hedge that used to demarcate upper and lower boundary of the vineyards in the past) neighbour the transverse rows of the Hliníky and Zahraničí sellers.  Horní Frejd includes detached pressing houses from the 18th century, with gables oriented towards the lane. Protruding saddle roofs protect the entrance from the ravages of the climate. The entrance into the pressing house is in the middle of the front wall. The doorpost is equipped with a gate used to close the pressing room at fermenting time. The gable over the entrance equipped with a feeding opening with a small wooden door used as a hayloft. One of the oldest buildings here is a pressing house, n. 49 of the former mayor, Frolich, whose cellar dates back to 1794. Another very old construction is the cellar of Stanislav Petrásek that bears the name Fabián Fiala at the location of a ventilation outlet dated 1818.  The upper hedgerow is separated from the lower hedgerow by the wailing wall of Kraví Hora. At Vinckovo Náměstí (Vincek’s square), the chapel of St Urban is located, with a monument commemorating deceased vintners. The construction of pressing houses over original underground cellars began only in the interwar period; most of them date from the 1960s. As for typology, most of these single-storey pressing houses are turned towards the street with their sloping roofs and form a continuous row. Mr Gruza remembers the construction of the pressing houses in the Lower Hedgerow and comments on it in the following way:   

“We fetched bricks from Hodonín by horse cart. It's 30 kilometres, so we hit the road early in the morning in the darkness and were back by midnight. And still we had to take demijohns with wine for the chaps at the brickyard, so that they would let us jump the queue and get our cart loaded before others. Once, somebody even wanted to give me a thrashing for that... Anyway, my horses were really good and so I was able to fetch over a thousand bricks at a time.”  The front entrance is very often framed with a ‘žudro’ (see dictionary at the end). The facade wall has a colourful bottom stripe. Cellars are eclectic. They utilise motifs from the regions of Podluží and Kyjovsko likely to be appreciated by tourists. A very common blemish is putting tiles on walls (more common in the Upper Hedgerow, the Lower Hedgerow being more unified architecturally, since it came into existence over a brief period of time). The complex includes the Hotel Kraví Hora (nicknamed ‘crayons’) that very much disturbed the character of the cellar colony of petty vine growers.  Pressing houses in the colony ‘Zahraničí’ are in fact located already in the registered area of the neighbouring village of Němčičky. This colony is placed in a pit where soil used to be excavated and where illegal feasts took place during the war. Cellars were built from 1953 by bricklayer František Michna of Vrbice, who was able to back up his claim that all cellars are equipped with typical stone fronts and windows with acute arches.  The lane in Hliníky is the newest colony, but there are ancient cellars there, too (e.g. n.114). On 12 October, the Free Federal Republic of Kraví Hora was established as a joke, whose purpose was to promote viticulture.  The republic has its own government and a president elected at the time of the local communal elections. It has also its anthem (Kraví Hory of Bořetice –Cow Mountains of Bořetice), an emblem, postal stamps and currency, the ‘kravihorec’, which is equal to one Euro. Citizens of the Republic of Kraví Hora distinguish themselves by their cordiality and hospitability. They also organize various happenings: a military drill of the Kraví Hora army, a protest against the cold wind caused by the Ferris wheel at the Viennese fairground in Prater...