The Castle That Started It All 2008

CASTLES, COPIES & CAVES

"I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and

waterfall you, and wood you,

and immense-rock you, and tremendous

you, and solitude you."

-Keats’s preface to Ann Radcliffe’s

  The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794

In the castle stood a cast of creatures,

miscast outcasts and other castaways,

who instead of bone were cast from stone.

In their limbs and lines we saw the future forecast, and fast.

So we built these rooms, and caves were cocooned,

around a world doomed to decay, soon, or someday.

In an otherwise ordinary town marked prominently on European maps, there stands a massive medieval castle. Visitors appear and disappear regularly, seeking a view of the silent stone structure, a sort of time-capsule after centuries of royal domestication, the rise of Communism, and ensuing decades of public neglect. Occupying a newly centrifugal existence in the town since the christening of the building as a world heritage site, the tourism it now sustains matches the increasing dependence on its fictionalization, as many local artists are commissioned to render the castle in ever more mythical, increasingly kitsch forms, for those wishing to carry a souvenir of history home.

Living in an old attic near this castle one autumn, watching my local companions code-naming the tourists zombies, due to the visitor’s glazed-over gazes, and the trove of recording devices that replaced seeing with documenting, it seemed phrases from science fiction films and fairytales were being conjured as if to make sense of an increasingly surreal place. Any spaces which allowed retreat, beyond vision of outsiders, whether a crowded attic or a tiny automobile offering temporary distance, were coded as "caves." "Zombies" could not retain the subtle distinctions between inside and outside, and the recessed nature of "caves" implied the necessary trespassing and knowledge of these boundaries in order to fully inhabit, over time, this miniscule town full of transitory outsiders.

It was as though a filmic façade had been seductively draped over the buildings in this land of medieval specters and modern monsters. One could not be sure whether the veil was incarnate, or circumstantial, for the business of locals or the pleasure of outsiders. Perhaps the grimy patina of history is not lustrous enough to sustain the fantasy of perfect relics. Renovating, repositioning, and copying the old in order to induce a more authentic history is common in such timeworn places, yet no less strange to stand amidst. We relegate old stones to the sidelines as rubble, or else elevate them as architectures, aimomg to convince ourselves there are still places available to our fantasies, even as time moves differently.

When I inquired about the surreal and highly demarcated town in which we met, my friend Henri explained the term "skazka," a word he thought would help me to understand both the castle’s centrifugal existence and the similar monumentalization of the town within central Europe. What intrigued me most about Henri’s description of this town as a place graced by "skazka" was the implication that to feel or experience skazka was essentially to long for something that, by process of being desired, was only pushed farther away, like an insect being grasped at but never caught, for the air generated to lasso it each time instead sent it farther back.

That which is named "skazka," whether a place, structure, or person, is mythically endowed with eternal existence, like a vampire or a taxidermied creature. Anything advanced toward the future as an artifact remains similarly haunted, a kind of futuristic nostaligia. "Skazka," Henri told me, could refer also, to architecture which becomes archetypical by way of being disassembled and reassembled in other terrains, displacing and reappropriating the local for a forecasted, outside audience. Like “Potemkin’s Village,” places of "skazka" are those that have accidentally transformed from the functional to the vestigial, and meanwhile, purposefully been transformed from the local to the legendary.

When I left the tiny town and its infamous castle, I continued to wonder about the word "skazka" for which I could find no comparison in English, nor a matching word in the Czech language. "Skazka" in fact merges the Russian word “Ckazka” and the Swedish word “Skanzen.” “Ckazka” derives from the Russian root “skazat,” meaning “to tell.” In current Russian usage the word refers to the telling of a legend. The strikingly similar word “skanzen" means “fortifying wall” in Swedish. Coined by a Swedish explorer traveling through Hungary in 1891, it was used to designate open-air museums where historical architectures were sanctified and reconstructed for the purpose of study.

By designating a specific architecture worthy of museumification, the original moves closer to its own extinction. By claiming a story as legend, we claim its historical roots just as we inundate it with supplementary myths. Both “Ckazka” and “Skanzen” map places dense with myth. These myths are then transformed, appropriated and disguised to better blend into the places and times they next emerge, chameleons of sorts. Architecture also emerges from history, and in being refashioned as witness to previous times, its ability to convey fictional fantasies surpasses its ability to relay any certainties.

I had a belief as a child, that if somehow I could turn around quickly enough, I would one day find the back of myself in the reflection facing me. Here is the irony, the desire, and the sorrow, for no matter how quick the turn, or how brief the gap, this seeing of that behind us remains dizzying, even for an additional mirror, an additional gaze, or an additional appropriation.

Perhaps we render pictures just as we build monuments and relay their stories, as though by each of these methods we create witnesses that are fixed, stable, unchanged by time or death. Yet by seeking the authentic, the authentic is inevitably pushed more and more out of hand, as in a hall of mirrors or a game of slight.