The route
Starosta and Starastova are a pair of prominent sandstone rock towers in the extraordinary Adršpach-Teplice region of the Czech Republic, about 150km north-east of Prague. In English, the names are "The Mayor" and "The Mayoress". The classic route up Starosta is the four pitch Stará Cesta, graded Czech VII (perhaps YDS 5.10a) and first climbed in 1928.
The sandstone of Czech and eastern Germany has a strong claim to be the birthplace of modern rock climbing. Free climbing up to 5.10 was accomplished as early as 1906. The area is notorious for a very strict climbing ethic: no chalk, no camming devices, protection only from from rope knots placed in cracks or very spaced bolts.
The context
Some time in mid-1987 I stumbled over a small item in a climbing magazine mentioning that the BMC were looking for people to join a British delegation to Czechoslovakia (as it was then). Specifically the focal point was a climbing film festival taking place in Adrspach in September. I had seen images of the sandstone climbing in eastern Europe a few years before and had already logged it mentally as somewhere I would like to visit one day. The climbing style and rock architecture seemed unique.
I was also interested in seeing life on the other side of the 'Iron Curtain". The Cold War had been a major backdrop to my childhood. For my parents, who had both served during World War II and kept Winston Churchill's speeches in prized place in their record collection, the Soviet Union was unambiguously the enemy and an existential threat to liberty. I was raised to think the same. The unexpected rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s had caused great excitement in our household. Somewhat for the same reasons I was a fan of the émigré Czech author Milan Kundera's books, all of which I had read at university. Ditto Kafka.
I sent a short letter to the BMC applying to join the one week trip, then thought little more about it. Invitations would only be extended to "known" climbers, I reasoned. Wrong. Or, more accurately: wrong in my case. There would be four of us, the others being Dennis Gray, the middle-aged boss of the BMC, and two guys whose names I knew from magazines, Craig Smith and Tony Ryan.
The flight to Prague from London was short, which makes sense if you look at a map, but somehow seemed disrespectful of the great fault-line of late 20th century geopolitics that we were crossing. At our destination my luggage was missing, including all my climbing gear. Not a great start but our minders from the Czech national climbing association assured me they would find it. As far as I remember, we spent a night in Prague then were driven to Adrspach. We spent most of the rest of the week based there aside from one short road trip to the Elbe region. In Adrspach we mostly drunk excellent Czech beer in bucolic country pubs and climbed, often in that order. I don't recall that we actually spent much time at the film festival itself, though I think I sat through one animation in which not much happened, then a character died violently and the audience laughed; Czech humour is notoriously dark.
Craig and Tony were really friendly, which was a relief, as I didn't feel remotely worthy to be travelling with them. Both of them were amongst the strongest climbers in the UK at the time. It was especially interesting to meet Craig as he was also a genuine climbing celebrity, in a period when that was still a rare phenomenon. Craig (and his lycra tights) had been on the cover of all the climbing magazines over the previous couple of years, notably in photos taken by the US photographer Beth Wald at Smith Rock, itself probably the most fashionable cliff in the world in the mid-80s. It would be too generous to say that he wasn't aware of his status but he was constantly entertaining and never arrogant. There was only one moment during the trip when he crossed the line into rockstar petulance: our hosts had taken us to a cliff quite early in the morning, where Craig insisted that he was insufficiently caffeinated to climb so we all got back in the cars and drove for about twenty minutes back to the nearest town so he could have more coffee.
I wanted to like Dennis, as I respected his work with the BMC, but he was not the greatest company, prone to long monologues about his glory days in the 1950's Brown-and-Whillans era of British climbing or any other story in which he could name-drop famous climbers. Over time, we became curious about his frequent absences in the late evenings. Years later Dennis came out, authoring a book "Todhra", billed as the "first gay climbing novel" and apparently densely populated with casual homosexual encounters. It is a reasonable inference that the book is based on personal experience. Reflecting on that, it is quite impressive that Dennis had the balls (so to speak) to set out on cottaging missions on "enemy" turf.
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| The Mayor and Mayoress, Adrspach © unknown |
The sandstone of Czech and eastern Germany has a strong claim to be the birthplace of modern rock climbing. Free climbing up to 5.10 was accomplished as early as 1906. The area is notorious for a very strict climbing ethic: no chalk, no camming devices, protection only from from rope knots placed in cracks or very spaced bolts.
Some time in mid-1987 I stumbled over a small item in a climbing magazine mentioning that the BMC were looking for people to join a British delegation to Czechoslovakia (as it was then). Specifically the focal point was a climbing film festival taking place in Adrspach in September. I had seen images of the sandstone climbing in eastern Europe a few years before and had already logged it mentally as somewhere I would like to visit one day. The climbing style and rock architecture seemed unique.
I was also interested in seeing life on the other side of the 'Iron Curtain". The Cold War had been a major backdrop to my childhood. For my parents, who had both served during World War II and kept Winston Churchill's speeches in prized place in their record collection, the Soviet Union was unambiguously the enemy and an existential threat to liberty. I was raised to think the same. The unexpected rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s had caused great excitement in our household. Somewhat for the same reasons I was a fan of the émigré Czech author Milan Kundera's books, all of which I had read at university. Ditto Kafka.
I sent a short letter to the BMC applying to join the one week trip, then thought little more about it. Invitations would only be extended to "known" climbers, I reasoned. Wrong. Or, more accurately: wrong in my case. There would be four of us, the others being Dennis Gray, the middle-aged boss of the BMC, and two guys whose names I knew from magazines, Craig Smith and Tony Ryan.
The flight to Prague from London was short, which makes sense if you look at a map, but somehow seemed disrespectful of the great fault-line of late 20th century geopolitics that we were crossing. At our destination my luggage was missing, including all my climbing gear. Not a great start but our minders from the Czech national climbing association assured me they would find it. As far as I remember, we spent a night in Prague then were driven to Adrspach. We spent most of the rest of the week based there aside from one short road trip to the Elbe region. In Adrspach we mostly drunk excellent Czech beer in bucolic country pubs and climbed, often in that order. I don't recall that we actually spent much time at the film festival itself, though I think I sat through one animation in which not much happened, then a character died violently and the audience laughed; Czech humour is notoriously dark.
Craig and Tony were really friendly, which was a relief, as I didn't feel remotely worthy to be travelling with them. Both of them were amongst the strongest climbers in the UK at the time. It was especially interesting to meet Craig as he was also a genuine climbing celebrity, in a period when that was still a rare phenomenon. Craig (and his lycra tights) had been on the cover of all the climbing magazines over the previous couple of years, notably in photos taken by the US photographer Beth Wald at Smith Rock, itself probably the most fashionable cliff in the world in the mid-80s. It would be too generous to say that he wasn't aware of his status but he was constantly entertaining and never arrogant. There was only one moment during the trip when he crossed the line into rockstar petulance: our hosts had taken us to a cliff quite early in the morning, where Craig insisted that he was insufficiently caffeinated to climb so we all got back in the cars and drove for about twenty minutes back to the nearest town so he could have more coffee.
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| Craig posing for Beth Wald's camera on Darkness at Noon, Smith Rock, mid-1980s © Climbing magazine (from this article) |
The ascent
Dennis and I climbed The Mayor with several Czech guys sometime in the middle of the week. The diary records that I led most of it. In practise this meant soloing short cracks between large ledges with giant ring bolts to belay from. My luggage still hadn't arrived and I was climbing in carpet slippers (an actual substitute for climbing shoes in eastern Europe at that time). They were less useless than I expected. Perhaps someone in the slipper factory was a climber and was secretly optimising the fit and sole rubber?
It being festival week, a tyrolean had been rigged from the Mayor summit to the Mayoress, so we crossed that too, swinging around about a hundred meters above the trees. Then we rappelled the Mayoress. A nice feature of the Adrspach towers is that all of them have summit logbooks; we duly wrote in our names. I suppose it is very slightly possible that we were the first Brits on the summits of these two towers, but I doubt it.
Subsequent ascents
I made a second visit to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1989. The only real link with the 1987 trip was that Craig had kept in touch with a young'ish Czech climber, Jiri, who was offering us accommodation back in Adrspach. After meeting briefly in London, we set off in two cars, Craig with Al Manson, and I with Dan Donovan. As far as I recall, we didn't re-unite until Adrspach. Crossing the border into Czechoslovakia from Germany was quite daunting. I remember an interminable wait and long queues of stationary trucks. Unlike our flight two years before, the transition from capitalist west to communist east felt much more tangible.
In Adrspach, Jiri was amazingly welcoming and kept us fed and out of trouble for a couple of weeks. I was climbing much more confidently than in 1987. I even took a fall on a knot. According to the diary, Dan and I repeated The Mayor, but I have no memory at all of it. No tyrolean, for sure. The best thing we did during our stay was the Letecka Cesta route on the Milenci (the 'lovers') towers at about E3 (5.10+ R). Several high quality chimney and crack pitches lead to a final crux face up to the extraordinary twin summits. We also jumped the gap between the summits. Czech tower jumping is a sub-genre of the sport with its own grading system. We were told the Milenci jump was a grade three, which seemed a solid achievement given that the top grade is five. I wondered then (and now) whether we had subtly done it wrong - perhaps jumping in the wrong direction?
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| Milenci towers, Adrspach © unknown (We jumped from left to righthand summits) |
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| Charles Bridge, Prague © unknown |
Back in Prague and after several phone calls to my insurers, I learned that I would not be able to "re-export" my damaged vehicle from Czechoslovakia without police sign-off, which could only be obtained from one senior officer somewhere in Prague's central police station. Matej offered to take me, but was clearly terrified by the prospect. It seemed our destination was very much the epicentre of the country's dictatorship and not somewhere Czechs visited lightly - the kind of place you might enter but never leave. Inside it did indeed fit the stereotype: many floors, harsh lighting and long echoing corridors with numbered doors. The office of the man controlling the destiny of my vehicle was distinctive. His large desk was entirely covered in explicit pornography, apparently glued to the surface and protected by a glass sheet. The message seemed to be "in this office I can do whatever I want." I awkwardly passed over various documents, evidence of the accident and some cash, Matej and the man spoke at length in Czech, a piece of paper was stamped and out we went. No big deal really, but disconcerting.
And another thing ...
Just after Dan and I left Prague, reforms set in motion by the last Soviet president, Gorbachev, led to eastern Europe countries like Hungary begin to open their borders with the west. Czechoslovakia had its own Velvet Revolution, and, by the end of 1989, a new government was in place, headed by the much-imprisoned dissident, Vaclav Havel. The Soviet Union imploded a couple of years later. Czechoslovakia fragmented peacefully into two countries in 1993.
The end of the Cold War, and Deng Xiaoping's de-Mao-ification of China around the same time, made the 1990s an optimistic time, at least as I remember it. American academic Francis Fukuyama rashly declared "the end of history", believing that western ideals of economic and social freedom were permanently entrenched. Seems quaint now. It is easy to make a case that freedom is in retreat globally. Xi Jinping abolished term limits for the Chinese presidency earlier this year, Putin long since corrupted Russian democracy and there's an authoritarian idiot in the White House.
A few months ago I had a fascinating conversation with a guy, now in his sixties, who grew up in Prague. He described his childhood experience of watching Russian tanks enter the city in 1968, crushing demonstrators who blocked their path. His father had been associated with the pro-democracy movement that preceded that event. By association, that led to him being denied university admission and other basic opportunities under state control. For a while he worked in the paper sector, trying to make sense of the constant shortages and surpluses in supply that were an inevitable consequence of the Soviet's inefficient planned economy. He described how he and his colleagues would buy time when surplus shipments threatened to overwhelm their warehouses by re-routing trainloads of paper bound for Prague back east to Siberia. He eventually concluded that he had to leave the country; an exercise that required he and his friends to roam unauthorised through several eastern bloc countries, be frequently thwarted by armed border guards and eventually succeed through an asylum application to Canada. It is shame oral records like this are not more frequently shared, especially as ever-fewer people remain alive with first-hand experience of communist dictatorships, and there are worrying signs that the ideology is becoming fashionable again.
