For the last few weeks, my Facebook feed has been blowing up with frog sex.
“POZOR – ŽÁBY MIGRUJÍ! A samy se neochrání!” (“ATTENTION – THE FROGS ARE MIGRATING! And they will not protect themselves!”) shouted one post on the FB group Jehnice na pohodu.
Next to a shot of frogs doing it froggy style, the post showed a cute painting of a lady frog (wearing lipstick) and a boy frog (with a top hat), and above them the words “DEJ PŘEDNOST LÁSCE” (“MAKE WAY FOR LOVE”).
Following links down the internet frog hole, I learned the whole story: every spring, thousands of frogs and toads and newts and other amphibians start migrating from the forests around Brno back to the muddy ponds they were born in. Once there (or on the way there), the boy frogs and the lady frogs share special hugs (that’s not a euphemism – that’s really how they do it). They lay their fertilized eggs in the ancestral pond, and the cycle repeats.
Except when it doesn’t. In recent years, the encroaching sprawl of the suburbs and increased traffic on the highways around the city have threatened to decimate the amphibian populations.
That’s where the organization Žabí hlídka comes in. Every year at the beginning of March, they gather volunteers to build plastic barriers along the local roads where the amphibians are likely to cross. Then over the next few weeks, the volunteers go on “frog patrols,” scooping up the little guys (who are sometimes riding on the backs of the bigger gals), putting them in buckets, and giving them a free lift to the sex ponds – acting as a kind of “frog taxi.”
This kind of clickbait is exactly why I love to follow Brno neighborhood groups on Facebook.
Most of the city’s neighborhoods have at least one or two groups created by, and for, local residents. Some of them are very official, run by the district government – and some of them are very unofficial, run by colorful lunatics. But all of them are entertaining – and honestly, these local groups are one of the reasons I haven’t yet done the right thing and quit Facebook. (My beloved Guess the Place and the recently revived Bots of New York also keep me hanging on. Plus 20-some years of my own awesome, essential, and highly original content.)
The stuff people post in these neighborhood groups tends to swing wildly between two extremes – either charmingly absurd pride for the obscure delights of their small patch of the world (like this anonymous poster’s gushing love letter to Bystrc), or charmingly venomous hysteria over small yet earth-shattering violations of the peace and order of the neighborhood (usually complaints about people parking incorrectly).
In the two years since my last B to Ž article (sorry!), I’ve been an avid follower of a few of Jehnice’s local FB groups. And it’s been a lot of fun to procrastinate writing this article by living vicariously through the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, posts by locals.
If you don’t know where Jehnice is, or if you’ve never even heard of it, you shouldn’t feel too bad. I’m guessing most residents of Jehnice would prefer it that way. Although it’s technically its own Brno city district, it looks and feels like a separate village. There are some spots in the surrounding fields where you can catch a glimpse of the city in the distance, but the tiny core of Jehnice is hidden, tucked snugly behind a few forested hills above the Ponávka creek on the far north end of town.
I don’t know anyone who lives in Jehnice. And yet, I feel very much in touch with the main currents of Jehnician life and philosophy, simply from following the local FB groups.
The most active seems to be the group I’ve already mentioned, Jehnice na pohodu. In addition to its FB presence, this organization has its own snazzy-looking webpage. They often post about social events like holiday markets in the village square or “creative workshops for seniors,” and the vibe of their posts mostly matches their name – welcoming and chill.
Except for when it comes to their cause célèbre – LOCAL ANIMALS IN DANGER!
That’s when the all-caps comes out.
Besides the frog sex posts, they’ve also posted WARNINGS about a disease found in Jehnice’s wild boars that can infect dogs who eat boar feces. Good to know. But the post that most pulled on my heartstrings was this warning from last June, about newborn fawns bedding down in nearby fields. In this case, the dogs themselves were the danger!
The official FB group of the Jehnice district council is not as boring as you might expect. Yes, it’s mostly posts promoting government initiatives, but even these are sometimes so specific in their banality they make me smile, like a recent post with pics of all eight(!) of the village’s new bio-waste bins. And then there are posts that really drive home Jehnice’s village character, like a recent announcement that someone would be selling seed potatoes, onions, apples, and garlic in the square the next day! How nice.
The most awful thing I’ve seen on the district page is a post about “several cases of cat abuse” in the village last year. So ANIMALS IN DANGER seems to be a running theme here.
Of course, the same encroaching suburban developments that are cock-blocking the frogs are also threatening the quiet village vibes that local humans like – and this is one of the other main themes of the FB Jehnic-o-sphere: OUR VILLAGE IS IN DANGER!
The group Klidné Jehnice is the place to go for an endless barrage of complaints about unwelcome developments. As they say on their main page: “We want our neighborhood to be a peaceful, green, and pleasant place to live.” There are posts lamenting the proliferation of parcel lockers, criticizing money spent on electronic bulletin boards, and voicing concerns about plans to build more big white buildings. The comments sections of these posts often devolve into prickly flame wars between the administrator of the group and members of the district council trying to defend their decisions.
Some of the sniping at the government seems a bit petty – but then again, the citizens of Jehnice have good reason to be wary of new initiatives; they’ve been burned by developers before. There’s a big white example of this looming over the village center – the renovated former brewery.
The brewery complex dates from the 1880s, when an industrialist with about as Austrian-sounding a name as you can imagine, Theodor von Offermann, bought the Jehnice chateau and brewery, both of which had been there for a long time, and expanded and modernized the factory. After World War II, though, the brewing slowed down and the buildings slumped into ruin. Then around 2013, an investor appeared who promised to convert the complex into an Alzheimer’s care facility and housing for the elderly. But once the construction started, it became clear that the builders were gutting most of the 19th century architecture. Only the shell of the main factory was preserved, and the brick walls were obscured with that cold white façade that every new building in Brno has these days.
Even worse, by the time the buildings were finished, it turned out there would be no elder care facility – just a block of new apartments. This 2020 iDNES article heavily implies there were some legal shenanigans involved in this bait-and-switch. The article quotes a former deputy mayor of Brno, who was angry that the final construction was two meters higher than the original permit allowed for. And indeed, the new complex strikes me as a big white blotch looming over Jehnice, awkwardly wedged in and out of proportion to the rest of the village.
So, fair enough, Klidné Jehnice and your uptight citizens’ brigade. Maybe the petty pestering is worth it if it helps keep corporations and the government from colluding to crowd out the village with big boxes. Jehnice’s bumpy landscape will probably keep it from hosting the kind of vast commercial eyesores that have blighted nearby Ivanovice. But as I walked across the broad open fields surrounding the village, I could easily imagine developers seeing Kč-signs sprouting among the (for now) quiet furrows.
After a year or so of lurking in the Jehnice Facebook groups, I realized that the pleasure I draw from such posts, the passionate love and disgruntlement on display there, might have a lot to do with the fact that, as a foreigner, as someone living very far from where I grew up, it feels nice to be in touch, even if only virtually, with locals talking about extremely local stuff.
I left my childhood hometown for good at age 22, and anyway, my hometown was a ready-made suburb pre-sliced into subdivisions – developments rather than real neighborhoods. So these conversations in the Brno FB groups scratch an itch for me. They make me second-hand nostalgic for a rooted life which I’ll never have, and which I don’t really, deep down, want for myself, but which I do really, deep down, want to believe someone else can have. And they allow me to bask, at least for a moment, in that local glow.
Maybe because of this weird way in which the local Brno groups feed my own amorphous sense of “home,” I got a nice surprise several weeks ago, when I saw a FB post advertising the one-day opening of a “forest bar among the sequoia trees” in Jehnice.
Does the fact that there is a grove of giant sequoias from California growing at the edge of Brno sound completely bonkers and wonderful to you?
That’s because it is completely bonkers and wonderful.
The guy behind it is a microbiologist named Lukáš Maršálek. Ten years ago, he decided to buy a parcel of woods in Jehnice and plant several sequoias, simply “for joy”. Now there are a hundred or so sequoias growing in his grove. Although he says his trees won’t reach the massive heights of their North American relatives, some of them are already over five meters tall. He’s got an Instagram page and a website called Mamutí Stromy (Mammoth Trees), where you can “become a patron of a sequoia” or buy seeds to plant one in your own back garden.
Well of course I had to get off Facebook and go check out the opening of this forest bar IRL.
After trudging north from the village for about ten minutes in a nippy March wind, I came to the edge of the woods and found a group of about 15 men, women, and children milling about a campfire and a refreshments table. Maršálek was of course there, a tall and athletic guy. He and a few others flitted about, filling watering cans and gathering shovels. I realized they were about to plant a tree – so I ordered a beer from the bar and watched the ceremony, which was photographed by two or three people and filmed by a drone (besides being passionate about giant trees, Maršálek is clearly also a master promoter). After the seedling had been plopped in the ground, fed a few huge nutrient pills, and padded with soil, I wandered around the rest of the grove, reading the wooden plaques next to each tree which displayed the names their patrons had given them – “Prosperity,” “Imagine,” “Václav I,” “Love.”
The whole crazy thing just made me smile. Maršálek had traveled thousands of miles across the ocean, to my own home country, to bring back a few precious sequoia seeds to plant in his native soil. And now here I was, a follower of my own nonsensical, world-wandering vision which had led me to settle in Maršálek’s hometown, strolling among his dream trees.
The sun started to cut through the clouds, and I knew exactly where I should go to keep the good vibes going.
I walked back across the fields, down into the village, across the park-like náměstí, up Meziboři street and past the cemetery, and finally down again along the edge of the pond, to TJ Sokol Ořešín.
In the two years I’ve mucked about Jehnice not writing this article, TJ Sokol Ořešín has become my favorite local spot.
The only thing is – and some of you may have picked up on this – TJ Sokol Ořešín is not actually in Jehnice.
It’s actually – and by now you really should have picked up on this – in Ořešín.
But I’m disregarding this technicality, and including it in this article, for one crucial reason – the bar there, called Sokolský bufet, is one of the few places you can get one of the best beers in Brno, Jehnické pivo.
Jehnické pivo has, of course, its own Facebook page, and I follow it closely, since they occasionally post about upcoming events where they’ll be serving their beer. And their beer is yummy. It’s crisp, bitter, but with a fruity tanginess to it. It has hints of boysenberry and autumn hay, and delicate overtones of …okay, whatever, I’m just kidding, I don’t know how to write about beer. I just like it a lot.
I also enjoy that their FB page is always posting historical photos of the old brewery, and making a big deal about the history of the brand – even though you might have guessed from what I said earlier about the former brewery that the current version of Jehnické pivo is not actually brewed there (in fact it’s not brewed in Jehnice at all, but up the road at the Vorkloster brewery).
No matter where it’s made – Sokolský bufet is the perfect place to drink it, perhaps after a look around Jehnice, or maybe better yet, after a walk down from Soběšice through the woods. On a bright afternoon, parents and kids and hikers and older folks and dogs perch on the picnic tables outside and soak up the sunshine. Who knows whether they are from Jehnice, or Ořešín, or from elsewhere in Brno, or from California, or New Caledonia. For as long as they’re sitting there, they’re locals.
