| Summary: | Rock climbing in the cities of the Bohemian Paradise became widely popular already by the end of the 19th century. Quite specific qualities of the local sandstone attracted domestic as well as foreign climbers right from the beginning. After 1948, many of the regional climbers, whose qualities were undisputable even in the nationwide scale, remained reliant upon climbing merely within the borders of the former Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, majority of them were not allowed to travel abroad and thus they could not prove their skills and qualities worldwide. There was a very limited number of those who could participate in foreign expeditions and thus fulfil their dreams. The rare contact with foreign climbers became a source of new information, new styles and trends in climbing, and an access to new equipment and gear in general. To many domestic climbers, however, such sources remained unattainable, and without them they were often left to develop and produce their equipment by their own, until they were allowed to travel to the West. This paper, with the help of the method of the oral history and qualitative subject analysis, gives a concise picture of the history of rock climbing in the Bohemian Paradise in the context of the constraints set by the communist Czechoslovakia. The chapters trace the...
|
|---|
