Czechs salvage soggy treasures

Several historic towns to the south, including jewels of renaissance and baroque architecture, were submerged, as was Cesky Krumlov, in south Bohemia, one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe.

With all the damage, tourism, the second-largest sector behind the auto industry, is expected to decline over the next six months to a year by 50 to 70 percent. The streets of Prague's Old Town, usually packed tightly with tourists, are now eerily silent.

UNESCO has pledged $1.5 million for the repair of Czech cultural and historical sites.

The floods, the worst in at least 175 years, drenched nearly the entire western half of the country and remain at dangerous levels in several rural areas. About 220,000 people have been forced from their homes in the Czech Republic, 20,000 in neighboring Germany. Thousands now have no homes to return to and many more are now living among wreckage. The Prague metro, the heart of the city's transportation system is almost entirely shut down, with 17 stations flooded. Repairs to it alone will cost $65 million.

The flood damage estimate for Central Europe currently stands at $20 billion, and it is rising daily. Germany and the Czech Republic were the worst hit, but Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia have also suffered.

In Germany, the buildings of Dresden's Semper Opera House and art museums were damaged when the Elbe River overwhelmed a dike. But all of Dresden's famed art collections were saved by museum workers and soldiers who carried 4,000 works by Old Masters to upper floors of the Zwinger Palace by candlelight moments before the water poured in.

In Prague's Czech National Gallery and Kampa modern art museum, where floodwaters reached the third floor, thousands of artworks and museum pieces were also saved in attics.

But the archives of the Czech Technical Museum and the Institute of Archaeology, both in the low-lying district of Karlin, were decimated by 10 feet of water. Of 70,000 volumes of original archeological scholarship, only 600 were saved. Many soggy manuscripts have been frozen to prevent further deterioration, in hopes that some day they will be restored, but experts say it could take decades.

In Libcice, the Sindelar brothers beg the flood-relief volunteers not to discard their treasured, disintegrating books.

"It is a horrible shock to see what the floods have done to this village," says Petr Miculek, who left his home on the eastern side of the country in the middle of the night to come to the aid of the Sindelar family and other villagers. "There is mud everywhere and the stench is so bad you can barely breathe. The people here lost almost everything." He carries out ruined furniture and shovels mud and refuse out of the Sindelars's kitchen and the children's bedroom. "We will do whatever we have to help," he says. "I'm sure, if we were in this kind of trouble, they would do the same."

Page: 1 | 2