Chods Erotic

The Chods are Czechs, and would say so, but for at least seven hundred years they have also been something narrower: the people of Chodsko, a string of villages around the town of Domažlice in southwestern Bohemia, where the Bohemian Forest runs along the Bavarian border. What set them apart was a job. Bohemian kings charged them with watching the forest passes and the trade road coming in from Bavaria. The name is usually traced to the Czech verb chodit, to walk, after the patrols they kept. In return they answered to the crown rather than to a local lord, were free of ordinary serfdom, carried arms, and flew their own banner bearing a dog's head. Neighbors called them psohlavci, the dogheads, and the nickname stuck. That arrangement did not survive the seventeenth century. After the Habsburg victory over the Bohemian estates, the crown sold the Chod villages to the Lamminger family, who treated the old charters as dead paper and the Chods as serfs like any others. The villages fought for their rights in court for decades, lost, and rose in revolt in 1693. Their spokesman, Jan Sladký Kozina of Újezd, was hanged in Plzeň in 1695. Tradition holds that before he died he summoned his lord, Wolf Maximilian Lamminger, remembered as Lomikar, to God's judgment within a year and a day, and that Lamminger was dead roughly a year later. Alois Jirásek turned the story into the novel Psohlavci in the 1880s, Kozina became a national hero, and his monument still stands on Hrádek hill above the villages.

The Chods do not claim to be a separate nation. They speak Czech, a West Slavic language, in a dialect other Czechs pick out quickly, and local writers and folk ensembles keep it in use. The region is historically Roman Catholic, and the parish calendar still shapes village feasts, though everyday life here is about as secular as in the rest of the country. What holds the identity together is custom: the Chod bagpipe, or dudy, whose drone carries the local dance music; round Chod koláče topped with poppy seed, sweet curd cheese and plum butter; and the Chod festival in Domažlice each August, when costumes come out of storage and the town fills with bands. The frontier has kept shaping them. For centuries the Chods shared these hills with German-speaking neighbors, and from 1948 to 1989 they lived on the edge of the Iron Curtain, a border people once again.