IF there was ever a city that needed another vowel in its name it’s the Czech settlement of Brno.
Barno, Burno, or even Berno would be so much better than Brno.
It would make the name of this place a whole lot easier to say, and not require those visiting the place to pause before they pronounce the word and practice folding their lips and tongue around the syllables.
While Brno is short of a vowel it doesn’t lack any charm, and is a particularly delightful place to visit when the springtime sun is shining over Eastern Europe.
Brno was on the itinerary today, it was the place we stopped for lunch during the drive from Prague to Bratislava, and we had time to walk along the main street and wander through a neighbourhood market.
It's strawberry-growing season in Eastern Europe and many of the stalls that had been set up beneath umbrellas in the square near the Old Town Hall were setting punnets of the plump fruit to the shoppers wandering the impromptu aisles.
I could smell the strawberries before I could see them, the warm late-morning breeze was washing across the fruit and distributing the pleasing aroma around the piazza, and it was that authentic perfume that only comes when berries have been grown by hand in a family’s veggie garden.
Brno, which sits in the south-eastern corner of the Czech Republic near the borders with both Slovakia and Austria, is the country’s second largest city with a population of around 370,000 people.
It’s also the capital of the state of Moravia – the southern portion of the Czech Republic is occupied by the states of Moravia and Bohemia – and it seems that some of the people who live in Brno consider they are Moravian first and Czech second.
Back in 1991, when a national-wide census was conducted, 19 per cent of the people who lived in Moravia declared that their nationality was Moravian.
And Moravia does have some famous sons with Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame, the father of genetics Gregor Mendel, Secessionist architect Adolf Loos and all-round smartie Sigmund Freud hailing from this part of Europe.
It seems that Brno residents are also very clever when it comes to cooking pancakes.
My travelling companions and I ordered pancakes for lunch and while mine came with bananas and caramel sauce another of the sweet combination was cottage cheese and chocolate while two member of the group had a savour creation featuring the ingredients of a Waldorf salad.
