O památné hoře Blaníku a jejím kraji - Příběhy posvátných hor – Cílek Václav (2022)

This Czech-language book explores the nature and landmarks of the region beneath Mount Blaník. The mountain is more than one of many Czech hills, as part of the identity of the Czech nation developed around it. Books, romantic stories and political speeches were written about it, while poems, operas and musical works were composed. About half the book is therefore devoted to the archaeology and mythology of Mount Blaník and the wider family of sacred mountains. Many of these mountains were believed to be home to protective forces of the land and important ancestors. Pilgrimages to mountains, where people could experience contact with something miraculous or at least beyond the individual, reached their greatest prominence at the beginning of the Hussite movement. Their traces can be followed in the meetings of religious sects and later Protestants from the mid-thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, followed soon by the national and political gatherings of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The cult of the mountains began thousands of years ago, changed and spread, but has not ended to this day.