Svacina Project

Summer in Texas means church picnics. The website www.texasczechs.com lists the dates for over 60 statewide throughout the year. But from May through September, there is a concentration of events in the predominantly Czech and German Catholic churches in Fayette and Lavaca Counties in South Central Texas. On a hot Sunday in July (the 21st this year), the Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church in the community of Moravia hosts its annual picnic, which raises funds for upkeep of the church, its halls, and cemetery. Local residents, their children and grandchildren, have continued this tradition for decades - like Gene Marie and Arnold Bohuslav - Texas Czechs that have been living in the community their whole lives and cooking at the picnic for most of that time. Gene Marie and Arnold Bohuslav   Moravia is a tiny community (less than 200 people) in Lavaca County locatable by finding the intersection of Farm roads 957 and 532. Though originally settled by Anglo se

I'm sitting at my dining table eating a bowl of garlic soup and thinking about my great grandfather, Alois J. Morkovsky. The story my mother tells me is that he would ask my grandmother to make the soup for him when he was feeling under the weather, like coming down with a cold.  (He lived with her and her family in his later years.) I have friends in the Czech Republic who recommend the same treatment (eating garlic) for a cold along with tying a scarf around one's neck. The soup I'm eating today evolved over the last week or so. On Sunday, the 30th, I went to Hallettsville for the annual Morkovsky reunion where I got several people to tell me stories about Alois Morkovsky. My parents and I stayed at my grandmother's house (she passed in January of 2012) and I helped my parents make roast pork, a squash casserole, and potatoes with butter and onions for the event. When it came time to drain the water from boiling the potatoes, both my mother and I had the same idea -