A postcard from Not Prague.

A silver cathedral, a chapel of bones and gingerbread dumplings. Plus TWO recipes for beautiful Czech dishes: a rich and lovely mushroom and dill soup, and tangy yeasted pancakes.

Until recently, I was one of those travellers who stopped at Prague and called it a day on the rest of the Czech Republic. It’s a knockout city, of course. Beer, pastries, astronomical clocks, the Charles Bridge doing its best to out-Baroque itself. But while my imagination had wandered beyond Prague, the rest of me hadn’t.

That changed last week when I visited Czechia (the official short name) to research a travel piece for The Telegraph. It won’t be published for a bit, so in the meantime, I’ve scribbled a kind of postcard from a town that deserves more column inches than I could devote to in that article.