E Stanko Vraz – Amerikan Narodni Kalendar 1933

On 21 February last year, Czechoslovak America was surprised by the news that Enric Stanko Vráz, a prominent Czech traveler, writer and well-known travel lecturer, died in Prague in a gray flat in Holešovice the morning of the morning. Even in America, Vráz was well known; there was almost no Czechoslovak settlement in the United States in which he would not have lectured in 1900—1918. He was also known to readers of the American calendar not only as the son-in-law of the founder and publisher of Svornosti and the American, but also as an occasional contributor who for several years organized the article “From the Life of Fellow Countrymen in Far Abroad”. Even his children Vlasta and Viktor are readers of this publication known for their contributions. That is why Enric Stanko Vráze has enjoyed extraordinary interest and importance for our readers.

Recent reports, received by post the day before the fateful radiogram, reported that Vráz had been bedridden for several weeks with heart problems and swelling. After the severe illnesses he had experienced in his advanced age, when his left arm was taken away from his shoulder twelve years ago in Chicago and then in Prague in 1923, when he suffered from almost complete paralysis of his entire body, not only in Prague and its surroundings, but also in more distant places, to which he often took difficult and strenuous tours. In recent years, he has also been a regular radio speaker.

Enric Stanko Vráz, the son of an emigrant, was born in the Bulgarian town of Trnov, when his parents were on their way from Crimea to Carihrad. Although he only attended schools abroad, Vráz acquired a knowledge of the Czech language, to which he stuck with his heart. After the death of his father and the great financial catastrophe that struck the family, Vraz ended his studies, devoted himself to traveling for science and traveled as a young man of 20 years, then very inaccessible and dangerous Europeans Morocco and Sahara. He had resorted to various disguises. He traveled sometimes as a Jew, sometimes as a Mohammedan, and guessed by collecting nature's cruel livelihood.

Later he went further south on a journey along the coast of West Africa and discovered many rare and new ones himself. He traveled continually Africa for eight years among black tribes, often months, even years inland, as a single white man. - He recognized part of Senegal, Gambia, inland, and part of the Portuguese territory of Bisoagos, arriving in Sierra Leone, the Republic of Liberia on the Pepper Coast. He lived for a long time on the Gold Coast, from where he made trips to the interior of dark Africa. For example, in Ashanti, Africans, the upper reaches of the Volta, in Eve on the border of Dahome, etc. In eight years of hardship and great danger, natives and murderous climates still threatened, Vráz knew more than 40 different of peoples, or of nations, some of which he had to learn. While he came to Morocco with the remnants of his fortune, on his other travels he was dependent only on the yield of his hunt. He hunted here lions and elephants. After the third serious illness, he went to the Canary Islands, where he recovered so much by a one-year stay that he could continue his travels again. From Teneriffe went to the islands of the Antilles, then traveled to Venezuela and then to Orinoco. His journey across the equatorial America, to the mouth of Orinoco along rivers and mysterious, dangerous forests all the way to Brazil, Peruvia, and through the Peruvian Andes to the Pacific Ocean was magnificent. Further by sea he went to Ecuador, Panama, Columbia and back to Venezuela. In doing so, he gave his life a chance again, as the road led through wild lands where the European foot had not yet set foot. He traveled with wild Indians, again in the company of civilized rudochů with countries already densely populated. On these journeys he made a happy discovery of rubber mud, which he collected in Venezuela to employ up to 600 Indians. The company was the source of his income, which he again turned to research his travels. After fourteen years of travel, very ill and deprived of disaster with the mud of all his savings, Vraz returned to Europe and visited old friends in Prague, which he knew only from letters. In Prague, he suddenly earned the hearts of everyone, that tireless, courageous man of steel constitution, who was in the salons as in his element as in the Bedouin tents, huts of blacks, horses in pampas, or the canoes of South American Indians.

After a short stay in the Czech Republic and America, he made a magnificent journey around the world. Among others, he traveled Hawaii, Japan, China, Kochi, Rear India and Ceylon. He made further research and collecting trips to Borneo, to skull hunters and to the Papuan people, to New Guinea. Both of these routes were very dangerous and expensive. On the way back he visited Siam and, in addition to the islands of Molucca, Celebes, Java, Bali and Lombok, he also traveled the Salus archipelago, south of the Philippines.

In America he traveled at different times in North America, Mexico, Central America, lived in Arizona for months, Navajo Indians, Hopi, Pueblo, etc. Another interesting journey led him to China to Beijing, where after the Boxer Rebellion, troops joined in the city he had been busy studying and photographing places, battlefields, palaces, never before visited by Europeans. From China, Vraz went to Manchuria, then visited Japan and Korea for the third time, where he lived for three months. From Vladivostok he traveled through Siberia on the Amur, Silce and then the Siberian Railroad.

Another period of trips is a trip to South America around the mainland, the purpose of which was to get to know all the capitals of all South American republics, as previously five-year journey was to know the interior, forests, mountains and mountains of North South America. And again our Odysseus sets out on a new journey through Mexico across Yukatan to the ruins of Indian cities, into the forests overgrown with palaces of the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Majors. On the way back he visited the east coast of Central America, the republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, etc., so he knew America all over, from Canada to the Land of Fire.

Vraz traveled alone with the natives and most of the paths, not as a tourist who travels the world, but as an explorer who lived among the most primitive nations, ate, slept and hunted as one of them.

The Czechoslovak nation fell in love with Vraz, he loved it sincerely. Young, old, read, heard, admired his wonderful descriptions of distant worlds, whether spoken or printed. Vráz's eye-catching travelogues were also accompanied by his original and incomparable paintings. There was a rich, scientific content connected with my own poetic images of poetry. A beautiful memory published in “Czechoslovakia” contributed to the appreciation of Vráz's old and faithful to his kind prof. Josef Kořenský.

We attach a memory here to the above printed biographical feature: Hardly any other surname was pronounced among the Czechs in Moravia, Silesia, Vienna and the United States of America a few years ago as often as the name Vrázovo. Prague naturalists knew them almost half a century ago, know everything from the mouth of the immortalized friend Václav Frič, the owner of the renowned nature shop, that the admirable queen of termites or termites and the giant goliath beetles exhibited in his plant come from a West African collector E. St. Vráz. Underneath the mighty queen, housed in a crystal vessel, there was neither the winged king as a male, nor the tiny, blind, and wingless workers and the more robust warriors in charge of the termite state defense. The eyes of contemplative scientists rested with great interest in the tiny, but still famous tsetse fly, memorable for being a disseminator of the deadly disease of sleep. Prague's natural spirits then saw other appearances in Frič's race for the first time. They saw electric catfish and a double-fish that can be preserved! in the river alive with his lungs, if he is forced to live in mud, if the water dries. He could collect such natural products! in hot Africa only collector whimsical, we said unanimously. This was confirmed by the magical collection of beetles, which also appeared in the shop window of a glazier in Spálená Street. A cluster of glorious goliaths with a white and dark-brown garlic garment prompted all pedestrians to look at the handsome West African faces for a moment. Not many insects were so abducted by the magnificence of that great giant that he multiplied his collections by paying five gold for the Goliath. Entomological collections were already praised by several Prague citizens. We knew the nature sent by Vráz to Bohemia before the naturalist himself. For the ethnographic sights from Africa, Vráz was able to thank the Náprstek Museum only in silence. Professor Frič from the Czech Museum. The promised land of collectors seemed to be Vraz's lands on the Gulf of Guinea, as is the Golden Coast. Liberia and Sierra Leone. A daring collector would have been brave of his expedition almost in his life when he was captured by the irritated Asanti and dragged into the camp in handcuffs. But he was lucky. He escaped with life and became a mentor and a doctor of the natives.

He wrote about himself to Prague that he always wanted something else, with nowhere to stand. Coincidence wished him. It was on the Moroccan coast of Tangier, where an unknown guest was sitting in a café on a narrow street reading "National Letters". Vraz heard his name was Jaroslav Brazda and he came from Prague to show entomological appetites in Africa. Under the convention of both naturalists, it was decided to pursue the export of orchids from the north of South America. So they left the African West, sailed the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea in 1889, stayed on the island of Trinidad, settled in Venezuela to export orchids, but preferred to export mud gum. The company succeeded, and Vráz gained so much that he could make a memorable journey in 1893 across Equatorial America. He named his one boat "Praga", decorated it with the Czech flag, sailed through the Orinoco happy rapids, embarked with the hired red march of the high Andes passes, saw the shiny plains of the Pacific Ocean after terrible suffering, crossed Panama and embraced his comrade back to Trinidad.

I was happy that I could take away money from Vráz's friends to the Prague banker. Apparently they came to Manaus when our globetrotter needed them supremely. It was not even a year since that trip, when a servant came to my school in Smíchov with a message from Náprstek. "The carriage is here", called Happy Vojta Thimble triumphantly. “And he didn't come alone. He also has a living sloth, a live possum with eleven cubs on his back, and several live tarantulas. ” The reading room was suddenly busy, like in an apiary. He came naturally to see the adored Murder. But Vráz only went from hand to hand when he gave his first lecture on November 26, 1894 and inclined all his listeners to his breathtaking speech. There was no one in the man's thirty-four-year-old, flexible and resilient figure to see how often he struggled with death on his travels. But the kneaded and callous nice fortune tells that he did not have the celebrated Vráz made of roses. After lectures in Prague, Vráza gave all the places in Bohemia and Moravia throughout the year, and the speaker spoke to both adults and children. Of the mined fee, Vráz not only looked at himself, but often shared it with the needy. It was obvious from Vráz's letters that the wandering collector was an enemy of women, but he was not spared from Cupid's arrow in Prague. He looked into the lure eyes of a young Chicagoan woman, and she became his wife three years later.

He grew rich in our welfare, hurried after a year our restless man with saved capital to countries unknown and thus made a journey around the world, not only the Asian mainland, but also nearby islands. On Bomeo, the orangutans were on fire, returning from New Guinea with trophies of magical paradises feathered with gems. In 1897 he moved to America, where he found his second home in Chicago with the family of his bride, Miss Vlasta, daughter of the prominent Czech-American publisher of Czech magazines, Mr. August Geringer.

In 1897 Vráz made his way to Mexico with his wife, climbed the volcanic mountain Popokatepetl, spent several years in America, also watched the horror of the boxing uprising in China, collects constantly ethnographic monuments and sailed to Europe in 1921 to settle permanently in Prague with his family and took up his lecture again. Various diseases made Vráz's life uncomfortable, but his left hand amputation in America was the most painful for him. The condition deteriorated even more when Vráz was forced to search! eight years ago to help in the Sanatorium Podolsky. But even this time the fierce soul of the desperate patient had frightened Morana, so our Vráz lived almost against the will of the Aeskulap. The news about Vráz's health sounded unhappy at the beginning of 1932, and on the morning of February 20, a sad news spread across Prague that the patient had died in his Holesovice apartment, leaving behind a devoted wife, daughter of Vlasta Adéla and son Viktor, University Associate Professor in Chicago.

The great gifts that Vráz contributed to the uplifting of the ethnographic collections of the Náprstek Museum will proclaim the patriotic enthusiasm of a poor patron. Numerous viewers will also be gratefully remembered at Vraz if their eyes rest on fairy-tale paradises and hummingbirds displayed in the halls of the National Museum. With a grateful memory, Vráz will live in our nation with his travelogues "Across Equatorial America" (1900), "In Siam" (1901), "China" (1904) and "From the Travel of E. St. Vráz”(1897). His “Exotic Stories” reveal their creative spirit and dreamy poetry with their take-off.