I meet Ilona Vojancová on a greyish December day, for a walk among some fine, well-preserved wooden cottages in a part of the National Open- Air Museum. Ms. Vojancová is an ethnologist and explains that this part of rural Czechia has always been economically weaker than the rest of the country. Closeness to nature and hard living conditions made people superstitious and rather suspicious of the official religious authority which, in this part of Europe, was represented mainly by the Catholic Church: Ilona Vojancová, photo: Honza Ptáček / Czech Radio “People were lukewarm in their faith. Christianity and Catholicism did find a positive response in some villages, there were quite a lot of Protestants and also some marginal religious groups, for example, Spiritism was quite widespread. In the folk customs, we find many traditions that are based on pre-Christian rituals. There were so-called Slavic carnivals, where the locals would march and dance through the villages wearing various masks, some of them animal masks. Those processions around Hlinsko are really unique and they were even inscribed on the UNESCO World Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2010. These carnival processions that survive to this day are full of pre-Christian ideas of influencing nature, the fertility of both the land and people. They show how strongly-rooted these pre-Christian traditions and ideas were and how long the local population kept them alive.”