The Third of Three : comments » The Lost Memories

The Third of Three

~ Tuesday, June 2, 2026 ~

Three weeks. I have been in the Kokořínsko region for three weeks. I am writing this from a guesthouse in Mšeno that I have been using as a base since mid-May. The owner stopped asking when I was leaving after the second week.

The Kokořín landscape is sandstone — pale, soft, carved by water into valley systems that run between vertical walls of rock. The castle sits on a promontory above the main valley. The forest closes in quickly once you leave the marked trails. The caves are everywhere: shallow shelters, deep chambers, carved passages, natural fissures enlarged by hands that left no record of why. Most of them have no name. Most of them are not on any map I could find.

I had been looking for a specific mark. I had a sketch — pencil, two inches across, drawn in Pavel’s notebook in November 2022 with a single word beneath it: Kokořín. No path description. No cave name. Just the sketch and the place.

What Pavel found at Strahov

Before Pavel left his position at the Strahov Monastery Library in 2020, he had been cataloguing a bound volume of Jesuit mission reports from the Bohemian Province, covering the years 1680 to 1720. The reports document the systematic effort to reconvert hidden Protestant communities in rural Bohemia. Most entries are methodical and grim. One is not.

The report is dated 1697 and authored by a missionary identified in the volume’s index as Father Stanislav Mrázek. He describes a visit to the cave settlements in the Kokořínsko region, listing several Protestant households and their responses to his approach. Most were reconverted, fled, or simply absent. One entry is different. Pavel had transcribed it in the notebook in Latin and then translated it in the margin:

A family dwelling in the northern caves, present at this location since before the memory of any living person in the surrounding villages. They declined all ministrations. When pressed, they stated that their observance preceded the Reformation and was not subject to its disputes. They could not be moved by argument, nor did they display hostility. Left undisturbed at the instruction of Father Superior, with notation that their matter is not of our jurisdiction.

Not of our jurisdiction. Pavel underlined this phrase twice. He wrote beneath it: Věděli, co to je. Nechali je být. They knew what it was. They left them alone.

Pavel had cross-referenced the mission report with estate records from the Kokořín lordship and found the family’s traces going back to the years just after the Battle of White Mountain — the catastrophe of 1620, when Czech Protestantism was broken and its survivors scattered. Some fled abroad. Some fled into the forests. This family had been in Prague before 1620. What they were in Prague, the estate records did not say. What they brought with them into the caves, Father Mrázek chose not to record.

Three weeks

I worked systematically, sector by sector. I had the general area from Pavel’s notes and nothing more specific than that. Wrong caves, dead ends, chambers that had clearly been used by someone at some point and held nothing I was looking for. I kept a record. I will not publish it. It would not help anyone find what I found, and it would bore everyone who was not there.

I found the right cave on the twenty-second day.

[PLACEHOLDER — path description to be inserted: approach from [direction], trail junction at [landmark], [distance and terrain to cave entrance]. The cave entrance is [description]. A narrow opening in the sandstone face, [height] above the valley floor.]

I recognised it before I was fully inside. The mark was at the entrance, on the left wall of the approach, carved into the sandstone at shoulder height. I had been looking at Pavel’s sketch for three weeks. There was no question.

I am not going to describe the mark. If you have read what I have published about the keeper families — Bishop Kapalini’s article, the Voitl tomb, the last abbot of Sázava — you will understand what to look for when you are standing in front of it.

Inside

The cave goes back further than the entrance suggests. The sandstone is dry. The family who lived here after 1620 — for how long, I cannot say, the estate records lose them in the 1730s — left traces that are hard to distinguish from the marks left by any other occupation: soot on the upper walls, a ledge that has been used as a shelf, a hollow that may have held water. Nothing that announces itself as significant.

On the back wall, bolted into the stone at chest height, is a small metal plate. Dark, oxidised, the bolts rusted to brown. It has been there long enough to have acquired the look of permanence. On it, coordinates — machined letters, precise, the kind you use when you need to be found.

I recognised them before I finished reading. Pavel’s notebook, the section dated November 2022: a set of numbers jotted in the margin of the page describing the Protestant family, circled once, no label. I had not understood what they were until I was standing here looking at them on a wall.

Pavel had been in this cave. He had bolted that plate to the wall so he would not lose the location, and so that anyone who came after him looking for the same thing would find it.

He knew someone might come after him. He prepared for it.

Back to a cave I had already been in

The coordinates led me to a cave I had already visited. Early in the second week, when I was still working through every chamber I could find. I had been thorough, I thought. I had walked the full length of it, noted the chambers, found nothing that matched what I was looking for, and moved on.

I went back.

The cave sits above the valley floor — you climb to reach the entrance, using handholds cut into the rock face. Popular enough that there are hikers on good weather days. It had not seemed like the right kind of place. That was my mistake.

I spent several hours in it this time. The main chambers I had already seen. I pushed further, into the lower section where the clay deposits crowd the ceiling down and the passage narrows. At the very end, where most visitors do not go, where the ceiling forces you to crouch and the light from the entrance is gone, there is something in the floor and the wall that was once a grave. The stone has shifted over the centuries. Whatever was interred there is long gone. But the wall above it has not shifted, and what was carved into it has survived.

I found what I was looking for.

I photographed it from multiple angles. I am not publishing the photographs.

The symbol had been placed where it would survive: cut deep into sandstone, protected from weather, set at the end of a passage that most people who enter the cave never reach. The Protestant family who fled Prague after 1620 buried one of their own here, and carved the mark above the grave so that the stone would hold it long after the bones were gone. They knew only what all the keepers knew: the sign should remain, and one day someone would come who knew the right names.

Something I need to mention

On my fourth day in the area, a car was parked at the Truskavna road junction when I arrived in the morning and still there when I returned at dusk. A rental plate. I did not write down the number. I should have.

On two occasions while walking the forest trails above the valley, I had the impression of movement on the path behind me. Both times, nothing visible when I stopped. The forest has its own sounds. I am not claiming anything.

On the day I found the intermediate cave — the twenty-second day — I noticed a fresh cigarette end on the rock shelf outside the entrance. The cave is not on any trail map I could find. Someone had been there recently.

I have what I need. I have all three. I am going to spend the next few days working out what they mean together — what the key reads when you know where to place it.

I should probably not stay in Kokořín much longer.

The Second of Three — Sázava; the last abbot; the chain from Prokop
The First of Three — Prague; the Voitl tomb; the fish merchants who asked for the sign
Those Who Held the Sign — Bishop Kapalini on the keeper tradition
What Pavel Was Looking For — the notebook section on Prague; Pavel’s method