A childhood shaped by parklands and psychiatric wards
Growing up on the grounds of the Kroměříž psychiatric hospital offered a unique childhood defined by sprawling parklands, historic trees, and daily interactions with patients who acted as companions in games of football and hide-and-seek, Médium.cz reported. Having a childhood in a park oasis felt like a setting for a movie, recalling scenes from nearly fifty years ago when encountering patients at every step seemed completely normal to the children rather than strange, an experience that later helped in life during conflict negotiations by teaching the ability to speak with various people in their language, while the boys who lived in the beautiful garden with working parents formed lifelong bonds despite later moving to different streets, cities, and countries.
Inside the secure estate of the Kroměříž enclave
The third garden of Kroměříž—distinguished from the town’s Flower Garden and Castle Garden—served as an expansive playground for local boys nearly 50 years ago.
Football matches with resident peers and underground exploration
The best football players were alcoholics who constantly kicked the ball and organized foot tennis tournaments, watched by the kids while riding bikes or scooters. Kids spent their days navigating the asphalt loops with bottle caps weighted with dirt—a game called plechy invented by Šmíd, featuring chalk-marked boundaries, customized metal caps decorated with tiny stick flags, and played all day across the facility until fingers were scraped bloody—along with scouring paths and walkways across the park for treasures like buttons, colored glass, pegs, small coins, keys, chains, and rings to trade. They also explored extensive subterranean utility tunnels beneath individual hospital wards containing large thick pipes imagined secretly as escape routes for patients, crawling through spaces, ducking, or climbing ladders out of manholes, and scaled boundary fences built of concrete with narrow mossy paths, steel poles, and sharp spikes that frequently drew blood.
Brick ocean liners and rides with Jarda
Beyond sports, the young residents built a large ocean liner replica out of bricks sourced from a stack near the facility’s grassy football pitch. The construction project featured cabins, portholes, and a mast before workers eventually dismantled the structure to build a small groundskeeper’s cottage. Transportation across the expansive grounds often involved riding in red Robur trucks or newer blue Avia vehicles driven by a staff member named Jarda, known locally for cigarette magic tricks and storytelling. Additional pastimes included lying in bed wondering how Jarda managed to swap their legs and whether it was permanent or would revert the next day, while turtle doves cooed outside the windows during those boyhood musings about magic and garden life in the hospital.
