GLOSA / While Filip Turek is waiting for an appointment from the Castle so that he can explain to the president that he did not write the ugly posts on Facebook himself, in the meantime, an older video of a persistent applicant for a ministerial post is destroying social networks. In the podcast from May 2024, the honorary president of the Motorists introduces himself as a great reader and the owner of what is probably the largest private library in Central Europe.
“And I rely on my library, which is really huge,” he explains to his young, amazed hosts on their podcast. “For example, I have a room full of books! Or a garage full! I actually have hundreds, or rather many thousands, rather many tens of thousands of books! And I’m going to buy those authors who have meant something in history.”
Please note that this is a literal transcription, without the slightest distortion. Discussers on social networks are having fun and don’t know what to comment on first. Of course, most will be interested in the enormous number of volumes, corresponding to the number of books in a well-stocked district library. One user matter-of-factly notes that her husband’s library contains two thousand volumes and is twenty meters long. How long or tall would a library with tens of thousands of books be? For most skarohlíds, this is proof that Filip Turek does not have many books, even though he has no idea what volumes he is talking about.
Anyone who has seen the library of the world-famous Italian scholar, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco can get a certain idea. A documentary film, The Library of the World, was made about his library. In it, the author of the international bestseller The Name of the Rose says that when his library exceeded 30,000 volumes, he stopped counting them. And the extent of his library is truly unfathomable. Books where you look. But now it seems that he was shamed by a young man from the Czech Republic, who has so far become famous mainly for his disgusting things on Facebook.
Others note the video’s alleged location of the books in a garage—that is, a space where thousands of volumes would have to share space with Turk’s extensive collection of reportedly up to eighty cars. Others ironically ask if a garage full of books is actually a “cider room”. This is an allusion to one of Turk’s black structures that resembled a garage, although he referred to it as a cider house. Whatever it was, the building was built without valid permits in his garden in Dubč, outside Prague. There are also a considerable number of caricatures circulating on the Internet, which depict Filip Turk in the middle of the unsalable volumes of his political teacher Václav Klaus. The sharper ones, because of the Turk’s persistent penchant for the uplifted right, leave him standing over the long rows of Hitler’s Mein Kampf spread out on the shelves.
But the video continues: “I’m not really into it, I don’t know… I read Remarque – The Last Night in Lisbon – when I was thirteen. That’s a human story that’s interesting to me because it gives me an idea of what World War II was like. But if I want to know something about World War II, I read other authors. I read the geopolitical context, I read how it came about, and I go to the roots. So I go to geopolitics 19. century.”
Someone pedantically reminds that if he had read Erich Mario Remarque at thirteen, he might have known that the geopolitics of the 19th century did not have a direct influence on the emergence of the Second World War – although, of course, everything is related to everything. In the end, we can only ask together with the classics: And Mr. Turku, could we see the library?
Worth a look
