Stanislav Liška

If people in Kubra know someone, it’s definitely the Glory Liška. He’s Stanislav, but the landlord doesn’t tell him otherwise. If it is said that youth is a state of the soul and is not related to age, then it is true of glory. When we were waiting for him in front of the house, he rode his bike like a teenager who just forgot something at home and rushed to see the boys on the field. Okay, I’m overreacting, but the truth is, Mr Stanislav really had a cutting step and positive energy just snapped out of him. He warmly invited us in, into his kingdom of hunting trophies, images, and calendars.

Glory to himself, and to the end also to me, he listened to the appreciation from his lifelong fellow pilgrim and friend and commented only briefly: “This is the bomb!”

Then he talked, and he wasn’t more attentive to the listeners than we were, because whether he was talking about building May, about catching trout and lobsters, about the former form of the Weight at Sihot, about folklore or about beloved Kubra, everything was interesting. Moreover, he, originally an economist, has the special gift that good storytellers have. He can give instigatingly and poeticly many facts without boring the listener without using platitudes.

He talked about everything with unprecedented and contagious enthusiasm. For example, about the topics of his calendars he publishes each year. They are always thematically focused on some area of social life of the native village and charged with historical photos. It seeks them throughout the village with names and stories attached to them, convinced that not only bread is man alive. ♦ I like it when there’s a date in the photo and you know who’s on it. If I have a chance, I’ll write it down in a photo from the other side, and he says.

The photos collected are divided into albums according to the topics and then processed with attractive text in the form of a calendar. From one of them he read us: “Rudo dances, the earth does not touch. The ring of the star trill, he sings. Breath is secret. Spark in voice, eye, movement. Wings pull high, high. Rudo with them. Clive melody fills my baby’s soul, penetrates all of me and although the fascists already win in the street, I stand like nailed.

He devoted himself famously to the amateur theater for a while, but as the example from the calendar itself suggests, he enchanted him with folklore. He even led local folklore for nearly fifty years. So far, no May construction can be done without him. It was once said that young men built them for the chosen girls, only in gardens. ♦ When they ran out of birch, young men began building together one big May, spruce. That’s what a grandmother who was born in 1880 told me and remembered the times he said. In a fondness for folklore, they fell into a note with their wife Anička, with whom they have been together for sixty-two years.

To remember Mr Liška’s greatest passion, we must mention hunting. The ubiquitous trophies and paintings with hunting themes spoke in clear language about the hobby he is still devoted to in his 87 years. It must be pretty interesting when the old fox shoots a dick.