English Translation

22 km. After Schlan you reach the village by halving the St. Johann-Prag route or halved the angle at Ostro. The Ostro-Schlan route is 44 km long. Let's look now for this line Prague-Taus over Zebrak Castle, - which means nothing more than the direction of the main road to the Reich and 44 kilometers from Taus leads over the old Radina-Gauburg Alt-Pilsen, a correspondence over the second Zebraf place further south of Prague, so we come to Prachatitz, the end point of the "Golden Steiges", which rises from Passau over the mountains into the Bohemian cauldron. Now we remember the alleged builder of this "Golden Steiges", the mountain saint of the Bömerwald, the hermit Günther, and trace his past, which we have to roll up here to justify the following. The hermit Guenther was a Thuringian nobleman, an ancestor of the family of the Schwarzburg princes. After a trip to Rome, in 1008 in the monastery of Nieder-Alteich near Deggendorf on the Danube in Bavaria, he smoked the coat of arms with the robe of a lay brother of the Benedictines, - in Ninchnach he founds three cells and a little church of St. John the Baptist and from there continues to penetrate the mountains, stifling some spiritual cell, into which he retired at the time. In his cell near Guthwasser-Hartmanis he died in 1045. In 1618 a stone chapel was built there on the St. Günther-Berge, which is 1009 meters high, in place of his wooden cloisters. But the Duke Bretislav had his body brought to Prague and fasted it in the monastery of Breunow. Thus A. Frind reports in his "Church History of Bohemia" (I, p. 316, Prague 1864). We must be surprised when A. Bachmann mentions in his "History of Bohemia" (Goth 1899, Volume I, p. 198), that Heremit Günther had "despite the seclusion of the place within the wide virgin forests with the emperor as well as with the neighbouring princes" entertained many relationships. But we map first the places Nieder-Alteich, Ninchnach and the St. Günther-Berg, - see there! From Nieder-Alteich to Ninchnach there are exactly as many kilometers as from Ninchnach to St. Günther-Klausen, but in all there are fifty-five. And this measured beam in Nieder-Alteich runs straight over the Chlum-height in the middle of our zebrat-system at the monastery Breunow to Prague to the height of the castle and the old cult place. Accordingly, we probably have to think more of the hermit Günther - he obviously, as his state funeral in Breunov proves, has also been at the service of an earthly, very practical task, and the appreciation of his merits has made him find the last place where he has looked every day and from where he continues to span secret threads, as the context shows. The fact that one could see from St. Günther's mountain Prague is noticed by every guide of the Bömerwald. Taus and Prachatitz are also open to the eyes. If the people kept the building as the activity of the hermit in mind, it has noticed what it understands. No construction, however, succeeds without a plan,- the hermit's plan, if otherwise we are allowed to regard our zebrat system as a piece of his work, was enormous, gigantic, unmoderate, if one proceeds from village or small country points of view,--it corresponded to the wide space of the Bohemian boiler, which one almost overlooks in its entirety from his raised standpoint, and he broke through it in a significant place. And he was a piece of the great planning of the empire! 144