Olomouc is the city Prague forgot to overshadow. For centuries before the Habsburgs shifted their attention elsewhere it was the capital of Moravia, and the proof is on the Upper Square, where the Holy Trinity Column rises out of the cobbles like a stone wedding cake. It was built in the first half of the eighteenth century, roughly between 1716 and 1754, and it is among the largest Baroque sculpture groups in central Europe. The city raised it partly as thanks for surviving a plague, and UNESCO listed it in 2000. Walk round it and the saints keep appearing, each one a little more theatrical than the last.
The square is a morning place. Come before the cafe tables fill and the stone is almost gold; come at noon in July and it is a bright, noisy bowl of tourists and students from the old university. You park outside the historic core and walk in, since the centre is mostly pedestrian and the cobbles are unkind to a loaded bike. Olomouc has fuel on every approach road, and a city of a hundred thousand makes food an easy problem. If you want something local, the town is known for its pungent ripened cheese, tvarůžky, which is an acquired smell and an honest snack with beer.
The riding around Olomouc is a different mood. The city sits on the flat, fertile Haná plain along the Morava river, so the approach is straight and agricultural, with cornfields and long poplar-lined lanes. The fun begins when you head east into the Nízký Jeseník foothills or north toward the Jeseníky range, where the roads begin to roll and bend. Treat the square as the start or the end of a day rather than the middle of one, a place to put the bike down and turn into a pedestrian for an hour.
One more detail rewards the curious. The astronomical clock on the town hall was wrecked in the war and rebuilt in the 1950s in a socialist-realist style, so instead of apostles you get workers, athletes and a cheerful sense of civic duty. It looks nothing like the clock in Prague, and Olomouc is perfectly happy about that. Stand there at noon and watch the figures parade; it is odd, a little endearing, and a proper piece of twentieth-century history hiding in a Baroque square.