2024-07-12 03:49:19
“I don’t have ghosts here. And if there are, they’re nice,” laughs Australian Jamison Young as he walks around the more than a hundred-year-old Zbiroh train station in the village of Karez near Prague. He bought the building ten years ago and is gradually renovating it together with volunteers. He revived four original apartments in it, which he rents out to tourists, and he himself has been living there for several years.
“For example, we repaired part of the roof and restored the original wood floors that were under two layers of linoleum,” says Jamison, 53, originally from Australia. “It is important for me to preserve the spirit of the place. To modify and reconstruct it in such a way that the original atmosphere, which is very unique here, is not lost,” he says of the station, which was operational from 1910 to 2012. “Unfortunately, the Czech Railways replaced some of the windows with plastic ones even before I bought the building,” he notes.
Jamison first came to the Czech Republic twenty years ago when, as a musician, he was looking for an opportunity to give unlimited concerts and make a living from music. After all, it was not so simple across the ocean.
“It’s hard to get gigs in Australia because the market is saturated with art from all over the place. Also, the number of live shows for original work is limited,” says the likeable foreigner, whose song Memory’s Child made it into the 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Another song, Top of the Hill, was in rotation on Australian alternative radio station Triple J.
He was looking for a bigger warehouse for furniture
In Prague and throughout the Czech Republic, he gradually started playing in teahouses and earned his living by singing songs that reflected what he was experiencing. The lover of Tom Waits lived for several years with a Czech woman who helped him get to important Czech festivals. “I also traveled in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland,” he adds.
At that time, he also started buying retro furniture and objects at Czech bazaars and flea markets, and subsequently sold them via the Aukro or Etsy portals to ordinary people and connoisseurs abroad. “I couldn’t imagine that as a foreigner I could make a living from my music in Europe, especially after the financial crisis in 2008,” he explains. “It was a natural progression, I was buying things that people were throwing away and I liked them,” he adds. And this is where the story of the train station in Kařez begins.
“I was storing furniture in Strossmayer Square in Prague. I was renting a part of the old spa in the Bubenche building and I needed more space. My parents sold their business in Australia, so I started looking for bigger spaces to store furniture around Prague,” describes Jamison before by the train station, where there are chairs and tables for sitting. He bought the building then for 965 thousand crowns.
Until then I was just writing songs
He puts the station together with his own hands and with the help of volunteers without municipal or state subsidies. “The biggest part of the renovation was removing all the debris. For example, parts of the old roof remained inside and there was a lot of concrete around the building. We also put new soil in front of the building by the dorms, and a lot of the work was landscaping and sanding the floors and doors,” Jamison describes as he climbs to the stairs that lead to one of the four apartments that he rents out through the Internet portals Booking and Airbnb.
“I’m mainly focused on improving the interior. It’s a lot of small important details,” says Jamison, who admits he’s also made a lot of mistakes. “I was just learning how to do something completely new. Up until then I was just writing songs,” recalls the Australian as he walks through an apartment in which time seems to have stopped. “I left the original communist posters on the wall. And here is an old counter… And here you can see chairs from Halabala,” he describes.
“Even when I restore furniture, I want to preserve its original form and spirit. If things work, they don’t have to look perfect. Just like your grandmother doesn’t need a facelift, a building doesn’t have to look perfect. It’s about preserving its character,” he explains his philosophy.
He wants to turn the station into a cultural center
During ten years in Kařez, he welcomed over 500 volunteers from all over the world. They contact him through the online volunteering platform Workaway, on which Jamison has an account. In exchange for three to four hours of work at the station, five days a week, he offers accommodation and food. He is currently assisted at the station by a 21-year-old art history student from the United States.
“I’ve had some very skilled people come to me to help me fix the roof, the electrical, or the floors. But mostly they’re students on vacation and travelers with limited skills,” Jamison describes.
Accommodation at the former Zbiroh train station. | Photo: Jakub Plíhal
In addition to the reconstruction of the original apartments, he would like to turn the station into a cultural center and organize concerts and festivals in it. He thus founded the non-profit organization Kulturní Stanice and two years ago hosted, for example, the Trať festival, a screening of short films for FAMU International students, and organized two alternative weddings. “Bands traveling through the Czech Republic to Poland who didn’t get a concert in Prague could play here. Fans could come by train from Prague. The Karez functional station is a 15-minute walk and only an hour away from the main train station in Prague,” he shares his idea.
Regions can flourish
“I would like to show how a great culture can be created even in the regions,” he says, adding that unfortunately it is not always easy in a traditional Czech village. “Unfortunately, the locals are not very open to such events,” he says briefly, adding that a cafe could also be built in the station. “But I’m afraid that there would be more complaints or unnecessary checks to harm me,” he says, alluding to the local mentality, which he says is not always open to new or unusual things.
When he’s not working on building improvements, Jamison likes to go swimming in the water reservoir in nearby Jablečn in the summer months. “The surroundings of Kařez are beautiful. It would be great to develop the project and show how regions can flourish and get money thanks to projects that are not just municipal,” the Australian wishes, showing the old fire truck he has parked in front of the station. “I used to have an ambulance, I used to transport furniture in it. Maybe I’ll turn that fire truck into a mobile cafe!” Laughs.
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