In 1962, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was at its height. It was hard enough to get into Czechoslovakia (we had to wait three hours at the border), but getting out was where things got dicey. From a watchtower, a guard had seen me take pictures of the Iron Curtain, and asked me to open my camera at the border crossing. I lost the last 5 to 6 photographs on the film roll — but the guard was pretty clear that refusal to comply could mean losing way more than that.

This is one of the pictures I managed to save. The baroque houses on the main square of Telc, in southern Moravia, were miraculously spared by the wars and are today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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