As a child, I listened to my father’s stories of his boyhood in 1950s Czechoslovakia, stories of adventures taking place in the narrow cobblestoned streets of his hometown or near the fields and lakes of his grandparents’ village. I never met any of his family, in life or in photographs. And by the time I was born, the streets and buildings that came alive in his descriptions were gone. They were demolished along with eighty other towns in the area to make way for expanding coal mines. With no way to connect my father’s memories to physical locations or images, the stories I heard sounded like make-believe, no more real than the tales I read in my storybooks.

Last year, wishing to fill these voids in family history and geography, I returned to the north Bohemian city of Most, where both my father and I were born, and retraced the locations of former towns. Guided by historical maps, my father’s memories, and above all by the landscape itself, I searched for clues that would reveal what was no longer there. Frequently, my father joined me on my expeditions, and as we walked or traveled by local trains and buses, he shared stories from local and personal history and geography—guiding me at once through the present and the past. 

“I am not a poet, I am a city, ill-equipped to write about the affairs of people. I am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past, I can describe only what I see,” writes the Czech poet Pavel Brycz about the town of Most. A House with No Walls describes what I see and bears witness to the past with a combination of photographs, historical maps of the locations I sought,  hand-drawn routes of my walks, and text addressed to my father — a continuation of our conversations that were inspired by the landscape we explored.

“You were born in Most, a borderland city that got its name after the Czech word for bridge. Like a medieval Babylon, the town drew strangers from foreign places, merchants from Prague on the way to Germany, Germans seeking riches in one of the region’s mines, miners who stayed so long they forgot who else they could be. 

I was born in Most, a modern, sprawled-out city built to replace the old one that still hovers nearby like a phantom older brother. Our cities share little except their names. Yours was made of round cobblestones polished by thousands of steps scurrying across the broad town squares into dark alleyways, perhaps to disappear inside one of the many pubs where a fight was always about to break loose. “Even I would avoid those. What a terrible city,” you shake your head, but not without kindness. 

My Most is wide open, full of sharp edges, rectilinear streets, and concrete apartment blocks built higher and higher every decade yet falling short of the greatness the city promised. Only the thick smog that silently creeps in every morning before daybreak offers an illusion of privacy. “What a terrible city,” I think, but with a hint of amusement, the same kind we feel when we complain about our families and then defend them fiercely. And ultimately, that is what A House with No Walls is about: about the mixed emotions we harbor for our hometowns, for the trips back that even after decades away have the power to reveal something new, about the bridges that tie us to the place we once called home.”

Watch an excerpt from Most —the Most Beautiful Town, which shows the town of Most throughout the second half of the 20th century, including the demolition of the old town where my father was born and the development of the “New Most,” where I was born.