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Railway Traveller Eduard Bazika, or Travelling with Wife
Hlavačka, Milan
Ing. Eduard Bazika (1830–1914) was not a professional pilgrim, but a pilgrim by profession. As a graduate of the Prague Polytechnic, he specialized in railway construction all his life and as an engineer, first of all for the State railways, and from 1855 until his retirement in 1891, he traveled all his life for the private State Railway Company (StEG), or rather, before construction, he traveled the entrusted railways in the Bohemian and Moravian landscape. Even after retiring, he worked for the Land Committee of the Kingdom of Bohemia and its Railway Committee, and in this position he once again traveled to all corners of Bohemia to assess the profitability of future local railways. A peculiarity of his was that he always tried to combine his traveling duties with his family life, which resulted in his wife and children traveling with him to various estates and railway constructions. He did not leave aside longer, more demanding private trips with his wife to world exhibitions and historical monuments in Italy (accompanied by Jiří Stibral) or to inspect the newly completed Alpine railways. As a representative of the self-confident Czech middle class, who already had free time and financial resources (and, of course, an overhead ticket), he was able to combine the obligation to travel with a passion for travel and perceived traveling as a necessary part of the active lifestyle of a modern person.
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