On Wednesday, new government guidelines came into force.

The government wants to keep farmer’s markets open, which is positive, however, there is a limit of 20 people on an area of 400 square meters. This is very hard to implement. This means that there can only be 20 people on a square of 20 x 20 meters, which means that every person should have an area of 4 x 5 meters, which is much larger than the recommended 2 meter distance (a square of 2 x 2 meters) used in supermarkets, for example.

These guidelines also make the organisers of farmer’s markets responsible for the amount of people at the market. Supermarkets do not have this responsibility. The amount of people is hard to monitor, since the markets are always in a public space, so there are shoppers as well as passers-by.

Even if we had one or two entrances to the markets, a large number of people would pile up around the entrances, which would either break social distancing rules, or there would be really long lines of people who are 4 meters away from each other.

Because of this, we decided to cancel the markets at Náplavka this Saturday. We are trying to communicate with the authorities and reach some sort of an agreement.

Yours, Archetyp group and Farmer’s Markets Náplavka