This Czech bike brand made an amazing frame inspired by Franz Kafka

On Tuesday, the bike brand Festka launched a pretty cool new bike, made in collobartion with illustrator Michal Bačák, inspired by motifs of author Franz Kafka.

The project began when a client from New York requested a Kafka-themed bike. Immediately staff at Festka were intrigued, given Kafka’s Czech background.

“For a company so intrinsically linked with Prague as was Kafka, it made perfect sense,” Tom Hnida, the company’s art director, said.

The client’s two favourite Kafka stories were the Hunger Artist and The Emperor’s Message, which served as the starting point for design.

Hnida approached the illustrator Michal Bačák who worked with Festka in 2019 and 2020 on two hugely successful projects.

“Everything flows and no man ever enters the same river twice. This bike, the third one I have illustrated for Festka, was the biggest challenge of them all. From the moment Tom came to my studio and told me what the customer wanted, the river swelled to a flood of biblical proportions,” Bačák said. “It wasn’t so much the technique or colour scheme but the content. Me transferring bits from Kafka’s unique universe onto a bicycle! I don’t think I could say I came to understand fully this literary genius, but I believe I got closer to him through reinterpreting, in my own way, several truly Kafkaesque scenes from his work,” Bačák said.

The model Lyndon chose for this project is a custom geometry Festka Scalatore built with a wireless SRAM Red eTap groupset, an ENVE cockpit, and ENVE SES wheels.

To learn more you can check out Festka.com