In the submitted reflection essay, I contemplate the rural environment in the region of Moravian Záhoří from the point of view of an ethnologist. The significant value of this regions concerns the landscape character of this agricultural region in a low hilly area adjacent to the western Carpathians and only rarely disturbed by modern industrial elements. The natural communication network with a plethora of small sacral monuments interconnects the individual villages, which have not undergone an essential development. If new residential districts are built at the outskirts
of the villages, at least the village core preserves some traditional values. In most locations in the region we can perceive the surviving urbanism of village greens and neighbouring farmsteads which have kept their volume corresponding to the first half of the 20th century. The farmsteads built from fired materials in large dimensions suffice without significant changes even today and they even exceed spatial demands in some cases. Therefore some parts of houses remain lifeless whereby the use of farm wings and buildings themselves seems to be a big problem. We encounter surviving architectural details of facades only in a few cases because these were wiped by younger reconstructions, or covered by modern layers. In spite of all modernization steps which were made during the 20th century and which continue at present as well, we can consider the region of Moravian Záhoří to be an exceptional region with preserved landscape and urban elements, which would be worthy a bigger tourist but especially professional interest of different disciplines. The primary precondition in this context is to find a relation to positive values surviving from the past on the side of inhabitants and representatives of particular villages.
Příspěvek je věnován funkci raně středověkého centra na Pohansku u Břeclavi. Stručně je v něm charakterizována pramenná báze a stav poznání této lokality. Objevy učiněné na Pohansku jsou uvedeny do širších souvislostí a komparovány s podobnými lokalitami z jiných částí raně středověké Evropy. Lokalita je interpretována jako munitio, emporium i palatium moravských raně středověkých panovníků. Centrum hrálo důležitou roli v procesu „mobilizace“ bohatství a při kontrole teritoria. Jeho vznik souvisí s tzv. cyklickým náčelnictvím. and This article considers the function of the Early Medieval centre at Pohansko near Břeclav. The source base and current state of knowledge regarding the site are briefly characterised. Discoveries made at Pohansko are presented in their broader context, and compared to similar sites elsewhere in Early Medieval Europe. The site is interpreted as a munitio, emporium and palatium of the Moravian Early Medieval rulers. It played an important role in the ‘mobilisation’ of wealth and in the control of territory. Its origin is related to a so-called cyclical chiefdom.
Using the planning in Prague between the 1960s and 1980s as an example, the article deals with the transformation of the concept of a socialist city among urbanists and architects. The author describes how the generation of the inter-war modernist avant-garde inspired by works of Karel Teige (1900-1951) started reasserting itself again after Khrushchevʼs speech on architecture in 1954. Its infl uential member, Jiří Voženílek (1909-1986), became the Chief Architect of Prague. It was under his leadership that the General Plan of the Capital City of Prague was drafted at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The author analyzes the plan as an example of the socialist modernism and urbanistic optimism of its creators who believed that, subject to a correct application of principles of inter-war avant-garde architecture, an urbanistic transformation might become the base of a social transformation of socialism. The plan envisaged sacrifi cing not only all residential quarters of Greater Prague built at the turn of the century, but also the very principle of a traditional city with a network of living streets which socialist urbanists saw as an incarnation of all evils that the development of towns and cities had thitherto been governed by: mixing of functions, too high density of population, lack of light and air. New housing projects comprising high-rise prefab residential buildings set in greenery were to become the opposite of traditional streets. The article explains how criticism of the housing schemes, the chief representative of which was urbanist Jiří Hrůza (1925-2012), had been growing stronger since as early as the mid-1960s. Infl uenced by works of US journalist and urbanistic activist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), he presented a comprehensive critique of socialist modernism and questioned they very principle of urban planning as a tool of social transformation. The intellectual skepticism was soon thereafter refl ected in urban planning practices in Prague; they abandoned the modernistic principle of zoning and acknowledged the value (fi rst urbanistic, later architectural) of traditional quarters. In the end of the article, the author analyzes how the urbanistic turning point was confronted with building industry practices and political preferences demanding rapid construction of fl ats and apartments. and Překlad: Blanka Medková
The aim of the study is to evaluate the circumstances revealed by the archaeological study of extinct medieval villages whose ground plans were staked out systematically, using some of the standard schemes of the times: that is, the possible direct proportion of the area, farmed by the individual homesteads, and the expanse of the plot of yards of these homesteads, or rather the width of the yards with respect to the village square. For the initial phase of the analysis were used the available early textual and cartographical sources from areas where such research was made possible by the earlier interconnecting of information about the history of settlement that allow for studying the older stages of social structure of the communities.