MOST OR BUST!” the conductors would tell him at the train station.
We, Translators
Until the 15th century, in which an enormous irrigation project began, a vast swamp known as Komořanské jezero (Komoransky Lake) covered nearly the entire area of the Bohemian city of Most, in what is now the northwestern Czech Republic. A system of bridges facilitated crossing into Saxonia, the neighboring duchy of a Holy Roman Empire then just beginning the reform of its millennium-long Reich, in what is now easternmost Germany. More than metaphorically obvious, then, the Czech word most means — physically — “bridge.”
Brüx was its name in German, an ancient form of the modern Brücke, and its earliest settlement was to become known by the name of one of its more prominent crossings, the Latinate-Slavonic Gnevin Pons, or Gneva’s (Hněva’s) bridge. The nearby mountain was also named after this early, and largely unknown, landlord Gneva (Gneva is a Russified spelling, Hněva its Czech corollary), and a castle later built thereupon, thus expanding the city’s purview beyond its geological basin. This castle, Most’s most significant settlement, was largely destroyed by its own citizens toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War to prevent it from falling into the hands of the occupying Swedes. Most has a unique history of being decimated by its own citizens.
Since time immemorial, the area of and around Most has been one of the most densely populated in all of Central Europe — first settled by the Celts, then by various Germanic tribes, and in the sixth century by the Slavs, ancestors of the Czech nation. When this area was drained, Most went from being a minor provincial settlement to the largest imperial city in northwestern Bohemia, under the jurisdiction of the Přemyslids, the dynasty of the first Czech kings that ruled in Prague. One of that lineage’s most notable descendants, and a passing persona in the volume at hand, was Agnes Přemyslid, daughter of the King of Bohemia; she founded the first hospital in all of Bohemia, in Prague, in addition to Most’s convent of the Order of St. Clara, whose namesake (1193–1253) had been a correspondent and close friend. Before the 15th century and the discovery of brown coal, which is known as lignite — a fuel of the lowest quality that when burned produces only about half as much heat as do other, blacker, bituminous coals — tin, iron, copper and silver were mined in the vicinity as principal occupation, though inhabitants of the city also worked in light manufacture; vineyards around Hněvín were tended by the monks of the city’s cloister.
Most’s decline — which continues to this day — began in earnest with the wHabsburgs, firstly with their rapacity for infrastructure, especially with regard to the obtainment of natural resources, and secondly with the imperial assertion of their own values, epitomized by an institutionalized oppression of Protestantism. This decline is adumbrated by the author of this book, as he has the “I” of his city speak about Blaník being “exchanged” for Bílá hora. Blaník is a mountain southeast of Prague where, according to legend, knights repose in a sort of perpetual slumber, only to rouse and ride out in a time of need to save the Czech nation from impending destruction. Bílá hora (White Mountain) was the site of the 17th-century Habsburg victory over the Czech Estates, resulting in a renewed dark ages in which Czech culture was largely suppressed. Century-long construction began on the late-Gothic Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, Most’s most notable historic landmark (here often called the “Deacon’s Church”), two years after the city suffered its greatest fire in 1515. Built by the German architect Jacob Heilmann on the site of an earlier Gothic and Romanesque church, it was this structure that was famously relocated by a distance of over eight-hundred meters from its original foundations during the incredible decade-long destruction of Most, which was begun in the mid-1960s to facilitate the pursuit of the great quantity of lignite to be found beneath the Old Town. This church — foreign-built, foreign-Catholic — was one of the only buildings that survived the systematic destruction of Old Most. It was moved to stand next to Most’s most venerable set of structures, creating a dismal sort of historic district: a complex of chapel and hospital, whose oldest f oundations date from the 13th century, under the patronage of sv. Duch — the Holy Spirit.
At the time of the relocation of the church, many of its relics and other Baroque valuables were transferred to a small chapel in the nearby village of Vtelno, famous for the late 19th-century flowering of its apple orchards. The region between Vtelno and Most was soon filled, populated post-industrially, with an oppressive orchard of gas stations, warehouses and shopping centers that grew, and soon wilted, amid the pre-fabricated concrete apartment blocks (paneláky) that were the glory of communist architecture. By contrast, the attractive villas of the Zahražany quarter (the location of the area known as “Na Špačkárně” — “At the Starling House”), situated at the foot of Hněvín, were constructed at the beginning of last century. At that European fin de siècle, this city, too, was in its own, if modest, cultural heyday. German money financed numerous structures in the styles of the pseudo-Renaissance, Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts. These are now among the oldest surviving buildings in Most, rendering the city — architecturally, as well in many other respects — one of the “newest” cities in all of Bohemia. Moravia’s Brno can boast centuries-old churches and castles. “Golden” Prague hosts its “hundred spires” and the ruins of antiquity. In contrast, and the church complex aside, Most has a handful of faded buildings dating from around the year 1900, and then mile after mile of gray concrete.
As late as 1900, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Most were still of Germanic origin. However, with the extension of the train track from Ústí nad Labem to Chomutov, which served to unite Most’s mines with greater Bohemia, the Czech population of the city grew steadily, eventually comprising more than one quarter of Most’s inhabitants by the time of the First World War. By then, large German corporations had long appeared on the scene and had succeeded in converting the mining process from the underground “canary-in-a-cage” style to modern open-cutting, which much like quarrying requires enormous holes to be created in the surface of the earth. The owners and management were German, the machinery was German, but the workers were predominantly Czech, having come as west as their borders allowed to essentially destroy their own city in the enrichment of foreigners. It was at this time, leading up to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, that Most began to be redeveloped from a so-called “boom” town of individualistic miners (think of the Yukon, or Klondike) into a major incorporated mining center. Heavy industry was its governance, and money, little of which became reinvested in Most, was its law.
In 1938, the Germans broke ground in nearby Záluží, situated between Most and Litvínov — the hometown of hockey idols Hlinka, Lang, Ručinský, Svoboda, and Šlégr — and built a chemical plant as part of the multinational Hermann Goering Werke to produce gas from the mined lignite; tens of thousands of slave laborers were worked there day and night. In 1945, nearly all the German citizens of Most were expelled under the infamous Beneš Decrees, and Czechs from all over the country began to arrive en masse, many forcibly resettled there for work purposes after 1948 by the new communist government (as referenced in this volume in “An Appearance, Manly”); they moved into the abandoned houses of Old Most, the villas in Zahražany, and the dilapidated neighboring tenements. Today, this plant manufactures oil, and pollutes the air for miles in every direction, depending on wind.