Vysočina has four new cultural monuments

Jihlava – The Vysočina Region has new cultural monuments. The Ministry of Culture has designated the blacksmith shop with a bell tower in Věžnice in the Havlíčkův Brod District, the former post station in Stonařov in the Jihlava Region, the community center in the village of Mnich in the Pelhřimov District, and a railway facility at the Rozsochy railway station in the Žďár Region as cultural heritage. Ilona Ampapová from the Telč office of the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) announced this today in a press release.

The blacksmith shop in Věžnice, dating from the second half of the 19th century, also served as a communal granary, which was later converted into a classroom and a teacher's apartment. Thanks to the belfry at the top of the roof, it also served as a bell tower. "The historical, architectural, and heritage value of the blacksmith shop in Věžnice lies in its age, the authenticity of the preserved elements, the original layout, its multi-layered architectural development, and also in the connection of artisan activity with the function of a rural bell tower," stated Miloslav Záškoda from the Telč office of the NPÚ. The building has a number of authentic features, including a blacksmith workshop with a brick forge.

The Stonařov post station was in operation from 1750 for another 170 years on the road that used to be the main transport link between Prague and Vienna. It is the last of 21 stations that lined the route over 300 kilometers long.

The community center in the village of Mnich was constructed between 1948 and 1950 according to a design by architect, painter, and scenographer Jiří Kroha, near the Memorial of Slavic Brotherhood, which commemorates the clash between the local population and partisans with the retreating German army at the end of World War II. The building has retained its intact mass to this day. The commission was directly sought by the communist Minister of Agriculture Július Ďuriš. Today, experts refer to the building’s architecture as distinctive. "The architecturally valuable and meticulously detailed representative structure of the village cultural house is developmentally, ideologically, and functionally linked to the nearby Memorial of Slavic Brotherhood, due to which most of the village and its building stock is included in the protective zone of the memorial," said Pavel Macků, the director of the NPÚ regional office in Telč.

The Rozsochy railway station area on the local line Žďár nad Sázavou - Tišnov is located about two kilometers north of the center of the village. The object, completed in 1904, which served as public toilets, a lamp house, a storage room, and a laundry at the time of its inception, has been declared a cultural monument. "The object enriches and complements the heritage fund of the Vysočina Region with an example of a modest yet high-quality architecture, as objects of railway construction are very rarely represented here," said Záškoda.

In addition to 3000 immovable cultural monuments, including 16 national cultural monuments, the Vysočina Region has three urban and three rural heritage reserves, 22 urban and five rural heritage zones, and one landscape heritage zone.

The NPÚ office in Telč, among other tasks, processes proposals for declaring items or objects as cultural monuments and subsequently participates in their registration.