Dolní Lutyně: the Taaffes, Saint Patrick and the Olše by the Polish border

On the Olše by the Polish border

Dolní Lutyně belongs to the Karviná District in the Moravian-Silesian Region and lies in historical Cieszyn Silesia. It borders Bohumín to the west, Orlová to the south, Dětmarovice to the east and Poland to the north. The municipality lies mostly on the left bank of the Olše, not far from where the river flows into the Oder³. The confluence itself, however, is already in Bohumín. The municipality consists of two cadastral areas, Dolní Lutyně and Věřňovice, together covering about 25 km².

The northern part of the municipality lies in the floodplain of the Olše. Here there are continuous fields of good farmland, criss-crossed by a dense network of drainage ditches. The southern part lies in rolling countryside, and the houses there are scattered³. The Lutyňka brook flows through the village and into the Olše. The larger bodies of water include a flooded sand pit, where sand and gravel are extracted, and the Farský Pond³.

According to the municipality, Dolní Lutyně has always been mainly agricultural, and most residents today commute to work in the surrounding towns and villages. The population has been growing in recent years, mainly thanks to people moving here³. The municipal coat of arms shows a blue shield with a golden sheaf of grain and two silver roses, which stand for Věřňovice, joined to the municipality.

Luthina, German and Polish Lutyně

The village is first recorded in 1305 as Luthina, in a register of tithes of the Bishopric of Wrocław³, a city now in Poland. It was probably founded by Benedictines from the monastery in Orlová during the colonisation of Upper Silesia at the end of the 13th century. It lay in the Duchy of Cieszyn, which became a fief of the Bohemian Crown in 1327. Originally it was one large village. Later it split into two settlements, German and Polish Lutyně. The former Polish Lutyně is today Lutyně, part of the town of Orlová.

The epithet “German” served to distinguish it from neighbouring Polish Lutyně. After the Second World War the village was given its present name, Dolní Lutyně, in Polish Lutynia Dolna. In 1365 Duke Przemysław of Cieszyn sold both Lutyněs to Paško of Barutswerde. Later, part of the village returned to the dukes of Cieszyn as part of the Fryštát estate, while another part remained a separate manor.

The parish Church of Saint John the Baptist is first documented in 1447. According to the register of the so-called Peter's Pence, a levy paid to the Pope, it failed to pay the required sum of six groschen that year⁴. In the 16th century the parish became Lutheran, because its noble owners, the Geraltowski family of Geraltowice and the Schlicks, remained Protestant. As late as 1652 the church was in the hands of a Lutheran preacher. Then, in the spring of 1654, on the orders of Emperor Ferdinand III, an armed convoy passed through the northern Cieszyn region, closing Protestant churches and expelling their ministers⁴.

The first documented Catholic parish priest, from 1671, was Pavel František Buchalik, who served here for 32 years. According to a visitation report from 1688, beer was brewed at the rectory. The same report describes the church as entirely wooden on masonry foundations. A wooden bell tower was joined to the church; the church, the bell tower and the mortuary all had thatched roofs, and the cemetery was surrounded by a timber fence⁴. At that time the priests lived in Dětmarovice and did not return to Lutyně until 1792, when a new rectory was built here⁴.

The Taaffes from Ireland

From 1700, Dolní Lutyně belonged to the Counts Taaffe³, a noble family from Ireland. That year it was inherited by Count Francis Taaffe, and his family then held it for almost a hundred years. A strong mark was left here by Nicholas Taaffe, a native of Ireland and a general of the imperial army, who later also bought Fryštát. He was the patron and founder of the new church⁴.

In April 1740 the old wooden church was dismantled. Count Taaffe gave its high altar to the church in the neighbouring Polish village of Godów and its pulpit to the chapel in Gołkowice⁴. The church's beams were reportedly used for the ceilings of the new château. Construction was soon interrupted by war: in December 1740 the Prussian king Frederick II invaded Silesia. The new church was not completed until 1746 and was solemnly blessed on 28 November⁴.

As a reminder of his old homeland, Nicholas Taaffe had statues of Ireland's patron, Saint Patrick, made. One, dating from 1749, stands by the front entrance to the cemetery in Dolní Lutyně⁵; the other is in Fryštát, now part of Karviná. The sandstone statue shows the saint as a bishop wearing a mitre. Around the pedestal is a later cast-iron railing².

The Taaffes built a Baroque château in Dolní Lutyně as their summer residence. In 1792 Dolní Lutyně was bought by the Larisch counts, the owners of Karviná. The Larisches then used the region's mineral wealth for its economic development³, but Dolní Lutyně remained a mainly agricultural village. After 1945 the estate gradually fell into decay. What survives of the former château complex is the old administrative building, a granary and a farm building³.

Church of Saint John the Baptist

The church stands on a hill in the centre of the village, surrounded by a cemetery that is still in use. Thirteen years after its completion, on 9 September 1759, it was consecrated by the Prince-Bishop of Wrocław, Philipp Gotthard von Schaffgotsch⁴. It has a single nave with two side chapels and a square tower on the west front, topped by a bell-shaped cupola. Above the roof of the nave is a small turret, known as a sanctus turret. The vaults of the nave, the choir loft – a raised gallery at the west end of the church – and the parapets of the oratories are decorated with rich stucco work featuring plant tendrils and rocailles, ornaments resembling shells. The municipality describes the church as a highly accomplished Baroque building with uniform interior furnishings from the time it was built².

Besides Saint Patrick, the cemetery grounds contain Baroque statues of Saint John of Nepomuk and Saint Anthony of Padua from the mid-18th century and a stone cross from the second half of the 19th century². According to the parish, the statue of John of Nepomuk is older than the present church. The Silesian draughtsman and engraver Friedrich Bernhard Werner had already recorded it in his view of the wooden church⁴.

According to the parish, a rare Renaissance bell from the end of the 15th or, more likely, the beginning of the 16th century hangs in the tower. During the First World War, parish priest Jindřich Dziekan saved it from being requisitioned. Three bells that the parish bought in 1924 from the J. Herold company in Chomutov were confiscated by the Nazi occupation authorities during the Second World War. New bells were cast in 1994 by the bell founder Josef Tkadlec in Halenkov in Moravian Wallachia. The largest, Saint Hedwig, weighs 250 kilograms; the other two bear the names of Saint Agnes of Bohemia and Saint John Sarkander⁴.

The church's appearance has changed over the centuries. In 1860 the rotten roof and the tower were rebuilt. In 1987 the tower was clad in copper sheet and the roof in sheet metal, which according to the parish changed the church's look considerably. In 1996 the main painting, the Baptism of Christ, was restored, together with the coats of arms of the founders, Count Taaffe and his wife Maria Anna von Spindler. In 2009 the drainage was improved and the slope stabilised⁴.

Ponds, a barn and a tram

At the beginning of the 19th century the Lutyně estate included, besides German Lutyně, the villages of Dětmarovice, Nová Ves, Skřečoň and Věřňovice, along with several manorial farms, a brewery, mills and many ponds. Until roughly the middle of the 19th century there was an extensive system of fishponds in the area of the municipality⁶. The largest pond, Nerad, covered more than 300 hectares⁷. The ponds have disappeared, and fields now lie in their place.

Of the rural buildings of that period, a log barn from the early 19th century has survived in the Nerad area near the sand pit. It is built of unhewn logs; one end is polygonal and the other has a triangular gable with a lean-to. On the long sides it has double doors, and part of the barn has a cellar². The barn is one of the so-called polygonal barns and is a protected cultural monument.

Around the turn of the 20th century, life in the village was strongly shaped by parish priest Jindřich Dziekan, who served here from 1888. He was behind the founding of the volunteer fire brigade in 1892, a farmers' association, the school in Zbytky in 1905 and a nursery school⁴. In the Austrian census of 1910, the vast majority of the inhabitants gave Polish as their “language of everyday communication”, that is, the language they normally spoke. In 1913 the Silesian Provincial Railways began operating an electric narrow-gauge railway, known locally as the tram, from Karviná via Orlová to German Lutyně and from German Lutyně to Bohumín⁸.

The twentieth century

After the First World War, Czechoslovakia and Poland disputed the Cieszyn region. When the region was divided in 1920, the village, together with Věřňovice, went to Czechoslovakia. In October 1938, after Munich, Poland annexed the village, and after Poland's defeat in 1939 it became part of the German Reich. Dolní Lutyně and Věřňovice were liberated by the Soviet army on 1 May 1945⁵.

The railway stop lies near the hamlet of Nerad, on the line from Bohumín to Dětmarovice. Since the 1960s long-distance trains to Český Těšín and Slovakia have also used this line, but they pass through the stop without stopping. The tram ran to Dolní Lutyně until January 1971. That month, because the bridge over the railway in Skřečoň was in a dangerous condition, service between the Bohumín depot and Dolní Lutyně was stopped⁸.

Both world wars are commemorated by memorials. Near the pharmacy stands a sandstone sculpture group from 1934 showing two soldiers lifting a wounded comrade. Set into the pedestal is a plaque with the names of those who fell in the First World War. The years 1938–1945 are recalled by a memorial of sandstone boulders with a bowl for an eternal flame, which now stands by the cemetery⁵.

Věřňovice

Věřňovice, the northern part of the municipality on the Olše, was originally called Wernersdorf, meaning Werner's village. In 1305 it was recorded in Latin as Wernheri villa, and the present name arose by shortening the Czech form Věřněřovice. In Polish it is called Wierzniowice. Until 1975 it was a separate municipality. Across the border lies the Polish village of Gorzyczki. Border checks at the crossings near Věřňovice ended when the Czech Republic and Poland joined the Schengen Area in December 2007.

At a fork by the road to the bridge over the Olše stands the Chapel of Saint Isidore. First, after 1800, a bell tower was built here, because the people of Věřňovice had to go all the way to German Lutyně for church. The chapel itself was built around 1869–1873. In front of it stands a polychrome sandstone statue of Saint John of Nepomuk, a piece of folk stonemasonry from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries².

In April 2024 a bell almost 250 years old returned to the chapel. It was cast in 1779 in the workshop of Franz Stanke in Opava. At the beginning of the Second World War the Nazis took it away, and for decades it rang in the Church of Saint George in Hemmingen, Germany⁹. It came back as part of the Peace Bells for Europe project, and the parish priest dedicated the Sunday service on 14 April 2024 to its return. In Hemmingen a newly cast bell with the same tone now rings in its place⁹.

In a field by the road to the border crossing stands a grave from the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. A cast-iron cross with a figure of Christ is set into a Baroque sandstone base. It is surrounded by an ornamental wrought-iron railing with flowers, rosettes and pine cones, the work of the Cieszyn blacksmith Wybranietz².

The Olše and protected nature

The Olše flows through the northern part of the municipality, meandering as it goes³. Věřňovice Nature Monument, declared in 1989, protects a distinct river terrace of the Olše, a raised step above the river, with almost natural floodplain forest and protected species. According to the regional authority, it has an abundant population of snowdrops that is unique in the district. Badgers live in the woods, and the 40 species of songbirds nesting here include the golden oriole and the red-backed shrike¹⁰.

Since 2013 the second nature monument has been Niva Olše-Věřňovice. It consists of three old lines of trees, mostly on the remains of the embankments of former ponds. The old oaks are home to a rare beetle, the hermit beetle⁷. Because of it and the yellow-bellied toad, the Olše floodplain around Věřňovice, with its former meanders, oxbows and floodplain forest, is a Site of Community Importance in the Natura 2000 network⁶. The Heřmanský stav – Odra – Poolší Bird Area also extends into the cadastral areas of Dolní Lutyně and Věřňovice. The government designated it in 2007, and the protected species are the little bittern, the common kingfisher and the bluethroat¹¹.

Dolní Lutyně today

The D1 motorway runs through the north of the municipality. The Czech Road and Motorway Directorate opened the section from Bohumín to the state border at the end of November 2012. Near Věřňovice it connects to the Polish A1 motorway, which is planned to run all the way to the Baltic Sea¹². The road from Bohumín to Karviná also passes through the village. Dolní Lutyně falls within the administrative district of the municipality with extended powers of Bohumín.

The Polish minority has its own tradition in the village³. In the 2021 census, 187 residents declared Polish nationality¹³. Besides the Alois Jirásek Primary and Nursery School, there is also a primary and nursery school with Polish as the language of instruction¹⁴. Both Dolní Lutyně and Věřňovice have local branches of the Polish Cultural and Educational Union and of the Sokol sports club. The village also has two volunteer fire brigades, Scouts and Polish harcerze (Polish Scouts)¹⁵.

In March 2024 the government adopted a resolution on preparing a strategic industrial park on the fields between Nerad and Věřňovice, known as the gigafactory. In the same month the association Zachovejme Poolší (Let's Preserve Poolší) was founded in the village, and a local referendum was held in June 2024¹⁶. According to information from the municipality dated January 2026, the region is preparing an amendment to its spatial development principles, its main spatial planning document, which would designate an area of up to 280 hectares in the municipality for production and storage. The municipality submitted comments on it, and a public hearing took place in January 2026¹⁶.

Tadeusz Krzystek, a mechanic with the Polish Air Force in Great Britain during the war, was born in Dolní Lutyně. With his wife Anna he later compiled a list of members of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain from 1940 to 1947, known as the Krzystek List (Lista Krzystka). The radio journalist and writer Otylia Toboła, who headed the Polish desk of Czech Radio Ostrava until 2012, was born in Věřňovice.