Havířov: villages of the Cieszyn region, sorela and a town from 1955

A town between Ostrava and Těšín

Havířov is a statutory city in the Karviná District of the Moravian-Silesian Region. It lies on the southern edge of the Ostrava-Karviná industrial area, roughly halfway between Ostrava and Český Těšín, in the foothills of the Beskids. To the north it borders the mining centres of Petřvald, Orlová and Karviná, and to the west Šenov and Václavovice. It has been a statutory city since 1990³.

The town covers about 32 km² and is made up of eight districts: Město, Šumbark, Podlesí, Bludovice, Životice, Prostřední Suchá, Dolní Suchá and Dolní Datyně. Most people live in Město, Šumbark and Podlesí. The smallest are Dolní Suchá, with just over a thousand inhabitants, and Dolní Datyně, with just under seven hundred¹.

The terrain is gently rolling upland at an altitude of roughly 240 to 300 metres. The Lučina river flows through the southern part and the small Sušanka river along the northern edge. In the north of the town, coal mining has left behind ground subsidence and settling ponds. The ponds along the Sušanka were once used to settle coal sludge. For recreation, people go to the nearby Žermanice and Těrlicko reservoirs, which lie outside the town. The Žermanice reservoir on the Lučina has been in operation since 1958³.

Villages older than the town

Havířov grew up on the land of older villages: Šumbark, Dolní Bludovice, Dolní and Prostřední Suchá, Životice, Dolní Datyně and part of Šenov. They belonged to the Duchy of Cieszyn, a fief of the Bohemian Crown, and from 1526 to the Habsburg Monarchy. Šenov and Horní and Dolní Suchá appear in the records around 1305, and Bludovice is reliably documented in 1335. Šumbark is mentioned in the first half of the 15th century. In the mid-16th century it was referred to as a town, but there is no evidence that it actually exercised town rights³.

All the villages were agricultural. The turning point came from the mid-19th century, when the mines in the area provided work for local people and attracted newcomers. According to tradition, coal in Prostřední Suchá was found by a farmer who wanted to warm himself in his field: he stacked black stones from the surface around his fire, and they began to burn. In the 16th century Suchá embraced the Reformation. In 1654 a religious commission closed the local church to the Lutherans, and the Lutheran preacher Jan Pragenus then hid for ten years at the chateau in Dolní Suchá⁴.

According to the town's website, the original wooden parish Church of Saint Margaret in Bludovice was built sometime between 1305 and 1335. Right next to it, a masonry single-nave church in the late Baroque style was built between 1786 and 1792. The largest of today's bells was cast as early as 1490, still for the wooden church⁵. A short distance away stands the Lutheran church. After Emperor Joseph II's Patent of Toleration of 1781, it became the centre of religious life for Lutherans from a wide area⁴. It was built between 1782 and 1784 and got its tower with a lantern only in 1850–1852. Above the entrance is a Polish biblical inscription, “Nic tu nie jest innego, jedno dom Boży a tu brama niebieska”⁶. Inside, galleries run along both sides of the nave, and the flat ceiling is covered with illusionistic painting⁵.

Šumbark Chateau and Kotula's Wooden Cottage

At the entrance to Havířov, on the boundary between Šumbark and Město, stands Šumbark Chateau. On its site there was once a fortified manor, documented in writing in 1588. It was later replaced by a Baroque chateau, which burned down in 1823 and was rebuilt in the Empire style. From 1845 it no longer served as a manorial residence but as the administrative building of an estate. Under various administrators it then gradually fell into disrepair. In 1997 the town had it completely renovated, and in January 1998 it opened the chateau to the public. Today it houses a hotel, a restaurant and a ceremonial hall, which also serves as a small concert hall⁵.

Opposite the chateau stands the Church of Saint Anne, built between 1841 and 1845, which together with the chateau forms a landmark at the entrance to the town. It replaced an older wooden church that burned down in the fire of 1823. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s the church was rebuilt and enlarged. Of the original building, only the low octagonal tower has survived unchanged⁵⁶.

In Podlesí stands Kotula's Wooden Cottage, a log cottage from 1781 with a thatched roof. The Museum of the Těšín Region, which manages it, counts it among the oldest log-built folk buildings in the Cieszyn region⁷. It recalls the original village buildings on the territory of today's Havířov. The exhibition shows how people lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, along with pottery from the Bludovice potters' workshops, which became famous for jugs with a white glaze and colourful floral decoration⁵. The homestead also includes a much younger brick barn with a cowshed and a small windmill, known here as a viatrak⁷.

A new town for miners

After the Second World War, the mines and ironworks of the Ostrava region needed a large workforce, and the decisive draw was a flat. The new housing estate was therefore built between Šumbark and Dolní Bludovice, outside the area threatened by mining subsidence and in municipalities without a single industrial plant³. Building “on a greenfield site” is, however, only a figure of speech. Along today's Main Avenue, which follows the old Imperial Road, there were houses, shops and inns, and they had to make way for the new town⁸.

The first houses went up on the boundary between Šenov and Šumbark at the end of the 1940s, and the first 96 flats were completed in 1949. From 1952 the focus of construction shifted to Dolní Bludovice, where the core of the future town took shape, and by 1953 a total of 1,715 flats had been built³. In December 1953 the Pavka Korchagin miners' training school opened; its building now houses the municipal authority⁹.

The construction site straddled three districts, and the individual parts of the housing estate were administered by Šenov, Šumbark and Dolní Bludovice. An independent town was therefore created as of 4 December 1955 by separating 230 hectares from Dolní Bludovice, 61 from Šenov and 53 from Šumbark. It received its founding charter on 18 December in the Radost cinema. At the beginning of 1956 it had 16,640 inhabitants³.

The name came from a public competition to which people sent 2,350 proposals². They included Bezručov, Čurdov, Faratín, Lidobudovatelov, Budosociokolektivov, Rudohvězdov, Gottwaldův Horníkov, Zápotockýgrad, Všemírov, Šťastnov and Stalin³. The committee put Šachtín in first place, Havířov second and Cingrov third. The Ministry of the Interior, however, preferred Havířov, and the council of the regional national committee confirmed the name on 27 September 1955². Havíř is Czech for a miner; in Polish the town is called Hawierzów.

The coat of arms was designed by the heraldist Jiří Louda. The council of the municipal national committee approved it on 1 November 1967, and the committee for municipal coats of arms at the Archive Administration on 18 December 1969. The round-based shield is divided wavy three times into blue and silver stripes. In the blue chief there is a golden rose between two pairs of crossed golden miners' hammers¹⁰. In 1992 Louda also designed the present form of the state coat of arms of the Czech Republic¹¹.

Sorela

The town's core from the 1950s is built in the style of Socialist Realism, known for short as sorela. According to the town's website, the architects did not want to build in the “bourgeois” pre-war style and took their inspiration from the Czech Renaissance. That is why the houses have cornices, gables, pinnacles and sgraffiti⁵. Many facades show scenes of workers and farmers with their tools.

The most typical building of Havířov's sorela is the former Radost cinema. The architect Vladimír Meduna used elements of the South Bohemian Renaissance on it, inspired by Telč, Písek and České Budějovice⁵. The cinema opened on 8 April 1956³, and films were shown there until the 1990s. The building has been a cultural monument since 2003, and after renovation it houses a cultural centre with a gallery, a café and a hall⁶.

Main Avenue became the town's main axis, and the Petr Bezruč House of Culture opened on it in 1961⁵. Neither a town hall on Republic Square nor a theatre was ever built⁸, and the municipal authority stayed in the former training school. Since 1992 the oldest part of the town has been protected as the protective zone of the 1950s residential complex¹², named Sorela. It stretches from the Stromovka forest park to the meanders of the Lučina, and from the chateau and the Church of Saint Anne to the Centrum cinema. The town describes it as a complex “much more humane than the later prefabricated housing”⁵.

The town grows

In 1960 Šumbark, Dolní Bludovice, Životice and Dolní Suchá were joined to Havířov. From 1962 building was done with prefabricated panels, and in the second half of the 1960s and in the 1970s the Podlesí housing estate went up. In 1970 the town had over 81,000 inhabitants and 24,465 flats³. It reached its largest area, 41.95 km², in the mid-1970s, after Dolní Datyně and Horní Suchá were joined to it. Horní Suchá became independent again in 1990³. Havířov had the most people in the mid-1980s, over 92,000 permanent residents³. Since then the number has been falling, and at the beginning of 2026 around 67,000 people lived in the town¹.

In 1969 a new railway station was completed in the so-called Brussels style, which followed on from the success of the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels. The building was designed by the architect Josef Hrejsemnou, and the west wall of the hall is decorated with a large glass mosaic based on a design by Vladimír Kopecký¹³. From 2011 Czech Railways and the town pushed for the building to be demolished and a smaller terminal to be built¹³. Architects and local residents opposed this¹⁴. The building remained, and the renovation of the station building was completed in 2022³.

The Dukla Mine

From the start, Havířov was mainly a residential town, and a large share of its people commuted to work in the mines and ironworks in the area³. Only one mine lay on the town's present territory, in Dolní Suchá. Its shaft bore the name of Emperor Franz Joseph I¹²; after the creation of Czechoslovakia the mine was called the Suchá Mine, and in 1949 it was renamed the Dukla Mine. Its history ran from 1907 to 2007³.

On 7 July 1961 a fire broke out in the mine, killing 108 miners³. It started at the drive station of a belt conveyor, which had most likely started up by accident and was running empty¹⁵¹⁶. Workers smelled burning rubber, but the report reached the dispatcher late, and the people in the endangered section were not withdrawn in time. At that time 338 people were working in the affected section¹⁶. The miners suffocated or were poisoned by the fumes from the fire¹⁵. In 2018 the director David Ondříček depicted the tragedy in the television film Dukla 61¹⁷.

Mining left its mark above all on Suchá. The Lutheran church in Prostřední Suchá, rebuilt in 1937 from an older chapel, sank together with its cemetery and the surrounding ground by more than 17 metres⁴. The last tub of coal came up from Dukla on 10 January 2007⁹. A year later, on 19 June 2008, the almost hundred-metre skip headframe¹⁸ from 1983 was demolished with explosives. According to the head of the blasting operation, it was the first demolition of a structure of this type by explosives in Czechia¹⁹. The pithead baths, the compressor house and the workshops of the shaft complex had been protected as a cultural monument since 1997, but this protection ended in 2009 and 2014²⁰.

The war and Životice

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland disputed the Cieszyn region. When the territory was divided in 1920, all the municipalities of today's Havířov went to Czechoslovakia. In October 1938 Poland occupied the Czechoslovak part of the Cieszyn region, and after the outbreak of the Second World War the area became part of the German Reich. On 4 August 1944 a shootout between partisans and the Gestapo took place in the inn in Životice. Three members of the Cieszyn Gestapo²¹, the innkeeper and one partisan were killed. In reprisal, on the morning of 6 August the Germans surrounded Životice and shot 36 men from Životice, Horní and Dolní Suchá, Dolní Bludovice and Dolní Těrlicko²¹. They included both Poles and Czechs. Another 31 people were taken to concentration camps, and only four came back²². After the war, Životice came to be called the “Silesian Lidice”²¹.

The victims are commemorated by a memorial with a two-metre statue of a mother holding a child in her arms, bending over a slain man. It was created by the Karviná sculptor Franciszek Świder and unveiled in 1949. In 1984 a museum building was added next to the memorial, with an exhibition by the Museum of the Těšín Region on the occupation and resistance in the Cieszyn region⁵. The memorial is a national cultural monument¹². In the cemetery in Prostřední Suchá there is a mass grave of 42 Red Army soldiers, prisoners of war shot at the František Mine, with a monument from 1949⁶.

Havířov today

Right next to the centre, the Lučina flows in a valley about 40 metres below Na Nábřeží Street. A roughly 2.5 km long unregulated stretch with dozens of meanders, wetlands and floodplain woodland is protected over an area of 40.7 hectares as the Meanders of the Lučina natural monument³, declared at the beginning of the 1990s. Here the river freely changes the shape and position of its bends⁵.

Since its founding, Havířov has presented itself as a green town. It has 18 protected memorial trees. Most of them are lime trees, ash trees and a horse chestnut that once lined the Imperial Road, and the largest number of them have survived in Elišky Krásnohorské Street. In 2009 the town won the title Town of Trees, and a year later a silver plaque in the Entente Florale Europe competition³. The Havířov in Bloom flower parade first passed through the town on 9 September 1973⁹ and was revived after many years in 2009. In 2024 the Havířov Festival drew a record 45,000 visitors³.

The multi-purpose hall in Podlesí, opened in November 1968, is home to the ice hockey club AZ Havířov. On 24 April 1984 Elton John performed there⁹. In 1993 the band Kryštof was formed in Havířov²³. People born in Havířov include the ice hockey player David Pastrňák, the athlete Pavel Maslák, the table tennis player Petr Korbel, the weightlifter Ota Zaremba and the model Simona Krainová.