Stonava: hamlets on the Stonávka, three mines and the end of hard coal

The village on the Stonávka

Stonava belongs to the Karviná district and lies in the Ostrava Basin. To the north and east it borders Karviná, to the west Horní Suchá and to the south Albrechtice. It covers just under 14 km², and its entire area forms a single cadastral area³. Through the middle of the village, from south to north, flows the Stonávka, a small river that comes down from the Beskids and, beyond Stonava, joins the Olza in Karviná. In Stonava it meanders strongly in places, and the land on both sides of its valley rises gently.

The municipality's strategic plan describes Stonava as a typical Silesian village with a central space and scattered buildings. A description from 1918 portrays it as “a large picturesque village in Silesia with irregular buildings separated from one another by small fields and copses”³. Instead of official parts, people here know the hamlets: Hořany, Dolany, Holkovice, Bonkov, Kateřina, Mexiko, Stavy and Nový Svět. In Polish the village is called Stonawa, in German Steinau. It shares its name with its river, and the origin of the name is explained in various ways: as Stínava, a place in the shade, or from a German term for a stony stream. The village received its coat of arms and flag in 1994. The arms show, on a green shield, a silver crowned griffin holding a small gold shield with a black letter S⁴.

A medieval village and Swedish Hill

The first written mention of Stonava dates from the end of the 14th century⁵. In the Middle Ages the village had several noble owners at the same time, and some of them called themselves “of Stonava”, for example Zbyněk of Stonava, recorded in 1415³. It belonged to the Duchy of Teschen. According to the municipality, the first mention of the local church dates from 1447⁶. In the 16th century the Reformation prevailed in the duchy and the church was taken over by Lutherans; it was returned to the Catholics in the mid-17th century.

South of the hamlet of Holkovice, in a small wood above a stream, stands an artificially heaped mound known as Swedish Hill. In the Central List of Cultural Monuments it is recorded as the “Swedish barrow” (mohyla švédská), and it has been protected since 1958. The Heritage Catalogue describes it as “an important monument of medieval fortification technology” from the 14th–15th century⁷. Archaeological research identified it as a small motte-type fortification, that is, a structure on an artificially heaped mound. The fortified manor of Stonava's owners probably stood here.

Legends are attached to the hill. According to one, it is a mass grave of Swedish soldiers from the Thirty Years' War. According to another, a newborn son of the Swedish king died in a Swedish camp here, and every soldier threw a handful of earth onto his grave. Before the First World War, the story goes, two smallholders wanted to use soil from the mound to level their fields; whatever they carted away by day returned by night, and within a year both of them died. Research has not confirmed the legend of the grave.

Coal, newcomers and the Workers' House

As late as the mid-19th century Stonava was a farming village. In 1869 it had 1,516 inhabitants⁵. After 1870 it began to change as hard coal mining developed in the area. Many inhabitants made their living from mining, and newcomers arrived, mainly from the foothills and from neighbouring Galicia. By 1910 the population had grown to 3,952⁵. In the Austrian censuses the overwhelming majority gave Polish as their language of everyday use, that is, the language they normally communicated in. In practice this was the local Cieszyn dialect. About one fifth of the inhabitants were Lutherans. They belonged to the congregation in Bludovice. In 1858, however, they consecrated their own cemetery and in 1900 a Lutheran school⁶, where teaching was in Polish.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Consumer Cooperative of Workers and Farmers was founded in Stonava, in Polish Stowarzyszenie Spożywcze dla Robotników i Rolników w Stonawie. It became the centre of the village's political and cultural life and had its own slaughterhouse, bakery and a network of shops. According to the municipality, it crowned its success by building the Workers' House³. The building, with its hall and pub, still stands today.

Two churches and a chapel

The landmark of the village is the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene. It was built in 1906–1910, when František Krzystek was parish priest and the first dean of Karviná⁶. Before that, a wooden church stood where the cemetery is today; it remained in use until March 1913⁶. The new church is a longitudinal single-nave building of exposed red brick with a transept, a semicircular apse and a tower built into the entrance front⁸. The facade is decorated with green glazed bricks laid in geometric patterns, and above the entrance there is a rose window. The church has been a cultural monument since 1992⁸. It stands on undermined ground and needs frequent repairs. It underwent a general renovation in the early 1990s, and in 1994 restorers repaired and conserved its interior, including the painted decoration⁸.

For a long time the Lutherans held their services in the school. They built their own church in 1938: the foundation stone was consecrated in July and the finished church on 1 November⁶. It stands opposite the Lutheran cemetery, where Vladislav Santarius, a Lutheran pastor born in Stonava, is also buried. Alongside the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene and Swedish Hill, the village's third cultural monument is the small Chapel of the Virgin Mary by house No. 37. It stands by a local road among tall trees and has a gabled front, a semicircular apse and a pitched roof. It was built some time after 1836 and has been protected since 1994⁹.

Between two states

After the break-up of Austria-Hungary, both Czechoslovakia and Poland claimed the Cieszyn region. At the turn of 1918 and 1919 Stonava came under Polish administration, and in January 1919, during the short Czechoslovak–Polish war, it was occupied by Czechoslovak troops. On 26 January 1919 there was fighting in Stonava. The local cemetery has a grave of the Polish soldiers who fell then, and in 2019, a hundred years after the fighting, a commemoration was held there¹⁰. In the summer of 1920 the Cieszyn region was divided, and Stonava went to Czechoslovakia.

In 1930 Stonava had 4,819 inhabitants, the most in its history⁵. There were two libraries, a Czech one and a Polish one. In October 1938 Stonava went to Poland, and from September 1939 it was occupied by Nazi Germany¹¹. During the occupation the Germans confiscated the books from both libraries as raw material for paper. Those that survived were mainly the ones people happened to have on loan. After the war the Larisch family, who even after the First World War had owned most of the land here, lost their property³. The manor farm with the manor house was then used by agricultural organisations.

A village surrounded by mines

There is hard coal beneath Stonava, and in the second half of the 20th century three mines grew up around it. In the 1950s work began on the border with Horní Suchá on the Suchá-Stonava Mine, later renamed the 9 May Mine, and coal was mined there from 1960¹². In the eastern part of the village the ČSM Mine was built, where mining began in 1968². On the northern border of the village, near Darkov in Karviná, the Darkov Mine was under construction from 1972, and the first car of coal came up from it in April 1982¹³. The construction of the ČSM Mine even made it into film. The feature film Začít znova tells the story of young volunteer workers who came to build its southern plant. Shooting was begun by the Stonava-born director Vladislav Delong; when he fell ill, director Miroslav Hubáček completed the film in 1963¹⁴.

The three mines thus surrounded Stonava on three sides. Undermining wiped out the hamlet of Křivý Důl and most of Kateřina, Dolany and Mexiko, and in the 1960s the manor house and the manor farm were also demolished. In the early 1960s two small housing estates were built, in Hořany and in Nový Svět, for miners' families and for people whose homes had to make way for mining. The population fell from 4,511 in 1961 to 1,714 in 1991⁵. According to the municipality's strategic plan, mining led “almost to the liquidation of the village”. Large parts of the once inhabited landscape became uninhabitable, and new building was concentrated in a small core between the Stonávka, the ČSM and Darkov mine sites and the road to the south³.

Disaster and the end of mining

Mining at the 9 May Mine ended in 2016¹². Two years later, on 20 December 2018, methane exploded in the ČSM Mine. Thirteen miners died, twelve from Poland and one from Czechia, and ten others were injured. Poland declared a day of national mourning for its miners. A memorial in the shape of a teardrop is dedicated to the victims in Stonava, and commemorations are held there¹⁵.

In February 2021 mining ended at the Darkov Mine. According to the municipality, the main part of its 26 km² mining field lies beneath Stonava, and with the closure the village lost compensation for mining amounting to tens of millions of crowns a year¹⁶. The last mine car from the 9 May Mine, with a car from Darkov beside it, now stands in a park in the village centre. On Stonava's territory, only the ČSM Mine was then still working, the last operating hard coal mine in Czechia.

There, as of 31 January 2026, the company OKD ended underground coal mining in Czechia – after almost 250 years, according to its own statement². Since 1968 more than 124 million tonnes of coal had been extracted there². The symbolic last mine car came up on 4 February 2026¹⁷. Since the summer of 2026 the mine's shafts have been filled in; in September work started on the second of four. According to OKD, the technical decommissioning is to last until early 2029².

Stonava today

Since 1990 the population has been stable, and in recent years it has been declining slightly³. A sizeable Polish minority lives here: in the 2021 census, 247 inhabitants declared Polish nationality, roughly one in seven¹⁸. The municipal primary school teaches in Czech and in Polish. The lower grades taught in Czech are in Hořany, the upper grades in Dolany, and the school with Polish as the language of instruction is in Holkovice¹⁹. The local library in the school building in Dolany has more than 13,000 volumes, about a third of them in Polish²⁰.

The village's traditional celebration is the July parish fair for the feast of the church's patron saint, Mary Magdalene. According to the municipality, it has been held since 1911 and draws thousands of people²¹. It includes a scything competition in front of the municipal office, a performance by the Miners' Band, fireworks and Mass in Czech and in Polish²². In 2022 the then mayor, Ondřej Feber, said that people from Stonava who had to leave the village because of mining also like to come back for the fair²¹.

The local clubs and societies carry on both mining and Polish traditions. The Society of Miners in Traditional Uniform grew out of a miners' association founded in March 1914. The local branch of the Polish Cultural and Educational Union has about 180 members, a choir and the children's folk ensemble Dziecka ze Stonawy. In the run-up to Christmas, the international festival of chamber and ensemble singing Stonavská Barborka takes place here¹¹. As for nature, the Stonávka valley and two heritage oaks are worth a look: the Oak on the Embankment and the Oak by the Stonávka in the hamlet of Stavy.