Czech Republic : Holasovice Historical Village Reservation (1998)

Holašovice is an exceptionally complete and well-preserved example of a traditional central European village. It has a large number of outstanding 18th- and 19th-century vernacular buildings in a style known as 'South Bohemian folk Baroque', and preserves a ground plan dating from the Middle Ages.


 
Archaeological investigation has shown that this area was settled by humankind as early as the 2nd millennium BC, in the Neolithic period. It was settled by Slavonic peoples in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. It came under Premyslid rule at the end of the 10th century, but Holasovice was not founded until the period of largescale colonization of the border regions of Bohemia in the first half of the 13th century. The first written record is in a 1292 document of Wenceslas II, who gave the village, along with several others, to the Cistercian monastery at Vyssí Brod, which retained possession until 1848.
Until the beginning of the 16th century the area was settled by Czechs, but the plague that ravaged Bohemia in 1521 left only two inhabitants alive. The Cistercians brought in settlers from other possessions of the Order in Bavaria and Austria: all the family names listed in a monastic record of 1524-30 were German. There followed a period of prosperity that came to an end with the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), but the village quickly recovered.
The numbers of farmsteads remained steady at seventeen from the early 16th century onwards, and the village did not begin to grow until the 20th century. The ethnic makeup remained predominantly German up to the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918: in 1895 there were 157 inhabitants of German origin and only 19 of Czech origin. By the time the ethnic Germans were expelled at the end of World War II Czechs remained in a minority.
The Definitive Cadaster of 1827 reveals that all the farmsteads (with the exception of the barns) in "Holschowitz" were built of masonry, not timber-framed, as was the case in most of the villages of Bohemia at that time. This tradition of masonry building for domestic structures is a characteristic of South Bohemia, no doubt brought in from Austria and Germany.
Between 1840 and 1880 there was considerable rebuilding in the villages of North Bohemia. This process was later in South Bohemia, and the style adopted, known as "Folk Baroque," is characteristic of this region.