Welcome to the English homepage

of Spolecnost Rozmberk o.p.s. (The Rozmberk Society)
a Czech non-profit for heritage preservation and regional development

BEWARE: due to the unexoected bankrupcy of our provider, not all our websites are working yet, and links may be faulty. Our apologies for any inconvenience this might cause; we are doing our best migrating all our sites and emails to a new provider.

For over 24 years, the Society has helped communities and people in our very rural region in South Bohemia.

  

Above: preserving local traditions and traditional crafts
below: making a playground for the village youths and a new WWI monument

  

 

Museum - Information Centers

Beside project activities, the Society also operates two visitor-education centers. The Peasant and Emigration Museum in an abandoned 99-year-old school building in the protected village of Kojakovice, explaining 19th century emigration to the USA and also WW I as seen from a local perspectiove. Our second center is the historic Novohradska Smithy in the over 300 year old now restored blackmisth workshop in Nove Hrady. The Smithy is operated in cooperation with blacksmith Daniel Cerny, and apprentice blacksmiths give demonstrations here during the summer season.

  

 

We urgently need help to bridge our cash gap

We would like to celebrate the 25th birthday of our Society in March 2023 and continue with our community work for years to come. However, as result of COVID, the war in Ukraine, and some other recent events beyond our control, we suffered severe income losses without compensation. This has depleted all our cash reserves.

We are faced with a gap of about $ 6,000 until spring 2023, when the new round of local support and income from our centers will come in again. Most pressing is the final payment (December 31) for a loan we had to take to pre- and co-finance our international World War I Heritage and Education project NETWORLD.

Please visit our donation pages and help us continue with our projects and our community work.

 

Switch to our visitor sites

Kojakovice Peasant and Emigration Museum

WWI, the Forgotten Front

Novovhradska Blacksmith Workshop

Ecomuseum Ruze

 

 

 

 

 

Ukraine

1914 -1915: tens of thousands refugees flee Galicia to the Czech lands.

In Septmber 2022, 7 months after the start of the war, over 7 million refugees have fled the war in Ukraine into Europe. In the Czech Repubic, over 450 000 temporary refugee visas have been issued and over US $ 270 million has been paid in humanitarian aid to those refugees.

In 2017-2019, our Society participated in a large EU Interreg Danube project NETWORLD, commemorating WWI, preserving its heritage, and educating children and locals about the forgotten horrors of that war. We told about the refugees escaping the war in Galicia (now Southeastern Poland, Northeastern Slovakia, and Western Ukraine). We made education material for schools about this and in our museum we showed the locations where soldiers died and from where refugees came. The project has ended, but we are continuing to help locals finding information about where their ancestors fought, kept as POWs, or died. We show this in our museum as well, linking places and people throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Never did we imagine that this would happen again today.

In WWI, thousands of these refugees ended up in small villages in our part of South Bohemia and elsewhere.

Today, we have opened our hearts and houses again to help the refugees and stand in solidarity with Ukraine and its people.

Our Society is cooperating with the local authorities who are coordinating the effort to provide food, accommodation, cloths, and access to facilities for those refugees arriving here.

 

 

Peasant and Emigration Museum Kojakovice, information center for Ecomuseum Ruze

Design by The Bear, September 2022. Pictures of people are added with permission for our websides only. Copying images for private or public use is forbidden.