Wallachia

Wandering thoughts to Wallachia

Starts with The Lutheran Church in Poland-  The Jesus Church in Ciezsyn, a historic church on the Polish - Czech border. Ryan Socash presents a sweet picture of the polish town.  Interestingly the town flag looks very similar to the Armenian national flag.

Ciezsyn was a German/ Silesian/ Austrian frontier town, and when Poland and Czechoslovakia were created in 1919, lead to a brief war.  It's a typical sob story.  "This was our traditional 'heartland'.  We need this land for security.  The Poles are all migrants."  The border now passes through the middle of the town along the river.  There are many cities in this state.   With Europe and a visa card, you might not notice the border now, though it's Zlotys on one side and Crowns on the other.

Next to Ostravia, the big steel city.  Then on to Olomouc, that could have been the Moravian capital.  It has a UNESCO world heritage site in the form of its plague memorial. It is so big there is a small unobtrusive chapel in the base.

Next over to Zlin.  This town was famous in the 1900's for being the centre of world shoe empire called Bata. The history link the Valech rising up with the Swedes against Albrecht Von Wallenstein, the famous Habsburg general who retired to Jicen, a place Theo took us to.

Stories from Zlin-  First the story of how came to be.  It is on the far edge of the Wallachia region, that dates back to roman times.  The Wallachi or Vlach, are the originally Romanians.  In Moravia they lost their Latin and became Slavs.  The first Tomas of the town was Tomas Bata.  He rose from being a local artisan to creating a global shoe empire.   The company got the order to make shoes for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI.

How Tom Stoppard comes to listed as a famous Moravian Wallach I don't know?  He was born in 1937 in Zlin as Tomas Straussler. His father was a Bata company doctor.  The Bata company had created a modern hive of industry with interesting modern houses for the workers.  The company spread across the world and when Tomas Bata saw that the Nazis were going to exterminate the Jews, he arranged for all his Jewish employees to be transferred overseas. The Strausslers when to Singapore.  They Singapore was overrun by the Japaneses.  Tom, his brother and mother escaped to Australia.  Tom's father was killed in a fleeing boat that was hit by a missile.

Tom's mother remarried a British officer, but Tom said that he never felt British, or anything in particular through his life.

Olomouc has an old astronomical clock that was strafed with bullets by a departing German occupiers as the Russian and Romanian armies advanced.  The repair to the clock replaced pictures of saints with proletariats.

Olomouc's repaired clock 

Red area is Moravian Wallachia