Post-Velvet Transition & Living Tradition Revival

The post-war European integration project binding contemporary member regions across borders.

1 chapter

1948 - 1989

The communist regime (1948–1989) reshaped East Bohemia's festival calendar through three mechanisms: selective survival, secular replacement, and institutional preservation. The Velká pardubická actually thrived — the 1954 Eastern Bloc decision to create an 'International Steeplechase Meeting' elevated it to the most important steeplechase in the Soviet sphere, with state-subsidized horses from the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. The race was cancelled only once during the entire communist period (1968, the Warsaw Pact invasion). The Benedictine monastery at Broumov was abolished in 1950, but parish clergy maintained reduced feast-day observance; the Regional Museum housed in the former monastery building inadvertently preserved liturgical objects and guild records that would enable post-1989 revival. Most village Masopust processions were suppressed, though a few survived in remote communities. The state created new secular festivals — May Day parades, Spartakiáda mass gymnastics — that occupied the same calendar slots as suppressed religious feasts. The University of Pardubice (founded 1950 as the Chemistry Institute) and the Safari Park Dvůr Králové (established 1946, expanded under state direction) represented new institutional forms that generated their own annual events. Kuks Hospital became a state-run elderly home; its Baroque pilgrimage tradition was extinguished.

1918 - 1948

The First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938) brought democratic self-governance, land reform, and modernist architecture to East Bohemia — but also sharpened the Czech-German nationality conflict in border towns. Svitavy (Zwittau), Trutnov (Trautenau), and the Podkrkonoší foothills were bilingual communities where Czech and German parish churches observed parallel liturgical calendars and German-language Vereine organized Schützenfeste, Kirchweih, and Maibaum celebrations alongside Czech poutě. The Pardubice Crematorium (1921, one of Czechoslovakia's first) marked secularization of death ritual. The Museum of East Bohemia in Hradec Králové began systematic ethnographic collection of folk culture, including Masopust masks and ritual objects. The 1938 Munich Agreement and German occupation brought the Velká pardubická to a halt (last pre-war running 1937) and expelled the Hospitaller Brothers from Kuks. For the German-speaking minority, 1945 brought expulsion under the Beneš decrees — erasing the German-language festival layer entirely from border towns like Svitavy and Trutnov, where incoming Czech settlers brought their own traditions with no connection to the displaced German community's calendar.

1845 - 1918

The arrival of the railway (Pardubice connected 1845, Hradec Králové 1857) integrated East Bohemia into the Austro-Hungarian industrial economy, generating new festival forms alongside traditional ones. In 1874, Count Maximilian Ugarte, Prince Emil Fürstenberg, and Count Oktavián Kinský founded the Velká pardubická steeplechase — now the oldest continuous Czech cultural-sporting event, running annually on the second Sunday of October. Josef Gočár's Automatic Mills for the Winternitz brothers (1910) brought functionalist industrial architecture to Pardubice's riverfront. The Petrof piano factory (established 1864) made Hradec Králové a centre of instrument-making. Industrialization created new calendar rituals — race days, factory shifts, railway timetables — that existed alongside but did not replace the parish pouť cycle. Stand at the Pardubice racecourse on the second Sunday of October and you experience a calendar slot that has been occupied by the same event since 1874, surviving two world wars and three political regimes.

1766 - 1845

Emperor Joseph II's fortress-building programme reshaped the Hradec Králové-Jaroměř corridor into a military frontier zone. The Josefov Fortress (1780–1787) at Jaroměř introduced a garrison town with its own chapel and feast-day calendar, while Hradec Králové itself was refortified as a walled city — a transformation that constrained urban growth but brought military payroll and garrison festivals into the local calendar. Náchod Castle acquired its Baroque expansion during this period. The enlightened-absolutist state also reformed guild structures and religious houses, though the Broumov Benedictines survived the Josephine dissolution. Walk the bastion circuit at Josefov and descend into the casemate tunnels: you are experiencing a military installation designed to project Habsburg power against Prussia, now repurposed as a heritage venue for historical re-enactments. The garrison chapel's feast days are no longer observed as living religious practices — the continuity has shifted from liturgy to heritage performance.