National cultural monuments will be Ještěd or Tatra cars

    PRAGUE - The list of national cultural monuments will be expanded by ten items starting in January. In addition to one immovable, nine movable ones have been added - these include ancient manuscripts, archaeological finds, Baroque paintings, as well as Tatra cars. The only newly declared immovable property is the mountain hotel and television transmitter Ještěd in the Liberec region. Thus, the Czech Republic will have 197 immovable national cultural monuments and 14 movable ones. The designation of cultural monument applies to about 40,000 immovable properties and approximately 50,000 items.
    The declaration of the new items and one building as a national cultural monument was approved by the government in September. According to the Ministry of Culture, which submitted the proposal, the purpose of the adjustment is, among other things, to address the imbalance between the number of immovable and movable national cultural monuments.
    The inclusion of Ještěd was also sought by the Liberec region, as it is a prerequisite for the monument to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which the region and preservationists are also working towards. The building is one of the best contemporary examples of modern architecture in Europe that follows the trend of humanizing technology. Its author, Karel Hubáček, won the Perret Prize for it in 1969, awarded by the International Union of Architects; the construction was completed in 1973.
    The most significant movable monument newly registered on the list is the Early Medieval Vyšehrad Codex. It is one of the most valuable works in the collections of the National Library and one of the most valuable Romanesque works of its kind in Europe. The manuscript was created for the coronation of the Czech prince Vratislav II as the first Czech king in 1086.
    From the same fund of the library is the Passionary of Abbot Kunhuta, dating approximately from 1313 to 1321. The Velislav Bible from around 1350 is also part of the collections of the National Library. It is one of the most extensive illustrated codices of the High Middle Ages in Europe and a unique testimony to the court art of the time.
    Other movable national cultural monuments will include a collection of 417 archaeological finds from the Mikulčice settlement from the Great Moravian period, six Gothic sculptures from the so-called beautiful style period, a collection of bells and cymbals from St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, a collection of Baroque altar paintings by Karel Škréta and Petr Brandl, and a unique Kynžvart daguerreotype, which was made by the inventor of the first photographic process, Louis Daguerre (1787 to 1851), even before the invention was published in 1839.
    A collection of five Tatra cars from the collections of the National Technical Museum represents unique representatives of the production from the Kopřivnice factory, the oldest domestic car manufacturer. The NW Präsident car from 1898 is the oldest car produced on the territory of the former Austria-Hungary. The Tatra 80 vehicle manufactured in 1935 for then-president Masaryk was made as a luxury type in a limited series. The Tatra 87 car from 1947 became famous for its design and the journeys of Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund.