Olomouc heritage protectors have completed the inventory of rare properties

Hanácké open-air museum in Příkazy

Olomouc - Conservationists have completed the review of all heritage-protected objects in the Olomouc Region after seven years. The result is new documentation, including written and photographic records, as well as digitized representations on cadastral maps, reported Iva Orálková from the Olomouc office of the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) to ČTK.
According to Orálková, the new identification of monuments was necessary due to changes in ownership relations in recent years. "Information about heritage protection sometimes got lost during them, so owners were sometimes unaware that they owned a protected object. The data is often not in the land registry either," said Orálková.
Many historical buildings and immovable monuments are now in different conditions or even stand in different locations than at the time they were listed as monuments. Some have been destroyed or irreversibly damaged. For instance, more than twenty houses protected mostly as evidence of folk village architecture have disappeared in the Prostějov region. Among them was also a windmill in Horní Štěpánov, of which only two crumbling millstones remain today.
Orálková noted that the number of monuments is currently increasing because parts of properties are becoming independent monuments, as required by new legislation. "This pertains to altars, church organs, or statues in their vicinity," she explained.
The most monuments were registered in the 1960s. A total of 2,107 are documented in the Olomouc region. The completed re-identification required the work of 24 conservationists in the region. The project was financed by the Ministry of Culture. The information collected from across the Czech Republic will end up in the Central Register of Immovable Cultural Monuments and will be published on the website www.npu.cz.
As Orálková pointed out, a follow-up project is currently collecting information on movable monuments.