Holešovice is a district in the north of Prague lying in a bend of the Vltava and on the slopes of the Letná hill.[4] Together with the neighbouring village of Bubny it formed the basis of today's Prague 7 borough.[1] The merged municipality of Holešovice-Bubny was annexed to Prague in 1884, and since the administrative reform of 1960 the whole district has been called Holešovice.[3]*
A village by the royal game reserve
Settlement on the site of Holešovice, documented from the 11th century, predates the first written mention of the village, which dates from 1228 and lists it as royal property.[1] Holešovice lay on the edge of a forest that Ottokar II turned into a royal game reserve in the 13th century, today's Stromovka.[1] Wenceslas III gave the local fields to his burgrave Hynek of Dubá; in the 15th century the village belonged to the Old Town, later to the Bryknar of Brykstein family and, before his death, also to Albrecht von Wallenstein. In the second half of the 17th century it returned to the Old Town.[1] War damage during the Thirty Years' War and the War of the Austrian Succession did not change its agricultural character.[1]
Neighbouring Bubny stood above the northern bank of the Vltava by a ford used by merchants heading for the Old Town markets. It is first named in the so-called Vyšehrad forgery under the year 1088; the first surviving charter concerning the village dates from 1234.[1] Swedish troops burned Bubny in 1634, and the siege of Prague in 1648 brought further destruction.[1]
Industrial district
The first factory in Holešovice was a calico printing works founded in 1823 by Maxmilián Dormitzer. In 1837 Holešovice had about 830 inhabitants in fewer than a hundred houses, Bubny fewer than three hundred.[1] In 1850 the two villages were formally merged into the municipality of Holešovice-Bubny, with a cadastral area of almost 529 hectares.[1] Industry developed after the opening of the Prague–Lovosice railway in 1850 and above all after the completion of the Buštěhrad Railway with Bubny station in 1868; the Franz Joseph I Bridge was built in the same year. By the early 1880s more than thirty factories operated here.[1]
The law annexing Holešovice-Bubny to Prague came into force on 18 November 1884.[2] The municipality became the city's seventh district and has kept that number to this day.[1] The city then established several enterprises serving all of Prague here: a municipal gasworks in 1888, the Central Slaughterhouse with a cattle market in 1895 and, in the early 20th century, a central power station that also supplied electricity for the trams. In 1897 the First Prague Burghers' Brewery began brewing.[1] The slaughterhouse operated until 1983; the site was then converted into a market and has been a protected monument since 1993.[6] Around 1900 the city built a river port with a transhipment point and a railway siding in two stages.[1] Between 1880 and 1900 the population of the seventh district rose from just under 11,000 to almost 31,000.[1] Zátory, near today's Holešovice station, kept its rural appearance the longest; it disappeared in the 1970s with the construction of a prefabricated housing plant, the station, a bus terminal and a metro station.[1][3]
In the 20th century
Between the wars Letná became a residential quarter, while industry continued to predominate in Holešovice. The Libeň Bridge replaced the provisional wooden crossing to Libeň, and the Trade Fair Palace rose in lower Letná.[1] During the occupation the German authorities seized the Trade Fair Palace and both new museums on Letná.[1] Between Strojnická, Veletržní and Dukelských hrdinů streets the Nazis set up an assembly point for Jews on a site known as Radiotrh. From autumn 1941 to summer 1944 transports left Bubny station for Łódź and Terezín, and more than 50,000 people passed through the camp.[1] During the Prague Uprising in May 1945 there was fighting at the Troja Bridge, on Štvanice, near Bubny station and on Letná.[1][4]
In the early 1970s the construction of the arterial road transformed the area around the Hlávka Bridge, and in 1974 the Trade Fair Palace burned down.[1] On 3 November 1984 metro service began on a section of line C with the stations Vltavská and Fučíkova; the latter has been called Nádraží Holešovice since 1990.[5]
After 1989
In the 1990s manufacturing in Prague 7 declined further, and many houses were returned to their original owners.[1] In August 2002 a flood inundated much of lower Holešovice and damaged about two hundred houses; Vltavská metro station was also under water, and the damage across Prague 7 exceeded one billion crowns.[1] The conversion of old industrial sites, such as the former burghers' brewery and the steam mills, into housing and shops then accelerated.[1] The brewery no longer brews, and the factories and railway workshops have closed.[3] In October 2008 the left wing of the Industrial Palace at the Výstaviště exhibition grounds burned down.[1]
Pages linking here
- Capital City of Prague
- Prague Metro Line C
- Renaming of Prague streets and squares
- Stromovka
- Trade Fair Palace