Lipnice – a Historic-Geographic Portrait of a Vanished Village of Cheb Region (Bohemia)

This paper focuses on a village in the Czech borderland: its beginnings in the Middle Ages as an agricultural settlement; its development as a thriving locality predominantly for mining and industry from the 18th to the 20th century; the consequences of the expulsion of its German population after World War II; the attempts of the new Czechoslovakian state to revive the locality by settling Czech re-emigrants from foreign countries in the village, and its destruction in the 1970s as a result of open-cast brown coal mining. The main lines of industry and protagonists of the village’s different historical periods are described in this paper. The village of Lipnice – located near Loket nad Ohří – is used as an example of the history of more than two thousand vanished communities in the Czech borderland.