K současným hodnotám vesnického prostředí moravského Záhoří

In the submitted reflection essay, I contemplate the rural environment in the region of Moravian Záhoří from the point of view of an ethnologist. The significant value of this regions concerns the landscape character of this agricultural region in a low hilly area adjacent to the western Carpathians and only rarely disturbed by modern industrial elements. The natural communication network with a plethora of small sacral monuments interconnects the individual villages, which have not undergone an essential development. If new residential districts are built at the outskirts of the villages, at least the village core preserves some traditional values. In most locations in the region we can perceive the surviving urbanism of village greens and neighbouring farmsteads which have kept their volume corresponding to the first half of the 20th century. The farmsteads built from fired materials in large dimensions suffice without significant changes even today and they even exceed spatial demands in some cases. Therefore some parts of houses remain lifeless whereby the use of farm wings and buildings themselves seems to be a big problem. We encounter surviving architectural details of facades only in a few cases because these were wiped by younger reconstructions, or covered by modern layers. In spite of all modernization steps which were made during the 20th century and which continue at present as well, we can consider the region of Moravian Záhoří to be an exceptional region with preserved landscape and urban elements, which would be worthy a bigger tourist but especially professional interest of different disciplines. The primary precondition in this context is to find a relation to positive values surviving from the past on the side of inhabitants and representatives of particular villages.