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15-year-old student writes book on vanished Šumava village

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Stozec, South Bohemia, Aug 12 (CTK) – Ludek Nemec, a 15-year-old Czech student, has written a book about a vanished village in the Sumava mountains, entitled “Krasna Hora – the History of a Forgotten Weaver’s Village,” that was officially presented in Stozec Wednesday.

Nemec was collecting documents for his book from the age of 11 when he started searching for the abandoned village in the locality.

The Sumava mountains, situated in southern and western Bohemia, spreads along the country’s southwestern border. The national park established on its territory is one of the largest in Europe.

“I have been travelling to Sumava with the parents since my childhood and I gradually took up interest in the extinct local villages,” said Nemec, student of a grammar school in Ceske Budejovice who lives in Dolni Trebonin village, both south Bohemia.

Mild winters in the past few years when Sumava was not covered with snow helped him find traces of the village, he explained.

“All of a sudden, I started uncovering places where the vanished village Krasna Hora used to lie,” Nemec said.

He found various relics of old buildings and sacral monuments that were hidden in a lush vegetation in other seasons of the year.

The 170-page book depicts the history of the village of Krasna Hora in Sumava (Schoenberg in Boehmerwald in German) from its foundation until the transfer of its mostly German inhabitants and its vanishing after WWII.

The book offers a number of period photographs, including maps with a precise location of particular houses in the village. Each house is described in one paragraph, including its history and owners.

“Old memories come back to life thanks to this book,” Nemec said.

He has cooperated with the Seidel Studio photographic museum in Cesky Krumlov, south Bohemia, from which some of the period photos published in his book come.

Krasna Hora is not the only village that disappeared in Sumava following WWII and the communist coup in the country in 1948. The communist regime relocated the inhabitants of several villages situated near the border in the 1950s.

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