A study of working class housing, mainly of working class housing
in working class settlemenents, belonged to the main topics of Czech ethnology and Czech socially oriented historiography before the year 1989. Within the frames of extensive ethnological researches of the Czech lands’ industrial areas both ethnologists and historians paid great attention to working class settlements in Brno, Plzeň, Prague or especially in Ostravian industrial area. Just around Ostrava we can speak about uninterrupted continuity of working class settlements’ research which has remained in the sphere of researchers’ interests also after the year 1989 when the changes in the whole society and the transformation of dominant historical narratives led to a decline of interest in working class housing and settlements. The review article summs up the Czech existing scholarship with special reference to the greater Ostrava area.
The long-standing significance of Ostrava as an economic and industrial centre of the Czech lands (from around 1850 to 1989) continues to thematically determine Ostrava's position in Czech, Czechoslovakian and Central European historiography. The social scientists studying the spiritual and religious history of 20th-century Ostrava are somewhat on the periphery, and unlike research into the persecution of the Roman Catholic clergy and monks during the time of the Protectorate and the post-February period, interest in researching this issue of the interwar period has been slightly more cautious. This paper focuses on a brief description of the institutional development of the traditional players in interwar religious life in Greater Ostrava – the Roman Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, the Jewish religious community – and above all the new players in spiritual and religious life between the world wars: the Czechoslovak Church, the Association of Social Democratic Atheists and the spiritistic Brotherhood association, which used Ostrava as a centre of First Republic spiritual and religious life.
The study focused on the factory colony of the mine „Jiří“ in Moravská Ostrava, by now only marginally reflected upon by the regional historians, does not aim to be a monograph dealing with the history of one of the rough number of 55 miners‘ colonies on the territory of contemporary Ostrava. The study of the colony of „Jiří“ that existed from the year 1872 or 1889 to the year 1970 was motivated, first, by the author’s interest in the proletarian colonies in Ostrava. But it also constitutes part of the research project begun in the year 2010. The research should culminate at producing a modern topography of miners‘ colonies of Ostrava that would replace the problematic topography of Jaroslav Bílek (1966). The study of the colony of „Jiří“ aims to refute the myth of its foundation before the year 1860, to describe in detail its constructional- architectonic development and the living standard, positively resolve the problem of the number of houses in the colony, and especially to remind the fact, unique in the region of Ostrava, of the double foundation of the colony in the years 1871 and 1888. Besides the general information concerning the setting and surroundings of the colony of „Jiří“ and its civic amenities, the study should provide the correction of the data on the population development of the colony in the years 1890–1910 presented in the thesis of Drahoslava Dušková (1976).