In the historical capital of Moravia, Olomouc, you can find numerous souvenirs that testify to its links with our country. Few know or remember that one of the Polish rulers was secretly murdered here. On the other hand, John III Sobieski admired the architecture of the local Jesuit church and the Bishop's Palace, and Hugo Kołłątaj was imprisoned in the Olomouc fortress.

Olomouc (Czech: Olomouc, German: Olmütz), the historical capital of Moravia and today an important academic and tourist centre of the Czech Republic, is located just over 120 km from the Polish border. Olomouc's extensive Old Town is filled with numerous monuments. Among the most significant are the two symbols of the city - the highest Baroque Holy Trinity Column in the Czech Republic (a votive offering to protect Olomouc from a plague) and the Gothic Town Hall with its astronomical clock, as well as numerous palaces and churches, including the Gothic St. Wenceslas Cathedral and St. Maurice's Church, and the Baroque St. Mary of the Snow (Jesuits) and St. Michael (Dominicans). Due to its location close to the Polish border, the history of the former capital of Moravia has many links with our country.

Secret murder of the Polish ruler
. Today, the city is a destination for many Polish tourists. Probably not many of them realise that a Polish ruler was killed near Olomouc Cathedral in August 1306. He was the 17-year-old Wenceslas III, King of Bohemia and Hungary, and nominal, albeit ephemeral, King of Poland, who was secretly murdered on his way to Malopolska, where he was on his way to deal with his rival, the Duke of Sandomierz, Władysław the Short and crown himself in Krakow. The death of the young monarch not only ended the 450-year reign of the Přemyslids in Bohemia and caused the collapse of the ephemeral Central European empire of the last representatives of this dynasty, but also made it significantly easier for Lokietek to reassume power in Krakow.

St. John Sarkander of Skoczów
In the side altar of St Wenceslas Cathedral lies the coffin containing the relics of St John Sarkander (1576-1620), a native of Skoczów in the Duchy of Cieszyn, still ruled at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries by the germanised princes of the Piast dynasty, fiefs of the Czech kings. An ardent promoter of Counter-Reformation ideals, Sarkander spent his entire life in Moravia. In February 1620, during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which ravaged the Czech lands exceptionally severely, as parish priest of the Moravian town of Holešov, located near Olomouc, he saved the town from attack and looting by notorious mercenary detachments of Polish foxhunters participating in battles on the Catholic side. In order to convince the attackers that Holešov was a Catholic town, he went out to meet them with a procession carrying the Blessed Sacrament. This event gave the Protestants a pretext to accuse Sarkander of bringing Polish troops into Moravia. He was arrested and imprisoned in an Olomouc prison. As a result of cruel torture, he died, refusing to betray the secret of his confession until the end. A neo-Baroque chapel dedicated to the saint now stands on the site of the former prison, in Olomouc's Upper Town.

It was as the patron saint of "good confessions" that Sarkander was canonised in 1995 by Pope John Paul II during a pilgrimage to the Czech Republic. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that for Czechs and Moravians the Catholic martyr of the Thirty Years' War, whose most painful outcome was the collapse of the independent Czech monarchy, is a much more controversial figure than he appears from a Polish perspective.

Poles associated with Olomouc
Of course, there were many more Poles associated in various ways with the history of Olomouc. For example, canon Jan Iwicki - 16th century theologian and counter-reformation political writer, lecturer at the Olomouc Jesuit College; Tadeusz Romanowicz - January Uprising insurgent, just like Kołłątaj, prisoner of the Olomouc fortress, after his release one of the leaders of the "democrats" party in Galicia; or Tadeusz Romanowicz - leader of the "democrats" party in Galicia.democrats" in Galicia, or engineer Stanislaw Rogalski - world-famous aircraft designer, co-author of the RWD series of aircraft (short for: Rogalski, Wigura, Drzewiecki), after the war the author of the designs for the lunar vehicle under the Apollo programme of the American NASA.