On the Czech side of Cieszyn Silesia, a collection of material witnesses of faith has been preserved: roadside crosses, statues of saints and small chapels scattered among the fields, along roads and on the edges of old villages and homesteads. Though many of them stand today somewhat forgotten; sometimes in the shadow of apartment blocks; they remain a record of the spiritual life of the local Polish community.

The Landscape of Faith and Change

In the nineteenth century, when the areas around Karviná, Horní Suchá and Stonava experienced rapid industrial growth, roadside crosses and chapels provided a counterbalance to advancing industrialisation.
They arose from the needs of the heart, from an unwritten obligation to God and the community.
They were erected as vows after the end of epidemics, as tokens of gratitude for deliverance, in memory of the dead, but also as expressions of everyday, quiet devotion among people who, living in the shadow of mines, steelworks and railway tracks, wished to preserve a visible sign of transcendence in the landscape.

These crosses were raised at roadside junctions, near bridges and on field edges: places where everyday life met the unknown.
Some marked sites of tragic events; others were purely votive.
Over time, their numbers grew, and their founders, including peasants, craftsmen and widows, increasingly carved their names on the pedestals, leaving future generations a trace of personal history.

In those inscriptions, one senses pride and a consciousness of continuity: the awareness that to erect a cross meant not only to perform a religious act but to root oneself in native soil.

Many founders used the Polish language, often in its local dialect. The prayer formulae carved in stone: “Jesus, have mercy on us”, “Hail, holy cross”, resound today as fragments of a collective prayer repeated by generations of the region’s inhabitants.

Along the road in Horní Suchá, there stands an iron cross dating from 1870, funded by Józef Janeczek, as recalled in the inscription:

“Hail, holy cross. Founded by Józef Janeczek, citizen of Horní Suchá, 1870.”

The cast-iron pedestal, shaped like a neo-Gothic chapel with gilded lettering, gleams amid the greenery, enclosed by a simple wrought-iron fence.
This cross is typical of the second half of the nineteenth century, when in the Cieszyn–Karviná region the products of Moravian and Silesian foundries, such as those in Vítkovice, Krnov and Biała, became widespread.
Patterns for crucifixes and pedestals were ordered from catalogues; yet the combination of elements: a brass figure of Christ, a gilt INRI plaque, a profiled base with the image of the Virgin Mary, gave each cross an individual character.

The cross in Horní Suchá, despite more than 150 years having passed, has survived in excellent condition.
Its proportions are balanced; its form austere yet dignified.
It stands not only as a symbol of faith but also as a testimony to technological development: a union of religious tradition and the modernity of iron-casting, which in the nineteenth century became as common as stone.
In such crosses, two energies of the era meet: spirituality and industry.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Karviná and its surroundings underwent profound socio-economic transition.
Land that for centuries had followed an agricultural rhythm entered an age of mining, migration and urbanisation.
Against the backdrop of steaming shafts, railway lines and new workers’ colonies, the stone and iron crosses became symbolic points of reference.
For newcomers arriving from nearby villages, from Galicia or from the Duchy of Cieszyn, the cross was a sign of domestication: a way to make new space their own.

Many of these crosses still bear traces of repeated renovation: repainted figures of Christ, refreshed inscriptions, metal lamps hanging beneath the crucifix.
This proves that the memory of these places endures.
From generation to generation, people restored them, often quietly and anonymously, without institutional support.

Today, standing before the cross at Horní Suchá, one feels the tension between transience and endurance.
Surrounded by modern houses, cars and tarmac roads, its presence still points the way.

Stone Figures of Saints

Older than the iron crosses is the statue of St John of Nepomuk, dated 1843.
Set on a tall, plastered pedestal at Horní Suchá, it depicts the patron saint of bridges, confessors and a good death, shown in the region’s typical manner: with a cross in his hands, a halo of five stars and a calm, slightly melancholy expression.

St John of Nepomuk, one of the most frequently represented saints in Central Europe, was for the people of Cieszyn Silesia a symbol of fidelity to mystery, of loyalty to God and tradition.

This statue, like many others in the region, was probably made in one of the stone workshops in Cieszyn or Frýdek, which in the first half of the nineteenth century formed an artistic hinterland for all of Cieszyn Silesia.
The craftsmen there, trained in the late Baroque Moravian tradition, were open to simpler forms accessible to ordinary people.

Their sculptures did not imitate classical idealism but emphasised physicality and expression.
The saints’ faces, with soft features, low foreheads and firmly modelled hands, resembled ordinary people.
This “aesthetic of kinship” between saint and believer was a conscious choice: sculpture was meant to be close rather than distant.

In the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia, where Polish, Czech and German influences met for centuries, the cult of St John of Nepomuk held special meaning.
He was raised not only as a patron of bridges and rivers but also as a protector of villages, a guardian against floods and fires.
Many statues, such as this one, were votive offerings after natural disasters or epidemics.
In their inscriptions – often now illegible – one could read formulae such as:

“To the glory of God and in honour of St John of Nepomuk”;
“Founded by the people of this village”;
or simply “In prayer for blessing and rain”.

Another stone statue preserved in Pietwałd has a similar character, showing a man holding a rosary and a hat.
Though no inscription survives, the iconography suggests that it may represent a votive pilgrim or St Isidore the Farmer, the patron of peasants.
The figure, frontally posed with bowed head and clasped hands, embodies humility and prayer.
Its rough carving, irregular proportions and lack of facial detail give it an austere expressiveness: a sculpture that speaks not through perfection but through truth.
It shows kinship with the oldest examples of folk stone carving from around Fryštát and Karviná, where village workshops merged religious motifs with local realism.

Such figures record the spiritual labour of generations: silent prayers for harvest, health, weather and the preservation of land.
For farmers and miners, they were as important as crosses: companions to daily work, guardians of field and home.
Their function was both religious and symbolic, marking spaces that belonged “to God and to the people”.

From today’s perspective, these statues take on new meaning.
They are traces of a material culture in dialogue with the landscape, where stone from local quarries – the same used to build homes and barns – became a medium of prayer.
They do not dominate the environment but resonate with it, their presence still perceptible as a quiet yet enduring prayer for the people and their land.

Memory and Language

On many crosses around Karviná, Horní Suchá and Stonava, inscriptions in Polish have survived: a testimony to the living Polish-language culture in Zaolzie before the division of the region in 1920.
In an era when language became both a sign of national belonging and a medium of daily prayer, religious inscriptions carried meaning beyond faith: they were public declarations of identity.
They engraved in stone what could vanish from official documents and schoolbooks: the sound of Polish words.

On one cross in Karviná-Ráj, an inscription from the Gospel of St John reads:

“I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6).
This simple citation, carved on a small stone plaque, refers not only to the spiritual realm: it is also a declaration of endurance.
“The way” is both a symbol of Christ and a metaphor for the fate of borderland inhabitants: people constantly choosing among languages, nations and frontiers.

In Stonava, on a stone cross from 1920, the words are carved:

“Jesus, my God, I love you above all things.”
It sounds like a personal prayer, full of the emotional immediacy typical of folk religiosity.
It is not the language of liturgy but that of the heart, revealing that the people of Zaolzie, though rooted in Catholic tradition, retained their own intimate way of speaking to God.
Their prayers were not quotations from missals but authentic, vernacular confessions of faith.

From a linguistic perspective, these inscriptions are invaluable: they preserve archaisms, simplified syntax and traces of Cieszyn dialects.
Orthographic inconsistencies only heighten their authenticity.
Here, Polishness expressed itself not through official language but through the speech of the people: soft, domestic, infused with emotion and prayer.

During the Partitions of Poland, and especially after 1920, when the political border divided the region, the language of inscriptions took on a symbolic dimension.
On territories annexed to Czechoslovakia, Polish inscriptions gradually disappeared, replaced by Czech or Latin religious texts.
Yet the older crosses remained: silent witnesses that prayers here were once said in Polish.
For later generations, they became symbols of memory and quiet resistance to assimilation.

Thus, the language in these inscriptions embodies collective memory.
Stone preserved what daily life eroded: Polish names, devotional formulae, the rhythm of prayer.
In some places, one can still read:

“O souls who have suffered, pray for us”;
and, nearby,
“Jesus Christ, have mercy on us” (cross dated 1928).

The plural form “pray for us” lends these words a communal tone: a village’s prayer, not an individual’s, where remembrance of the dead, of epidemic victims or mining accidents formed part of everyday life.

There is no pathos in their language; their power lies in simplicity.
Sometimes just a few words, carved with the gravity of eternity.
The repeated “Jesus, have mercy on us”, heard throughout Silesia, resonates here with special force: in the Cieszyn dialect, it becomes the prayer of workers, farmers and borderland dwellers.

For Poles in this region, especially after 1920, the use of their language in sacred space was an act of quiet resistance against Czech administration and imposed bilingualism.
Stone needed no permission: it could speak Polish when schools no longer could.

From the perspective of intangible heritage, these inscriptions form a “memory of language in stone”.
The crosses and chapels preserve what is invisible: the sound, rhythm and idiom of prayer.
They record a world in which religion and nationality coexisted without contradiction, until history, borders and politics forced them apart.

Today, reading inscriptions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can understand them not only as expressions of faith but also as documents of cultural identity.
Each word carved in stone bears witness to endurance.
In an era when Polish was gradually disappearing from the public space of Zaolzie, it was the roadside crosses that preserved its final material traces.

And so, when one bends down to read the words “Jesus, my God, I love you above all things”, one touches not only a religious message but also the memory of those who defended their language with prayer. Stone, though voiceless, became the voice of the Polish tongue of the borderlands.

Between Faith and Collective Memory

After the Second World War, the landscape of the region underwent rapid transformation.
Towns and villages that for centuries had lived by the rhythm of nature, labour and prayer were absorbed into an industrial panorama.
The change was felt most dramatically in Karviná: once a vibrant town, now largely lost beneath layers of earth, coal and time.
Mining disasters, ground subsidence and the liquidation of mines and entire districts have left the old Karviná existing only in fragments: on archival maps and in the memory of its inhabitants.

With them disappeared the places of daily prayer: chapels and crosses that for generations had structured the rhythm of space.
Some collapsed with the sinking ground; others were moved to safer locations, sometimes to the edges of new housing estates.
Thus arose a paradox of the contemporary Zaolzie landscape: the signs of the sacred still exist, but their original context has been lost.
They stand among apartment blocks, car parks, slag heaps and the remains of mine shafts: relics of another civilisation, whose logic was not based on extraction but on community.

One resident of Stonava recalled:

“When the cross was moved, we took the earth from beneath it too, so that nothing would be left without prayer.”

That gesture is symbolic: for the local community, the cross is not merely an object but part of a living relationship with the landscape: a spiritual point of reference.
At a time when village and parish boundaries shifted and people moved into miners’ housing blocks, these crosses offered a sense of continuity and rootedness.

In many places, one can still find crosses and statues relocated from subsidence zones. On their bases, new inscriptions appeared: “Renovatio AD 2002”, “Renew our faith, Lord – 2011” or “Let memory endure”.

In this sense, the crosses and chapels of Zaolzie form an “archaeology of faith”.
They unearth from the past not only the names of founders and dates but also a way of seeing the world: one in which life, labour, prayer and death formed an inseparable whole.

Today, when shopping centres and apartment blocks rise where fields once stretched, these stone witnesses remind us that space is not merely a physical background but a vessel of memory.

Iron, Stone and Word

The roadside crosses of the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia form a catalogue of materials, forms and workshops that for more than 150 years shaped the region’s spiritual landscape.
Stone pedestals of sandstone, cast-iron crosses, brass crucifixes – sometimes brightly polychromed – each is not only a craftsman’s work but also a record of the local history of technology and aesthetics.
Their styles range from rustic simplicity to neo-Gothic ornamentation, with tracery, moulded cornices and wrought-iron fences: material frames of faith.

In the nineteenth century, the centres of sacred stonework for the region were Cieszyn, Frýdek and Fryštát.
Workshops there produced pedestals, statues of saints and decorative elements for chapels.
The stone – mainly sandstone from Karviná, Frýdek and Cieszyn – was easily accessible, malleable and resistant to the changing climate.
These stonemasons combined Baroque traditions with local folk stylisation: angular proportions, simplified faces and the absence of academic modelling were compensated by expressiveness and sincerity.
Many figures still bear visible chisel marks, left deliberately as signs of the human hand rather than the perfection of the machine.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the metallurgical industry, began the era of iron crosses.
Their production was linked to the foundries in Vítkovice, Třinec, Krnov, Bielsko and Opava, which – alongside industrial construction – also produced sacred castings.
Their catalogues, often printed in Czech or German, offered designs for crosses, Christ figures, Madonnas and entire compositional sets with pedestals and ornate arms. Orders were placed by model number, which is why identical forms can be found today across Silesia, Lesser Poland and Moravia.

Each casting, however, was unique: local workshops combined elements from different series, added ornaments and, above all, gave each cross individuality through paint and gilding.
Examples preserved in Stonava and Horní Suchá show crosses coated with black protective paint, their details — rays, inscriptions, thorns of the crown — accented in gold or zinc white.
In this way, within the dark industrial landscape, tiny points of light shimmered: visible signs of the sacred amid daily toil.

In Karviná and nearby villages, small local craftsmen joined ready-made castings with stone pedestals of their own making, often signing them with initials or surnames: “G. Wojtyła Cieszyn”, “K. Nowak Fryštát”, “J. Skupień Horní Suchá”.
Though not “artists” in the academic sense, their work combined technical precision with spiritual purpose.
Every element mattered: the proportions of the base determined the cross’s legibility in the landscape, and the material’s resistance ensured its survival in a mining climate heavy with dust and moisture.

Alongside stone and iron, the region also saw brass and zinc crucifixes, often polychromed.
Produced in small parish workshops or metalworking ateliers in Opava and Bielsko, these small figures, mounted on iron crosses, were waxed or lacquered to retain their sheen.
Brass, with its warm tone, lent a subtle, icon-like glow to the composition.

This tradition endured well into the interwar period.
In the 1930s, foundries in Třinec and Frýdlant nad Ostravicí produced small roadside chapels made of metal and concrete: simple yet solid examples of early sacred modernism in Silesia.

Regardless of material, however, the most precious element remains the word.
It is the inscription that endows these objects with spiritual and personal depth.
Carved in stone, cast in metal or scratched with a nail into wet plaster, they form a linguistic palimpsest of the region, blending the language of prayer with the dialect of identity.

Inscriptions such as “Jesus, my God, I love you above all things”, “Founder 1860” or “Hail, holy cross” are miniature epitaphs of everyday life: each combining the form of a prayer and a chronicle.
Often they are the only surviving trace of the founder: a name, a village, a date, sometimes a profession.
These brief, concrete sentences — without rhetoric, yet full of truth — echo human existence carved in stone.

From an anthropological perspective, the crosses and chapels of Zaolzie embody a phenomenon that could be called “theology of matter”.
A faith that the earthly and the technical: iron, sand, limestone, can become vessels of the sacred.
In the workshops of Třinec or Cieszyn, art and labour were never separate: the chisel, hammer and casting mould were tools of faith as much as the rosaries held by the founders.

In this collaboration between humans and matter lies deep symbolism.
Iron and stone become emblems of endurance; the word engraved upon them gives that endurance meaning.
Thus was born a unique tradition of Cieszyn Silesia, in which the traces of industry and the traces of prayer meet in a single gesture.
The crosses standing among fields and mines remind us that in this region’s history, technology and spirituality were never opposed: they formed a common language, inscribed in stone, iron and word.

The Enduring Power of Small Forms

These modest objects scattered throughout Karviná, Stonava, Horní Suchá and neighbouring villages are more than relics of bygone devotion.
They are witnesses of a community’s endurance: a community that, despite shifting borders, political pressure and social change, preserved in stone and metal its language, faith and memory.

Each cross is like a node on the map of the Czech part of Cieszyn Silesia: a point where Polish, Czech and Silesian histories intertwine in a single gesture: the act of raising a cross “to the glory of God and in memory of people”.