In Olomouc, the historic capital of Moravia, one can find numerous artefacts bearing witness to the city’s links with our country. Few people know or remember that one of Poland’s rulers was assassinated here. Meanwhile, Jan III Sobieski marvelled at the architecture of the local Jesuit church and the bishop’s palace, whilst Hugo Kołłątaj was imprisoned in the Olomouc fortress.

Olomouc (Czech: Olomouc, German: Olmütz), the historic capital of Moravia and today an important academic and tourist centre of the Czech Republic, is situated just over 120 km from the Polish border. Olomouc’s extensive Old Town is brimming with numerous monuments. Among the most significant are: the city’s two symbols – the tallest Baroque Holy Trinity Column in the Czech Republic (a votive offering for the protection of Olomouc from the plague) and the Gothic town hall with its astronomical clock, as well as numerous palaces and churches, including: the Gothic St Wenceslas Cathedral and the Church of St Maurice, and Baroque ones – the Church of Our Lady of the Snows (Jesuits) and St Michael’s (Dominicans). Owing to its location near the Polish border, the history of the former capital of Moravia reveals numerous links with our country.

The assassination of a Polish ruler
Today, the city is a popular destination for many Polish tourists. Surely few of them realise that, near Olomouc Cathedral, in August 1306, one of the Polish rulers was killed. He was the 17-year-old Wenceslaus III, King of Bohemia and Hungary, and—albeit albeit a short-lived one, who was assassinated whilst on his way to Lesser Poland, where he intended to deal with his rival, the Duke of Sandomierz, Władysław Łokietek, and to be crowned in Kraków. The death of the young monarch not only brought to an end the 450-year reign of the Přemyslids in Bohemia and brought about the collapse of the short-lived Central European empire of the last representatives of that dynasty, but also significantly facilitated Łokietek’s return to power in Kraków.

St John Sarkander of Skoczów
In a side altar of St Wenceslas Cathedral lies a small coffin containing the relics of St John Sarkander (1576–1620), who hailed from Skoczów in the Duchy of Cieszyn, which at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries was still ruled by Germanised princes of the Piast dynasty, vassals of the Bohemian kings. Sarkander, a zealous proponent of Counter-Reformation ideals, spent his entire life in Moravia. In February 1620, during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which ravaged the Czech lands with particular severity, as parish priest of Holeszów in Moravia, situated near Olomouc, he saved the town from attack and plunder by the notorious Polish mercenary Lisowczyki, who were fighting on the Catholic side. To convince the attackers that Holeszów was a Catholic town, he went out to meet them with a procession bearing the Blessed Sacrament. This incident gave the Protestants a pretext to accuse Sarkander of bringing Polish troops into Moravia. He was arrested and imprisoned in Olomouc. As a result of cruel torture, he died, refusing to the very end to betray the secrecy of the confessional. On the site of the former prison, in Olomouc’s Upper Town, there now stands a Neo-Baroque chapel dedicated to the saint.

It was precisely as the patron saint of ‘good confession’ 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 the Czechs and Moravians, this Catholic martyr of the Thirty Years’ War – whose most devastating consequence was the collapse of the independent Czech monarchy – is a far more controversial figure than he appears to be from a Polish perspective.

Poles associated with Olomouc
Of course, there were many more Poles connected in various ways with the history of Olomouc. Take, for example, Canon Jan Iwicki – a sixteenth-century theologian and Counter-Reformation political writer, and a lecturer at the Jesuit college in Olomouc; Tadeusz Romanowicz – a participant in the January Uprising, who, like Kołłątaj, was imprisoned in the Olomouc fortress, and after his release became one of the leaders of the ‘democratic’ faction in Galicia; or the engineer Stanisław Rogalski – a world-renowned aircraft designer, co-designer of the RWD series of aeroplanes (an acronym derived from the surnames of the designers: Rogalski, Wigura, Drzewiecki), and, after the war, the designer of lunar rover concepts as part of NASA’s Apollo programme.