Příbram houses

1. HOUSE OF VOJTĚCH STOCES

The Art Nouveau house with a turret in the upper part of Wenceslas Square dates back to 1906 and belonged to the Stočes family. Mariánské údolí runs out of Wenceslas Square on the left, Dlouhá Street on the right. The street had several names during its existence; at the time when the Stočes lived in the house, its northern part was called Zeyerova Street. The ground floor of the house was a butcher's and sausage shop with an entrance where the two streets converge. On the gables under the over-window cornices there is a gilded monogram of Vojtěch Stočes, butcher, smoker and member of the Sokol, a physical education and patriotic organisation.

"In this house, on 15 June 1942, Mr Vojtěch Stočes and his son Antonín, a student of VI.B of the local gymnasium, were arrested by the Gestapo. The Nazis executed them together with other citizens of Příbram on 29 June 1942 in Tábor for allegedly approving the assassination of Heydrich. Honour to their memory," reads the memorial plaque, which was added to the house in 1996. (Antonín Stočes was actually a student of VI.A.) Jan Drda wrote a short story based on this event, The Higher Principle, which was later made into a film.

2. BAKERY U KÁŠŮ

On the corner of Zahradnická and Pražská uice there was a small ground-floor house with the bakery of the Káš family. The yellow new building dates back to 1839. The academic painter and maker of many of Alša's sgraffiti, Josef Bosáček, an almost forgotten native of Příbram, descended from the Káš family on his mother's side - originally he was also a baker.

3. HOUSE NO. 82 IN BRANKA

House No. 82 is located in V Branka Street. The name of the street probably comes from the Middle Ages, somewhere in these places there used to be a gate in the fortification, through which one used to go to the nowadays arched stream Lušťov.

The history of the house itself dates back to the 17th century, when it was built in 1685 by Simeon Mikuláš Hlasivec, a cantor and regenschori in the parish church of St. James in Příbram. The house had typical Baroque gables decorated with ceramic vases and a frescoed image of the Madonna and Child in the façade.

After the initial period of the burgher settlement, an important chapter of Pribram's history began to be written in this place: the establishment of the first printing house. In 1710, Jáchym František Prachinus bought the house and started to produce small printed materials, mainly aimed at the steadily increasing pilgrimage traffic, i.e. holy pictures, motlids and hymn texts.

4. THE HOUSE OF THE SVOBOD FAMILY

The listed Baroque house is the most beautiful example of this style in Příbram. It has a raised ground floor and a low floor separated by a cornice above it. A second, richly articulated cornice separates the arcade.

This house belonged to the Svoboda family until the 1990s. On the façade of the house, in the break in the cornice between the ground floor and the first floor, there is a frescoed image of St James the Elder, currently covered by a tin advertisement. The openwork gable is topped with a bust of the goddess Juno, the patron saint of women.

The orange house on the right used to be the restaurant U Božího oko. In the 1960s, the mother of the Pribram-born film writer and director Pavel Juráček worked here as a waitress.

5. BEDŘICH KAFKA'S LIQUEUR DISTILLERY

This house was the liqueur distillery of Bedřich (Fridrich) Kafka. He founded the liquor store here in 1877 and soon became a supplier to the C.C. and exported his products to many countries. It is not without interest that Bedřich Kafka was a relative of the writer Franz Kafka: Bedřich's father was Franz's great-grandfather.

The liqueurs were made by steam distillation and thus surpassed many foreign ones, including French ones. They were therefore in demand in many first-class hotels at home and abroad.