A short history of the region

Czech Forrest is a deserted region that was not very settled until the 18th century. Up to that time you could have come across mainly bears and wolfs in the thick woods. Later these were people mainly of German nationality who began to settle down and deal mainly with glass-making. They used energy of streams and wood of old fir and beech trees growing in the area. Tens of villages with thousands of inhabitants were created and the landscape started to change its character. Quartz crushing machines, glass-making furnaces, glass polishing machines, mill-races.

Soon after the war the German people living in the place were forced to leave for Germany and in 1953 the villages were razed to the ground with dynamite and bulldozers. Simultaneously at the beginning of the 1950s they installed the first wire barriers that were improved and moved more interior. It was so called “Iron Courtain”, the fence between East and West Europe. Those years the region became depopulated and stayed interweaved only with a net of asphalt roads on which you could see border guards' vans. The turbulent history of this region can be traced even today in slowly disappearing airborne watch towers, ruins of barracks for border soldiers, glass-making machines grown by firs and in the rests of the settlement to be seen less and less year by year.