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Fig. 8.1
The Sudetenland in the Czech Republic
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compositional elements to clarify the landscape memory? How useful is knowledge
about the landscape memory?
The authors try to answer these questions on the micro-regional spatial scale,
in case studies focused on several types of rural landscapes in the Czech-German
borderland, the Sudetenland (Fig. 8.1). This area, with its unique history and “con-
troversial” identity (Balej & Andel, 2008), is studied at two essentially different
stages of its development: (1) a period of relatively minor changes to the land-
scape and (2) a period of major changes to the landscape. By comparison with other
areas in the Czech Republic, landscape changes were much more pronounced and
extensive in the Sudetenland. Additionally, there was a marked concentration of the
driving forces that determined this dynamic development.
The landscape in the period of relatively minor changes follows up on the
Baroque landscape consolidated from the end of the Seventeenth century onwards,
which displays a harmony between people and nature. Agricultural activity changes
in the course of the Eighteenth century. Agricultural production intensifies, fallow-
ing is replaced by fertilisation, and the rotation of crops becomes an established
practice. As fallowing is abandoned, the acreage of fields increases over time by
up to 50%. The deforestation process culminates, differentiation between meadows
and pastures occurs (with regular two-cut management), land reclamation is applied
(through canals with sluice gates) and the sacralisation of the landscape is com-
pleted (through small-scale sacral architecture, such as wayside columns, stations
of the Cross, wayside crosses, crucifixes, chaplets, and pictures of saints). Efforts
to reverse the shrinking of forests, particularly through reforesting thin deciduous
forests with coniferous species, reach their zenith and result in pine and spruce
monocultures.
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