Litovel (German Littau) is a town in the Olomouc District in the Olomouc Region, 18 km northwest of Olomouc on the Morava River, whose six branches give Litovel a specific character. The city is therefore also called Haná Venice. One of the branches, Nečíz, flows directly under the town hall tower and the whole square. Approximately 9,700 inhabitants live here, the cadastral area is 46.39 km². It is located at an altitude of 233 m above sea level at the foot of the Drahanská Highlands.
By plane
The nearest airport is Brno or Ostrava airport.
By
rail
Litovel is the local railway junction.
By car
Litovel
is an important road junction. It is located on the D35 motorway running
from Hradec Kralove to Olomouc.
Litovel town hall
The town hall is located on the Přemysl Otakar
square, originally the building served as the mayor's residence and then
as a manor residence. In 1557, the city bought it and established a town
hall here. In 1572, it was rebuilt and a 65.4 m high tower was added,
standing directly above the Morava branch, which makes it the highest
bridge on the Morava river.
Plague Column
A monument to the
plague epidemic of 1714, it was created by Václav Render in 1724. The
plague column is decorated with sculptures of the Virgin Mary, St.
Pauline, St. Rosalie and in the corners of St. Charles Borromeo, St.
Rocha, St. Sebastian and St. František Xaversky.
The city walls
The remains of the city walls. After the Thirty Years' War, they were
repaired, which is reminiscent of a stone with the year 1691, embedded
in the walls.
Lang's house
One-story townhouse in the city's
heritage zone on the corner of Přemysl Otakar Square and Masarykova
Street. The building is a cultural monument of the Czech Republic. This
oldest preserved Lithuanian Orthodox house was built in 1542 in the
Renaissance style as a representative residence of the wealthy draper
and city councilor Lorenz Lang.
Nečíz waterworks
Nečíz is a
branch of the Morava River, flowing through the core of the city
approximately from west to east, with a channel that has been adjusted
several times, today it is largely covered. This urban structure was
already part of the medieval water system of the city. The Nečíz flows
under, among other things, several important buildings, among them under
the former Municipal Mill or the tower of the Town Hall. One of the
city's attractions is the descent to the Nečíz water level via a
classicist staircase directly from the area of Přemysl Otakar Square,
which is a protected technical monument.
Jan Opletal Gymnasium
building
The neo-Renaissance style building was designed by the
professor of technology in Brno, architect Josef Bertl. The construction
was completed on September 10 and 11, 1904. Dr. František Nerada, the
first director of the gymnasium, describes the building in the following
way in his article from 1904: "The artistic decoration of the school
building is real": "Above the main entrance, the coat of arms of the
city, above the first floor, where there is a bust of Comenius, the
emblems of the Czech lands, and above the second floor, next to plastic
ornaments alternately depicting the Czech crown and linden bushes, there
are images of flowers characteristic of Litovelsko in special fields.
However, the main decoration consists of four large paintings located on
the main facade on both sides of the main entrance, which are provided
with inscriptions describing their meaning. Each painting, which depicts
larger-than-life bust-sized figures, is 4 m long and a meter high. They
are made, as well as all the pictorial decorations outside the building,
in colored burnt clay, covered with pitch, so that they resist the
weather and become indestructible."
Decorative mosaics on the
facade of the gymnasium
Wenceslas II elevates Litovel to a market
village (in 1291)
John of Luxembourg grants city rights to Lithuania
(1327)
Jiří z Poděbrad, founder of the golden age of Litovla
The
Genius of Slavs blesses the revived Lithuanians (year 1899)
Swedish plate
The monument to the conquest of Litovla by the Swedes
during the Thirty Years' War was built in 1652. Stone cannonballs are
walled up in it. The translation of the German inscription on the plaque
reads:
"In the year 1643, on June 19, the main Swedish army besieged
the city of Litovel. In these places, she heavily bombarded the city and
then took it by assault. After that, she blew up three tall and strong
towers and both gates, scattered the ramparts, demolished the ditch and
rampart, and pitifully destroyed the entire city at the enemy's will.
Saint John's Bridge
The stone bridge over the Morava River was
completed around 1592 and is one of the oldest surviving bridges in the
Czech Republic and the oldest in the territory of Moravia. In the middle
of the bridge is a statue of St. John of Nepomuk.
After the
floods in 1997, an extensive reconstruction of the bridge was carried
out. In 2014, an even older bridge over the Nečíz stream was uncovered.
Churches and chapels
Church of St. James and Philip
St. Mark's
Church
Hus's choir
St. George's Chapel
Churches and chapels
in urban areas
Chapel of the Coronation of the Virgin Mary in New
Village
Chapel of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in
Nasobůrky
Chapel of St. Anna in Unčovice
Chapel of St. Cyril and
Methodius in Březovém
Chapel of St. Florian in Chořelice
Chapel of
St. Floriana in Víska
Chapel of St. Floriana in Třech Dvory
Chapel
of St. Michal in Myslechovice
Church of the Holy Trinity in
Rozvadovice
Chapel in Savín
Church of Saint Francis Serafinský in
Chudobín
Orthodox Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in Chudobín
Church of St. Cyril and Methodius of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church in
Chudobín
The name of the town is reliably attested for the first time in 1391
in the form of L'utovel and perhaps derives from the presumed male
personal name L'utov ("L'ut's son"). The form with a vowel and instead
of the umlaut ’u became established during the 15th century. From a
morphological point of view, the ending -el is particularly interesting,
in which the consonant l is considered epenthetic (insertion) and could
have arisen from a hypothetical previous combination of the consonant v
with the possessive suffix -ja. The expression *L'utovja vьsь would thus
mean "L'ut's village". This would correspond to the Latin version of the
city name Luthouia found in sources from 1272, 1382 and 1465.
Epententic l is typical for East Slavic and South Slavic languages,
however, it is also rarely preserved in some local names in Bohemia,
such as Davle or Třebovle, or in Poland, such as Drogowle or Witowle. In
these names, the ending -vle developed from the original -vl. According
to this analogy, the current form would therefore arise from the
nominative L'utovle (or L'utovlě), whose genitive or locative would also
be L'utovle (Litovle), from which the new nominative L'utovel (Litovel)
would later arise. However, the flaw in this theory regarding the name
Litovel is the fact that there is no evidence of its earlier form ending
in -vle.
The name of the city is feminine in literary Czech, but
in East Moravian and Silesian dialects it is masculine.
According to dendrochronological research, the time of
the town's origin dates back to the years 1252–1256. The city was
founded by Přemysl Otakar II. The first written mention of Litovel
comes from the years 1270–1272, when the name Luthowl appears in the
documents of the Hradisko monastery, but the first authentic written
mention of the founding of the town dates back to 1287, it is a
document stored in the town archives.
In 1291 King Wenceslas
II. granted Litovel the right to brew and the right to go, and
Litovel was promoted to a market village. In 1327, King John of
Luxembourg allowed the city to build walls. Nineteen years later,
the town joined the trio with the towns of Uničov and Olomouc, and a
year later, on November 1, 1437, Litovel was attacked by Hussite
troops.
In 1572, a typical town hall tower was built. In
1724, a Marian plague column by the sculptor Václav Render (also the
author of the Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc) was built on the
square to commemorate the plague epidemic.
In connection with
the municipal reform, in 1850 Litovel became a district town, in
1869 a peasant bank was established here, and in 1899 the Czechs won
the municipal elections, which brought Litovel under Czech
administration. Four years later, the Rolnický Brewery in Litovel
was founded. In 1901, the pride of the Czech city administration
became a real school, whose Neo-Renaissance building rises above the
surface of the pond in Smetanovy sady (today the Jan Opletal Grammar
School).
On July 7, 1997, a thousand-year-old water came, the
city was hit by a catastrophic flood and was practically completely
under water, many houses were destroyed (immediately or due to
broken statics). In 2017, the mayor Zdeněk Potužák stated that due
to the problem with the purchase of land, flood control measures
will be completed in 10 years at the earliest. On June 9, 2004, the
city was destroyed by a tornado (grade F3).
During
construction work in the summer of 2014, archaeologists uncovered
the oldest preserved functional stone bridge in Moravia on Přemysl
Otakar Square. The bridge stands above Nečíz, one of the branches of
the Morava River, which flows below the square. The original paving
on it has also been preserved. It is 8.5 meters long and 7 meters
wide. Archaeologists date the origin of the bridge to the turn of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
In March 2020,
Litovel was closed due to the high number of people infected during
the covid-19 pandemic.
The Protected Landscape Area of the Litovel Pomeranian Mountains
extends around the city. It was declared a protected landscape area in
1990.
There are significant floodplain and swamp forests in the
PLA. Most of the territory of the PLA is located in the valley
floodplain of the Morava River with floodplain forests, meadows,
wetlands, pools and flooded sand pits. Other biotopes in the territory
of the PLA are thermophilic oak forests in the northern part and oak and
beech forests. The natural species composition prevails in the forests.
The non-regulated natural meandering flow of the Morava River is of
supra-regional importance.
Biocenters and nature reserves
Supraregional Biocenter "Vrapač - Doubrava" (1,100 ha)
The
supra-regional biocenter "Arms of the Morava River" also called
"Litovelské Pomoraví - luh" (1600 ha).
Regional biocentres: "Pňovický
luh" (80 ha), Třesín (120 ha).
A total of 25 small-area specially
protected areas (SPAs): 2 NPR, 1 NPP, 13 PR, 11 PP.