Protection of the Deserted Landscapes in the Czech-Austrian Borderlands
Abstract: The borderland landscapes abandoned after the Expulsion of Germans and the construction of the Iron Curtain are an integral part of the cultural heritage. Even after eight decades, relics of cultivation, landscaping, and construction are still visible and often they present the only remains of the era preceding the World War II. Yet they are not protected and there is no methodology within the Czech academia that would address the preservation of these deserted settlements. From the perspective of heritage conservation, the protection of such landscapes is challenging: individual relics are usually neither rare nor valuable, but together they constitute the identity of the depopulated regions. The Czech legal framework provides several different measures, mainly in the area of the protection of nature and the landscape (Act No. 114/1992), cultural heritage conservation (Act No. 20/1987), or spatial planning (Decree No. 500/2006). The paper, therefore, aims to identify the tools currently applicable for the case of deserted landscapes and to assess the possibilities of their implementation on an example of a study area near the Czech-Austrian border, which is delimited by the settlements Dolní Dvořiště – Malonty – Cetviny (deserted town). In this regional study, first, the cultural values and key driving forces of the landscape transformation are summarized and subsequently, the potentially applicable protection tools are presented and discussed.
