What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 22 October 2022.

Kolínská was built in 1911.

It was founded as a royal city, probably in the mid-1200s, by Přemysl Otakar II, because what wasn’t.

There’s even a fresco in the Town Hall there, showing him supervising the construction (picture taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kolin_town_hall_fresco_1.png).

In 1421, the city was captured by the Orebite Hussites (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2022/12/04/prague-3-day-107-orebitska/). They celebrated this by burning down the Dominican monastery.

The Táborite priest Bedřich ze Strážnice built a castle on the site of the monastery in 1437. In 1458, he sold it to Jiří z Poděbrad (who is coming up in a few days).

It seems that every city in Bohemia had multiple devastating fires in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Kolín, not wanting to be outdone, managed to have them in 1579, 1587, 1589, 1597 and 1617, interspersed with bouts of plague in 1568, 1582, 1598 *and* 1613.

On 18 June 1757, the Battle of Kolín took place. The Austrians under Count von Daun defeated the Prussians under Frederick the Great, causing him to give up the siege of Prague and his plans to march on Vienna.

Kolín was nearly destroyed by yet another goddamn fire in 1796.

When the Prague-Olomouc railway came into being in 1845, Kolín began to become industrialised, to the point that it was, by the start of the 20th century, known as “český Manchester”.

During WW2, Kolín’s refinery was used to produce Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, for Nazi concentration camps. And this in a city with a long Jewish tradition.

The city was bombed four times by the Allies.

Kolín remains a significant industrial centre, including what was Toyota Peugeot Citroën back in 2007 (when I taught its staff English for all of six weeks), but is, since 2021, just plain Toyota.

Famous Kolínites include composer František Kmoch (1848-1912), Bohemian-French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846), renowned photographer of Prague Josef Sudek (1896-1976) and Václav Morávek (1904-42), figure of the anti-Nazi resistance and a national hero.

And Miloš Zeman, who I think we can all agree is the best president called Miloš Zeman that this country has ever had.

Across the pond, Czech migrants founded Kolin, Louisiana in 1914.

There’s also a Kolín, Montana, whose origins are rather hard to Google given that Montana is also the name of a bicycle store in The Original Kolín.

Finally, Kolín is not to be confused with Kolín nad Rýnem (on the Rhine), which is Cologne / Köln in Germany.