A ‘příčka’ is… well, all kinds of things. Take your pick from ‘crossbar’, ‘rung’, spoke’, ‘dividing wall’, ‘partition’, or ‘crosspiece’, and feel free to add your own.
However, the street stretches a good bit further west than that, so either this story is not entirely true, or someone involved in the construction decided to forget about the original meaning (see also: any country with the word ‘Democratic’ in its name).
There’s greenery around here, and there no doubt used to be a lot more of it, especially as none of these streets I’ve been covering lately seem to have sprung up earlier than Czechoslovakia did.
This particular street was built on a plateau near the forest.
One nice thing about forests and plateaus is that they have a decent amount of air – or ‘vzduch’, *or*, deriving an adjective from a noun, they are (making them all feminine to make this post flow a bit better) ‘vzdušná’.
Dobřejovice is a village in Prague-East, about 18 km south-east of the centre of the city. The earliest extant information of it in writing is from 1309.
Větrov, deriving from ‘vítr’ (wind), is a name popularly given to hills which are bare of vegetation and quite, yes, windy. This area was once called Větrov for that reason.
At other times (e.g. in 1868), Sulice was part of the Karlín political district, and, at others (e.g. 1884 and 1921), it was part of the Vinohrady political district. These three are not exactly neighbours, so this is something I will have to look into later.
Nowadays, Sulice has a population of about 2,600. In 2019, it gained a rather fetching flag and coat of arms.
Ľudovít Velislav Štúr was born in Uhrovec, a village near Trenčín, Slovakia, in 1815. His father, Samuel, had moved from Trenčín to take up a position as a teacher.
Originally educated by his father, Ľudovít moved to Ráb (present-day Győr, Hungary) in 1827 to study at the gymnasium. A Slovak-born teacher, Leopold Petz, noticed his talents and encouraged him to take an interest in Slavic literature.
In 1829, Štúr enrolled in the Evangelical Lyceum in Bratislava, where his older brother Karol (1811-1851) was already a student.
At the time, this was the only school in (what was then classified as) Hungary with a department for the Czech and Slovak languages, and one of the teachers was a renowned professor, Juraj Palkovič.
The students had founded their own Czech-Slovak Society around the time of Štúr’s arrival; naturally, he became a member. In 1835 – a year after he completed his studies at the school – he became its chairman.
On 24 April 1836, Štúr led a walk to Devín, where he made a speech about the history of Great Moravia, and officially adopted the middle name Velislav.
In the same year, he became an honorary deputy of Professor Palkovič, and lectured on Polish and Czech grammar and history. He was already in correspondence with people we’ve met before on our street travels, including Josef Jungmann (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/09/15/prague-1-day-111-jungmannova/).
However, in 1837, the Czech-Slovak Society was banned – as were all student associations and societies in Hungary – due to student unrest.
In 1838, Štúr enrolled in the University of Halle, where he studied theology, philosophy, history and linguistics. Completing his studies in 1840, his journey back to Hungary took him through Bohemia, where he met many Czech nationalists.
Once back in Hungary, Slovaks were not in a good position, and attempts to promote their language and culture were discouraged. In 1842, this compelled Štúr to issue the Slovenský prestolný prosbopis, a petition sent to the Royal Court in Vienna to complain about national persecution.
Very unhelpfully, the Royal Court sent the petition to Buda, where its demands were, unsurprisingly, rejected.
In 1843, Štúr announced his idea to unite Catholic and Evangelical Catholics through a unified literary language, based on the Central Slovak dialect.
A year later, he finally gained permission to publish Slovenskje národňje noviny, a Slovak-language newspaper; he also published both Nárečja Slovenskuo alebo potreba písaňja v tomto nárečí (‘The Slovak dialect or, the necessity of writing in this dialect’) and Nauka reči Slovenskej, a grammar.
In 1847, Štúr entered the Hungarian Diet, held in Bratislava, representing Zvolen. However, the events of 1848 led to the closure of both the Diet and the newspaper.
The next few years were also difficult for Štúr personally: his brother Karol and his father died in quick succession in 1851 – leaving Štúr to take care of seven nephews and nieces – and then, in 1853 a close female friend, Adela Ostrolúcka (pictured), died, closely followed by his mother.
On 22 December 1855, Štúr was on a hunting trip when, while attempting to jump over a stream, his rifle accidentally went off and shot him in the leg. He died on 12 January 1856; he was forty.
The list of streets and squares named after him in Slovakia is, expectedly, long, and the annual awards given by the President of Slovakia are called the Order of Ľudovít Štúr.
Keeping things very up to date, Štúr, the film, came out earlier this year and had its Prague premiere less than a month ago: https://www.cinemart.cz/filmy/stur/.
Those of you who familiar with the Prague-Budapest train route will have seen his name when stopping at Štúrovo, on the Slovak-Hungarian border.
Those of you old enough to remember Czechoslovakia and 50-crown notes may have seen his face a fair bit from 1987 onwards.
And those of you with an interest in the night sky may know about minor planet 3393, which is also called Štúr (3395 keeps the Czechoslovak theme, by the way – it’s called Jitka).
U Vodotoku (which we’d translate as something like ‘watercourse’) is a pond on the Zátišský stream, created in the 1960s at the same time as many surrounding housing estates.
Given the dates, we have to assume that the street was named after the various waterways round here, and the pond was then named after the street.
Having started to suffer from a lack of water, it was renovated in 2006, removing silt and improving its suitability as a refuge for animals in the aquatic ecosystem.
Further renovations were required in 2024, partially because people feeding the birds have also led to a large colony of rats, and their system of burrows.
In 2007, 97 species of plants and 150 species of butterflies were found to be growing (or flying, if you’re a butterfly) around here.
Vlasta Židlický was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and, during WW2, was a member of the illegal Union of Friends of the Soviet Union (Svazu přátel Sovětského svazu).
Due to his opposition to the Nazi occupation, he was executed on 6 February 1944.
‘Koupadla’ are ‘baths’, as in the outdoor ones you would go to swim in, rather than the indoor ones that you want to lie in for hours on end after having a bit of a day of it at work (I’m in that place today). See also: ‘koupaliště’.
A ‘propust’ is a sluice, i.e. a sliding gate or other device used to control the flow of water. It can also be translated as, yes, ‘floodgate’.
This is relevant here, because the street is (kind of) located between the swimming baths discussed yesterday on https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2026/02/22/prague-4-day-317-u-lazni/ and the Lhotka Stream, which will no doubt get a bit more coverage when we do What’s in a Prague 12 Street Name.
(Approximate start date: let’s not think that far ahead)
‘Lázně’ (plural) would translate as ‘spa’, ‘watering place’ or ‘health resort’ (all singular). You will most likely know this from trips to Karlovy Vary (hotel view from summer 2021, and therefore my first night away from home for about ten months, below).
Back in Lhotka, the street name is a reference to the local outdoor swimming pool. The swimming pool’s website says it operated in the 1970s and 1980s, but the fact that the street has had this name since its inception in 1938 suggests it goes back a bit longer than that.
Following a successful petition, Prague 4 bought the area back in 2014. Within a year, renovation work had begun, and the pools reopened to visitors in 2018 (there’ve been a few renovations since too).
Unsurprisingly, they don’t do the non-summer months, as evidenced by this pic from 15 February.
It’s not clear when the village was founded, but we know that it was exempt from taxes for a time. This could be the source of its name – in old Czech, a ‘lhota’ is a relief, liberation or freedom.
There was also a fortress in Lhotka, but the last time this was mentioned with the present tense attached to it was in 1368.
Around 1900, Lhotka had a large estate. We’ll no doubt get onto the remants of this in future posts; today, Lhotka is mainly about the villas and panel blocks.
Ve Lhotce is the home of the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace (Kostel Panny Marie Královny míru), built in the modern constructivist style in 1937.
