History of the house No.9

In the Middle Ages, the Prachatice branch of the Golden Route passed here – a trade route from Salzburg and Passau via Bischofsreut to Volary and to Prachatice. The name of the settlement probably dates back to this time, when donkey drivers (carriage animals or drivers of fully laden animals) traveling along the Golden Trail would stop here to rest and water their cattle and horses from troughs – pipes, troughs or gutters – this is where the earlier names of the settlements came from České Trouby, České Žlaby or the German name Böhmisch Röhren.

The settlement was only founded in 1709 by the Duke of Cesky Krumlov as an administrative municipality of the area and also to stop the expansion of the Bishopric of Passau, which at that time was not yet part of Germany and whose territory reached and was inhabited up to the border Mechové potok, and there was a threat that the Passau residents would claim even the desolate territory of České Žlebé. Our hotel also dates from this period, which was built when the settlement was founded as a mountain farm between 1710 and 1712 and is the only preserved house from this first construction. The reconstruction of the hotel, which took place in the years 2014-2017, left the building in its original form and many historical elements.

This highest settlement in the southern part of the Šumava National Park experienced its greatest prosperity, but also its greatest tragedy, in the last century. In the thirties of the last century, over 1,300 inhabitants, mostly of German nationality, lived here. There were four inns, five hotels, five general stores, a post office with telephone and telegraph, a financial guard, a doctor, and dozens of tradesmen and artisans. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, only residents of German nationality remained here. After the Second World War, there was a displacement of the population of German nationality, and since it is “just a few steps” from České Žlebé to Bavaria, it did not want a settlement even in the post-war period. An iron curtain grew up a short distance behind the settlement, and the resettlement of the borderlands practically did not take place here.

One of the legendary smugglers/CIA agents Bohumil Hasil, brother of the even more famous Josef, was buried in the local cemetery. In the post-war years, the post office was abolished and in 1967 the baroque church of St. Anny and gradually most of the houses. In the former administrative village, now a settlement, falling under the municipality of Stožec, only three dozen inhabitants live today. According to documents from the late 1970s, it appears that our house survived the demolition only by a miracle.