PhDr. Leoš Mlčák

* 1948

  • “My grandfather was a high-flier. Various luminaries met at his home – local notables, lawyers and such, and his wife Anna used to cook for them. He was proud of being friends with actors; [Jindřich] Plachta and others would visit him, but I didn’t experience that; that was in the 1930s. They had a cottage in Semetín, and they went there more often after the war. Grandfather had paintings made for him and so on. He planned to relocate to the Šumperk area in the borderland. He moved his shop, machinery, and apprentices and ran his business there for about a year. Then they came and took it all away. They told him to join a cooperative, but he didn’t want to. Eventually, he had to move to Staré Město and ended up working in the graphite mines in Vrbno pod Pradědem [in fact, it was Malé Vrbno]. He was a hunter all the time, and a prankster. He was such a daredevil that he would dump a trailer of coals in front of the officials’ platform the day before the First of May celebrations ever year. They told him: ‘Ludvík, we’ll have to jail you for that!’ They had to clean it up, and he would laugh.” – “Was that in Staré Město?” – “That was in Staré Město pod Sněžníkem, and we were happy there. He moved into this big old burgher house with a huge staircase and hunting trophies. There were big rooms with furniture that [grandpa] had custom-made back in Vsetín. That’s where we spent our holidays during childhood; less often than we did in Bystřička, though when mum was in hospital giving birth, we went to school there for some time. I wasn’t too fond of it, though the house was gorgeous. There was a fountain opposite it, where we used to play; nowadays there are prefab blocks there. I was in awe when I saw the old house’s vault ceilings – I never saw that at home. Grandpa lived a turbulent life and died in 1958. For some time, he even worked as the manager of the Paprsek mountain lodge. He would go about with a horse and a cart; the horse was called Mimina, and when we came there, he let me ride on her back. He had this fly so he could cart the visitors’ luggage.”

  • “I got the article, which was signed with my name, and I was livid. It was an offence to St Adalbert, St John of Nepomuk and many others. In effect, the article said that while all sorts of saints had their statues, the memorials for Red Army and the working class were all but forgotten. Of course, many officials contacted me; of course, I sent disclaimers to wherever I could. Some colleagues even said things such as ‘He says he didn’t write it, but wait and see his career take off from now on.’ The thing is, it must have been written under the guidance of some disinformation experts, as it offended just about everyone: the church, the conservationists, and the historians who studied working class movement and memorials. For me, it was hell on Earth. Every night, I got several phone calls to the effect of ‘Die, you Soviet memorial!’, and that is an example of the ‘kinder’ statements. I was under a lot of stress because asking for an official pardon from the Tribuna – an all-out incendiary, ultra-leftist paper that literally loathed nothing – was a futile effort… I suspected they would send me the pay, and accepting the money – the bargain of Judas – would mean acknowledging my authorship. I rejected the pay and sent it back. I kept on bombarding the Tribuna, asking for a pardon and an explanation. The editor-in-chief was named Kojzar; he had a mistress in Olomouc and used to come there quite often, so maybe they were trying to discredit the local conservation efforts. There were rumours of a new law being drafted, and they wanted to slowly eliminate certain old stuff. You know how they cared for heritage conservation during the Bolshevik era... They wanted to stir up a debate and make a lot of people angry, and they did. It was written professionally; all you could do was just dismiss it completely. They needed someone who was known but not too popular. They didn’t expect that sort of response. Many people who knew me sided with me. I owe huge thanks to Professor Hlobil who knew me well. He made sure that the people in university knew what was going on. Many students didn’t know me, though, and students can be pretty radical, so I was under fire so to speak. Strangely enough, the final outcome was that those premeditated ‘assassinations of culture’ never happened. They realised they had gone too far, and it flamed out. All I achieved was that Mr Kojzar wrote in the next issue: ‘As the author informs us, he is not the author of the article.’ That was it – no pardon. I was living in hell for about two months, you see; I would get letters such as ‘We comrades at the Walter factory in Prague have discussed this, are very annoyed, and will write to the [CPC] Central Committee.’ It affected me – it was my biggest clash with the ruling power.”

  • “I was allowed to go to Mírov; it was a heritage site. I was in such a shock when I came to the local St Margaret’s Church – it was all looted. There was an extra floor added inside where prisoners filed some metal. It was so noisy; they spoke to each other and also, the more noise they made, the more the wardens felt assured that the prisoners were working hard. I walked the corridors and saw the canteen and all that… I didn’t see the dungeons and so on; I didn’t dare ask to be shown – I wasn't sure who I was talking to, and they might as well keep me there... I was shocked and awed. Then I saw the cemetery that had been in use since the 19th century; it was originally a prison for the clergy.”

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    Olomouc, 30.03.2023

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I experienced my biggest clash with the regime in the 1980s

Leoš Mlčák, high school graduation photo, Vsetín, 1967
Leoš Mlčák, high school graduation photo, Vsetín, 1967
zdroj: Archív pamětníka

Leoš Mlčák was born in Velké Losiny on 15 September 1948 as the elder of two sons to Anna Mlčáková and František Mlčák. Mother Anna, née Brňovjáková, came from a farming family in Bystřička and had completed a household management school in Hranice. Father František brewed beer in the Hanušovice brewery. He came from Vsetín and was the son of Ludvík Mlčák, a local slipper maker whose business was nationalised after 1948. Leoš Mlčák graduated from the technical high school of mechanical engineering in Vsetín. He witnessed the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies of August 1968 while serving in the military with an anti-tank squad in Šumperk. He studied art history at the Faculty of Art of the Palacký University in Olomouc and architecture history at the Faculty of Architecture of the CTU in Prague. He worked as a conservation expert in central and northern Moravia, and as such he was in contact with the environment of church secretaries and persecuted clergy. In 1985, the Tribuna newspaper printed an incendiary article aimed against the church heritage in his name; he never found out who actually authored it. Following the Velvet Revolution, the witness conducted business in conservation. From 2002, he worked at the Olomouc Museum of Art as a curator and art historian, first in Olomouc and then in Kroměříž. He has authored many technical publications. He and his wife Jana Vlachynská have raised two daughters, Markéta and Kateřina. The witness was living in Olomouc in 2023.