Bohumin Audioguides

Bohumin sits at the confluence of the Oder and Olza rivers, five kilometers north of Ostrava, on the Polish border. It has been a junction town for as long as there have been routes through this part of Central Europe: first for trade between Prague and Krakow, then for the Austro-Hungarian railway network, and now for the Czech national rail system, which lists Bohumin as one of its most important junctions. Trains from here reach Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and Berlin. The station is not incidental to Bohumin; it is Bohumin.

The town's history is a compressed version of Central European complexity.

First documented around 1256-1262, it was German-speaking under Hohenzollern rule from 1523, then part of Czechoslovakia after 1920, then briefly annexed by Poland in 1938 after the Munich Agreement, then under Nazi German occupation with forced labor camps operating within its territory, then liberated by Soviet forces on May 1, 1945. The Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, begun in the 14th century in Gothic style, survived most of this. The Sacred Heart Church from 1894 and the Lutheran church from 1901 represent the layers of the town's later history.