Our story
St Joseph's House stands on a ridge shaped by mountain schools, the settlers who cleared its forests and the great transformation of Staré Hamry. Some of these stories are documented in chronicles, others live on in legends.
From shelter to a house of encounter
It began as a simple cottage for pilgrims. It lived through the war, confiscation by the communists and restitution, and to this day it has kept its original purpose: to offer people a safe place in the mountains.
1930s
A local hill farmer built a cottage on his meadow on Gruň as a shelter for passers-by and a place for stays of several days in the mountains.
During the Second World War
The cottage was bought by the Ostrava Charita, the Catholic charity, for holidays and convalescent stays for people in need. Even then it was given the name St Joseph's House.
After 1945
Bought with donations from believers for work with young people, the house was officially registered in the name of Miroslav Tělupil, a professor of philosophy. The Dominican theologian Metoděj Habáň, a leading figure of Czech Thomism, invited students here for academic summer weeks and, during the year, for small weekend gatherings. He taught them to think freely, act responsibly and see the beauty of the human spirit and of nature.
1948–1992
After February 1948 the gatherings stopped. In August 1952 Miroslav Tělupil was sentenced to ten years in prison in a trial of a group of Catholic young people, for his “pernicious anti-socialist influence on young people”; he came home after five years. The confiscated lodge was taken over by the Hlubina mine in Ostrava, whose chronicle for 1953 records its first holiday centre for miners on Gruň.
Since 1992
After restitution, Miroslav Tělupil, by then rehabilitated by the courts, handed the house over to the Most a Cesta association, founded in February 1992 for exactly this purpose. He also looked for support for the renovation among friends in Germany. He died in the spring of 1993, a year after the house's new beginning. Since then it has once again served families, schools, communities, courses and people looking for rest in the mountains.
The story of the Tělupil family was recorded by Paměť národa (Memory of Nations) in the recollections of the daughter, Olga Kvapilová. Her father's motto in life was “Serva ordinem et ordo servabit te”: keep order and order will keep you.
Most a Cesta
When the founders of the Most a Cesta association (“Bridge and Way”) set it up in 1992, they put its mission simply: to build bridges and paths towards reconciliation, mutual understanding and friendship that means more than mere tolerance.
That is why St Joseph's House is more than a place to stay. It hosts spiritual retreats, seminars, school trips to the countryside, training courses, community gatherings and family holidays. The homely setting and the shared table give people room to meet without needless hurry.
Programmes for schools and groupsThe land below the ridge
Staré Hamry grew up along the Ostravice river from the 17th century onwards. The mountain landscape was gradually settled by forest clearers and shepherds, while the water drove the hammer mills and later changed the face of the whole village.
For centuries the river divided Moravia and Silesia. In 1638 Count Oppersdorf had a water-powered iron hammer mill built on its bank, the first ironworks of the Frýdek estate. When new hammer mills later went up in Baška, people began calling the ones here the “old hammers” (staré hamry), and the name stuck to the village.
Gruň is an old Wallachian word for a cleared ridge with pastures. The southern slopes fed mountain farms, the northern ones were covered by forest, and a carters' road from Silesia to Slovakia ran across the ridge. Long journeys to the authorities, to church and to school were part of life for the families here.
In 1773 the hill farmer Šimon Tomeček set up a statue of the Virgin Mary by the road, and in 1847 a wooden chapel was added, which began to draw pilgrimages. Today's little Church of Our Lady Help of Christians, built from 1887, is the highest wooden church in the Beskids and remains the natural heart of the ridge.
Three school buildings
Even in the mid-19th century Staré Hamry had no school of its own, and the children were formally assigned to the school in Borová, almost twenty kilometres away. In 1852 makeshift classrooms were therefore set up on Gruň as well, and teaching gradually moved into buildings of its own.
Conditions were hard. In 1876, 122 children were assigned to the school on Gruň, but only some of them attended regularly. Some set off as much as two hours before lessons began.
1872/1873–1911
The first school on Gruň was housed in a rented wooden cottage, no. 234, opposite today's Charbulák. Children from scattered homesteads walked for up to two hours, and the teacher was shared with the school in Řečice. In 1911 the building burned down.
From September 1911
The new one-room wooden school was built closer to the little Church of Our Lady and opened in September 1911. A year later the teacher Antonín Lang started the school chronicle here; during the occupation he was arrested by the Gestapo and died in Auschwitz. In September 1927, on his sixtieth birthday, Petr Bezruč came to see the school.
From 1931
The third school building went up within a few months in 1931. It had three classrooms and 112 pupils when it opened. In 1933 it was named the Bezruč School, and it was often described as the highest school in Silesia.
Teaching on Gruň continued until 1973, when the school was closed for lack of children. Both the 1911 wooden school and the brick Bezruč School still stand near the little church today.
Guests of the ridge
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, day trippers discovered the ridge. The inns on Gruň welcomed a poet as well as artists, and the slopes here found their way into Czech poetry.
The lodge described as the oldest mountain lodge in the Beskids bears the name of Hanka Weliczková, who sold spirits, bacon and bryndza sheep's cheese to travellers from her cottage on the ridge. According to the story, it was a judge who gave her the nickname “švarná”, meaning comely. After a fire in 1904 the Pícha couple built a hikers' shelter here, the first Czech mountain business in Silesia.
Petr Bezruč came to Gruň from 1908 onwards, and at Švarná Hanka he wrote about ten poems, Písně z Gruně (Songs from Gruň). During the First World War, after his release from prison, he found refuge here as a caretaker. He later dedicated the poem Turistům na Gruni (To the Hikers on Gruň) to the Charbulák family.
After the First World War, the war veteran Bohumír Charbulák opened an inn, and at the end of the 1920s he expanded it into a mountain hotel, today described as the oldest mountain hotel in the Beskids. Guests on the ridge included the conductor Rafael Kubelík and the actor Hugo Haas.
Staré Hamry and Šance
The decision to build a drinking water reservoir was made between 1952 and 1954. Of the seven reservoirs and several variants considered, it was Šance that was finally built, with an embankment dam 65 metres high and 342 metres long.
The project was included in the investment plan in 1964 and completed in 1969. A large part of the original centre of Staré Hamry disappeared under the water, including houses, shops and services, and the railway came to an end too: on 11 January 1965 the last train ran from Ostravice to Bílá, bearing the sign “That's how it is, we're taking the last train to Bílá”. Within ten years the population fell from more than two thousand to just under a thousand.
A new centre grew up at Samčanka. People carried crosses and small religious monuments away from the places due to be flooded; some of them found a new home by the little church on Gruň. Above the water stayed the Church of St Henry, with cast-iron crosses from the local ironworks and a memorial to Maryčka Magdónová by the cemetery wall, a reminder of the fate that Petr Bezruč set right here in Staré Hamry. The reservoir still supplies the Ostrava region with drinking water.
Discover places of interest in the areaFrom the memory of the region
These tales belong to the memory of the region and have been passed down here for generations. They are not historically documented events: real places and people mingle in them with motifs handed down from one generation to the next.
The Beskids were once a refuge for outlaws, and the best known of them, Ondráš of Janovice, is said to have been outlawed after helping his father escape from the prison at Hukvaldy. His band is said to have roamed both banks of the Ostravice, standing up for the poor against the lords.
Legends place Ondráš's hideouts and buried treasure around Lysá hora. The historical core of the story ends in 1715, when Ondráš was killed by his companion Juráš; everything after that was shaped by folk imagination over the generations.
A young shepherd is said to have found a stone below Súlov that shone like a jewel. When he lifted it out of the ground, a mighty stream burst from the rock and rushed down towards the hammer-mill settlements.
The wild water is said to have calmed only once the unlucky shepherd was buried by the spring. In its own way, the legend explains the power of the mountain river, which for centuries gave the region its living and at the same time commanded respect.
Old tales say that a great lake lies deep inside Lysá hora. One day its walls will break and the water will flood the land below the mountain. Other stories place an army of sleeping Silesian knights underground, ready to ride out to help people in their darkest hour.
The caves are also said to hide treasure guarded by a snake wearing a small golden crown. People tell, too, of a hermit on the summit and of a hole so deep that a stone dropped into it was heard only after a long while.
According to legend, the Šipka cave in Štramberk is home to tiny guardians of treasure and the start of a secret passage that leads all the way to Radhošť. In folk tales the underground linked distant places and offered shelter in times of danger.
Another tale recalls a sudden cloudburst that is said to have saved the townspeople from Tatar raiders. Tradition also traces the baking of Štramberk ears, the local spiced pastry, back to this event.
According to one version of the story, a border guard murdered by smugglers was buried beneath the cross. Smugglers' paths ran through the mountains where Silesia, Moravia and the former Kingdom of Hungary met, and salt and tobacco above all were carried along them.
Real clashes between smugglers and the revenue guards did sometimes end tragically. Which of them gave the place its name, however, can no longer be said for certain.
Tradition has it that the righteous will gather at the precipice on Súlov at the end of time. Deep inside the mountain, they say, lies a treasure guarded by the mysterious King of the Beskids.
A poor highlander is said to have tried to dig it up on Christmas Eve. No sooner had he struck the ground than a terrible storm broke. He went home without the treasure, but knowing that some places are not meant to be taken by force.
Sources and further reading
The history of the house draws on materials from the Most a Cesta association. Information about Gruň, its schools and the reservoir is based on municipal documents and articles by local chroniclers.
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We will get back to you as soon as we can.
