They transported the chapel to Pardubice on a semi-trailer two kilometers away

The chapel now stands closer to the village in an area where a cross commemorating the victims of the Seven Years’ War and memorials to the victims of car accidents is placed under the lime trees. Preparations for her transfer began about a year ago. It meant getting money, finding a specialized company that wasn’t intimidated by a complex problem, then designing and calculating the entire event.

“The construction work itself started a fortnight ago, when it was necessary to prepare the chapel for transport and also to adjust the place where it landed. We had to separate the building from the foundations in the ground and insert a steel frame under it,” described René Růžička from the Ulas company from the Ústí Region, which has been working on similar projects since 2015. It was her fourteenth move.

“It’s such an irony of fate. I was five years old when the church in Most was moved. And I went there to look. But never in my life would I have thought that I would do something like this professionally. And it happened. Probably the largest object we moved was a hundred and forty-tonne chapel in southern Moravia. She was moving on two cranes. Originally, it stood in a bend near the road and cars often crashed into it,” Růžička continued, according to whom every such event is complex, especially in terms of logistics.

“Everything has to be thought out so that the chapel remains whole, even if it rises. This is what we are always most afraid of. This chapel is two hundred years old and we don’t know what condition it is in. We believe that in good. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have gone into it,” remarked Růžička shortly before the start of the transfer.

The chapel, together with the metal frames that bound it, weighed twenty-five tons. Although everything was carefully planned, there was a delay.

“On site, it turned out that the chapel has a high center of gravity, so we had to additionally secure it with additional iron elements. We welded two reinforcements and then it was no problem,” added Růžička.

Originally, the chapel was to be moved by the Directorate of Roads and Highways. However, the safety audit said that the chapel does not interfere with traffic on the road. And so it did not want to finance a complex operation.

“But the chapel was right next to the road. We wouldn’t even be able to take care of it and maintain it,” explained Mayor Josef Kosel (Citizens’ Satisfied Life). The project costing approximately one million crowns was also realized thanks to the support of the Pardubice Region, which provided the village with a grant of 600,000 crowns from the Rural Renewal Program.

“We also announced a public collection, which now has over fifty thousand crowns. What is not collected will be paid by the municipality,” said the mayor, according to whom, of course, there were voices that the move was unnecessarily expensive. That, for example, the chapel could be demolished and rebuilt in a new place.

“But that loses its meaning. It would never be the original, two-century-old chapel anymore,” added the mayor. He was proved right by the onlookers, who rewarded the builders with a round of applause after the building was placed in its new place.

Chapel of wood and stone. They completed an architecturally unique building near Brno

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