Existuje cukrovarnická kulturní krajina? – hledání „neviditelného“ historického dědictví

Is There a Sugar Mill Cultural Landscape? – Searching For an "Invisible" Historical Heritage

Jaromír Kolejka, Karel Kirchner, Tomáš Krejčí, Eva Nováková, Jakub Trojan

In: Geografické informácie (Geographical Information), Ročník (Volume) 28, Číslo (Issue) 2, 2024, p. 48-65, ISSN 1337-9453

DOI: 10.17846/GI.2024.28.2.48-65

Abstract

The territory of the Czech Republic belongs to the traditional and, in the past, the most important production and export areas of beet sugar in the world. The cultivation of sugar beet has significantly changed the landscape of warm climatic regions. From the middle of the 19th century suitable plain areas of meadows and forests were plowed very quickly. Sugar mills and their accompanying infrastructure were built on the outskirts of towns and villages or in the open countryside (a total of almost 400 sugar factories in the territory of present Czech Republic). The needs of the sugar mills motivated the engineering industry to produce machinery and the mining industry to extract used raw materials. The contribution aims to present a maximally objective method of searching for sugar production landscapes of the past and present according to specific criteria supported by spatial data. On the one hand, these are based on natural conditions suitable for sugar beet cultivation, verified areas of past and present beet cultivation and locations of all documented sugar mills, including knowledge of the length of their period of influence on the surrounding landscape. With the assistance of GIS technology, the likely areas of occurrence of the sugar mill landscapes throughout the territory of the Czech Republic were identified, including the determination of the length of the period of their influence on the surroundings. Subsequent field research will look for other indications of the sugar mill landscape in the pre-selected area. These will be used to specify the territory of historical and recent sugar mill landscapes.

Keywords: sugar beet, natural conditions, production experience, production areas, sugar landscape heritage indicators

FULL TEXT