Uhelná is a municipality in the Rychleby Mountains in northern Moravia. For some it is a remote region on the Czech Republic’s border with Poland, for others it is a place to live, build ties within the community and create new traditions.  

A number of active citizens from Uhelná and the surrounding villages, i.e. people who are trying to move the region forward, have come together into what might be called a core team. After a year of meeting over coffee at the Tančírna, a cultural/community center in Račí Valley, they came up with a novel plan: to create a local folk costume. 

Marie Krajplová, the head and heart of the project, moved to the region 12 years ago. She organizes cultural events and extracurricular activities for children. She has a structured approach to building community ties, a flair for communicating with people and is perceptive to the needs of local residents, because she is at home here, too. 

The core team’s goals are clear: to create a single piece of fabric that defines a sense of belonging to the region, and to involve the broadest and most varied group of people from the region as possible. In March 2023, they submitted a grant application to Via Foundation, and just one month later they began implementing their plans.  

The months that followed were busy: the team members traveled together to the Danzinger family’s indigo dyeing and block printing facility in Olešnice, and they visited farms where plants are grown to produce fabrics. They asked the staff of the municipality’s archives and museum to give lectures on the history of folk costumes and fabrics in the Rychleby Mountains. A Christmas concert was held in the church to promote the idea. A group of nuns also visited to tell them about fabric production in the region during the communist era. And, alongside all these activities, community members met to actually create the regional piece of fabric.

Nine months after the core team set out to make their dream a reality, the members are able to say – with relief, joy, and emotion – that they got hundreds of people excited about their idea. The core team has grown to include dozens of new active citizens, and mayors, schools and retirement homes have gotten on board with varied activities. “All of us on the team are most proud of the fact that people across villages have connected,” says Marie Krajplová. And she adds that the idea that was created to build community may eventually bring jobs and livelihoods to people in the region in the future.  

The ways in which various local actors have gotten involved is inspiring for anyone who has ever embarked on community building activities. Children from the Javorník extracurricular art & music school and the preschool in Uhelná have put on theater performances. The parish in Uhelná lent the church as a space for concerts, while the municipalities of Uhelná, Bernartice and Vlčice provided space for workshops. During the fabric creation process, it turned out that the process of indigo dyeing with block printing required more space than had been planned, and there were days when even two floors of the municipality clubhouse in Uhelná were not enough for dyeing and drying fabrics. But these unanticipated obstacles actually enabled the team to connect with even more people.

Overall, they created more than 100 indigo block printed scarves and tried out 14 different techniques. People learned to sew, crochet, and some even tested weaving methods. At first, most of the participants were children, but gradually whole families started to join in. The project touched the lives of elderly residents in the community in a big way. In Uhelna alone, senior citizens make up half of the population and most of them live alone. Even those who were accustomed to staying at home joined in and are eager to continue gathering together.