Textile Tradition

Contemporary Brno encompasses an area which exceeds that covered by the medieval city many times over. It is a cosmopolitan centre, pulsing with culture, science, and modern technology. Its cultural heritage draws tourists from home and abroad. They come to discover the historic core and the jewels of modern architecture adorning its suburbs, primarily built by the 20th century’s textile magnates. And yet this all might have turned out differently. Brno could easily have grown to become just another middle-class regional town. 

As late as the mid-19th century, Brno was still primarily a local economic hub, enclosed within its city walls (torn down in the 1850s and 60s), a medieval town with a traditional manufacturing structure reliant on artisanal production subject to guild control. The town’s turning point arises from a combination of several factors: the Habsburg monarchy’s unfavourable situation following a succession of military defeats, the mercantilist beliefs of leading figures in economic life, and the stubborn nature of Maria Theresa.  

Military defeat as impulse  

For the Austrian monarchy, losing its war against Prussia meant forfeiting its most advanced economic centre, namely Silesia. This forced it to look around for a territory that might be developed as a potential substitute. Among the suitable localities was Brno, particularly thanks to its favourable position as a traditional market town located close to Vienna on the network of Reichsstraße (Imperial Roads). For the development of large entrepreneurial ventures, it was essential that water courses – like the Svitava, Svratka, and Ponávka rivers, as well as various millraces – flowed through the city and its suburbs. These would supply the power to drive machinery. We are dealing with a period in which the most advantageous economic investment was in the textile industry, and so this is where governments and other institutions directed their targeted support. In the mid-18th century an Imperial-Royal Factory Inspectorate, also known as the Manufacturing Office, and the joint-stock Lehenbank (Loan Bank) or Půjčovní banka as it was popularly called, were established in the city. These institutions supported wool entrepreneurs and foreign experts bringing their know-how from the Austrian Netherlands, and these individuals in turn worked to open the first manufactory of fine broadcloth, which began production in January 1764. It was based on the experience from operating this factory, which had been rented by a group of entrepreneurs headed by Johann Leopold Köffiller, that the fame of Brno’s woollen mills was built. It is important to remember two other contributing factors to the development of the woollen industry: the issuing of the Patent of Toleration and the abolition of serfdom in 1781, which released the rural population from their ties to the land.  

Woollen superpower with social challenges  

Over the course of the 18th century, Brno became a genuine woollen superpower, a development which went hand-in-hand with a headlong construction boom. New buildings for factory operations and workers’ housing needs spontaneously gave form to Brno’s suburbs. The industrial chimneys of the textile factories and the constant racket of the looms became dominant features of the city, which started to be known as the ‘Moravian (or Austrian) Manchester’. Alongside the upsurge in construction came social problems, stemming from the atrocious housing conditions and the poor hygiene and safety conditions in factories. Child labour, tuberculosis, inhumanly long shifts, and unequal relations between employees and employers were a feature not a bug. In terms of exports and growth in industrial production, however, Brno flourished right through until the 1870s. The auspicious development of Brno’s woollen industry was interrupted, however, by the two world wars and finished for good by the period of nationalisation and delimitation in the 1950s and 60s. 

How has the textile tradition fared?  

Following the stormy and disorienting 1950s, socialist enterprises like Mosilana, Vlněna, Bytex, Moravan, and Kras, etc. came to appreciate the tradition upon which they sought to build, becoming proud successors of the original companies. The world was captivated by the artistic technique of art protis, invented at the Wool Research Institute and practiced under the direction of the Art protis Studio, located at Vlněna 2. Into the hungry shops of the socialist block were offered woollen and semi-woollen fabrics, e.g. Tesil.  

Although the cut-throat period following the Velvet Revolution swept away the textile industry from its traditional localities, it did not wipe out production in Brno entirely. Inheritors of the woollen tradition are the woollen fabric manufacturers Nová Mosilana, a.s., the textile testing institute Textilní zkušební ústav, s.p., and the medical textiles manufacturer VUP Medical, a.s. Returning, however, to these abandoned mills, the nostalgia that seizes visitors seems justified, and poses the question whether some kind of memorial space should be created in these halls, a place where Brnoers might be reminded of their textile tradition and make some sense of the world of the textile factory – a world of toil on which today is patterned the contemporary form of the modern city.    

(text from the Brno INdustrial newspaper, publisher TIC BRNO, p.o., supplier Pocket media s.r.o., full text in For Download)