A city, divided for a hundred years - by Marian Kechlibar

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A city, divided for a hundred years<br>Where diversity was not exactly a strength.

Marian Kechlibar<br>Aug 19, 2026

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Can you see the flags at the far left of this image, in the middle of the bridge? That is an international border, right in the middle of a city which used to be a single unit for about 700 years. Těšín (Cieszyn) dates back at least to 1217. Since 1920, it has been divided into a Czech(oslovak) and a Polish part.

So, hear the story of a divided city that has barely started to heal… I will try to keep a distance from things, at least as much as you can expect from a member of one of the nations involved.

By the standards of Central Europe, Těšín is a mid-tier city. The two parts added together have some 60 thousand inhabitants and - more importantly - the city of Těšín was the seat of local Princes and a regional administrative center for almost a thousand years. And those Princes were no small fry either. First Piasts, then Hapsburgs, they stemmed from side lineages of royal families. Located in a place where the river Olza could be easily crossed, Těšín was an important stop for wealthy merchants traveling from Czech Lands to Poland and back, and grew wealthy as well.<br>The early medieval population was entirely Slavic, but plenty of Germans arrived during the High Middle Ages, invited by the kings for their know-how and skills. Far from Germania proper, their language developed in semi-isolation into bizarre forms; on the Polish side, there still survives a local Germanic language mostly incomprehensible to modern German speakers, Wymysorys, which sounds every bit as crazy1 as you would expect from its name.<br>Of course, there also came the Jews, plying their trade, and in the middle of the 19th century, an important railway started carrying even more immigrants to the city, seeking work in factories which grew like mushrooms in this coal-rich region. By the beginning of the 20th century, Těšín and Těšínsko were a thoroughly mixed society, with no overall ethnic majority. The Germans and fresh immigrants mostly lived in the cities. Outside them, some felt Czech, some felt Polish, some called themselves just Silesians (Šlonzáci), speaking dialects that were neither Czech nor Polish, but an ungodly mix of both. Today, some call Silesian a separate language, but it has neither an army nor a navy, so the recognition is limited.<br>To make things more complicated, the local population mostly embraced Protestantism in the 16th century and that added another line of division into an already complicated picture. Even at the onset of the First World War, religious identity often trumped the ethnic one, and Protestant Poles were quite cool towards the idea of being absorbed into the overwhelmingly Catholic Polish nation.<br>Nevertheless, as long as there was peace, the city and the region prospered. Late Hapsburg Austria had a lot of flaws, but its legal structure was tailored for economic growth and inclusive towards all of the minorities that inhabited the empire2. It did not matter if you were a Czech, a Jew or a Bosniak Muslim: you could attend a school, learn something useful and start your own business.<br>In 1911, the city of Těšín introduced its first tram line, connecting the main railway station on one riverbank of the Olza to the historic city center on the other bank. Having your own tram system was a rite of passage for cities of that age. If you had one, you were a respectable metropolis.

Of course, it did not last. After the shots fired in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary made the fateful decision to punish the Serbs by starting a war against them, and lost the gamble very badly. A country of 11 main ethnicities, weakened from within by senseless bloodshed on the frontlines, fell apart in late 1918 and its ruins became ground zero for nationalist passions unleashed.<br>The intellectuals of the day dreamt of nation states, but any nation states drawn fairly over the hodgepodge of ethnicities that was the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire would have to have impossible borders. Těšínsko was one of the regions where anything resembling national self determination was a pipe dream. Historically a land of the Czech Crown, it was claimed by reconstituted Poland and Polish authorities started preparing elections to the Polish parliament, the Sejm, on its entire territory.<br>The new Czechoslovak Republic might have let it go, if it wasn’t for a crucial railway connecting the industrial region of Ostrava to northern Slovakia, one of just two railways connecting the western and the eastern part of the country. In 1918, railways were a critical part of infrastructure and control over them was a matter of life and death. And this particular railway went right through the western part of the city of Těšín.

The railway station that started it all. Today, Český Těšín. Author: Ondřej Žváček, CC BY 2.5, source: Wikipedia.

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