Policka

Policka was founded in 1265 as a royal town and its fourteenth-century wall survives essentially whole: about twelve hundred metres of circuit with nineteen bastions standing, one of the most complete medieval town walls in the country, running round a compact old town with an arcaded square and a baroque plague column. The tower of the church of St James holds a small flat where the sexton lived, and it was there, in a single room up a spiral stair, that Bohuslav Martinu was born in 1890 - his father was the tower keeper - and where he spent his first years, with the town below and the horizon visible from the window, which he wrote about later as forming his sense of space. The room is open. The Policka museum covers Martinu and the town's glass and textile history. The Zdarske vrchy and Toulovcovy mastale are nearby.

History

The town takes its name from the local name Napolickach, probably "on the plains". Until 1200 the area was administered by the Premonstratensian monastery of Litomyšl, and in 1265 King Ottokar II founded Polička to guard the trade route from Moravia to Bohemia through dense forest: on 27 September 1265 he ordered the locator Conrad of Lewendorf to set up the new town, which was at first administered from Svojanov Castle. In 1307 King Rudolf I gave it to his wife Queen Elizabeth Richeza, and for centuries it was a dowry town of the Bohemian queens; under Charles IV the streets were paved, stone houses built and the town fortified. Jan Žižka took it in 1421, and one of Sigismund's Hungarian armies then plundered it. The town prospered in the second half of the 16th century, when Renaissance buildings including the Church of Saint Michael went up, a fire devastated it in 1613, and it was taken and looted several times in the Thirty Years' War before recovering by the end of the 17th century and being rebuilt in Baroque style in the 18th. A fire in 1845 destroyed most of the houses and the Church of Saint James the Great, and the slowdown that followed is why the town walls were never torn down; the railway arrived in 1896. The composer Bohuslav Martinů was born in the tower of the Church of Saint James (Wikipedia, Polička).

Highlights

• A complete medieval wall - about 1,200 metres with nineteen bastions standing.
• Martinu's birth room - a flat in the church tower, up a spiral stair.
• An arcaded square - with a baroque plague column at the centre.
• A town museum - the composer, and the glass and textile trades.

When to go

April to October. A day.

What to expect

The tower room is reached by a long narrow spiral stair and opens on limited hours. Museums close on Mondays. The town is small and quiet.

Nearby

Svojanov castle is south; Litomysl is north-west.

Key facts