Only the chapel remained
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Jiří Janičata was born on 7 October 1946 in Velké Losiny. However, he spent his childhood in the settlement of Annín (Annaberg in German) in Jeseniky, which was settled by people from Wallachia after the German population was displaced. The family lived there until the 1960s on farm No. 107. However, like the other inhabitants of the settlement, they lost their fields during collectivisation and so they moved to nearby Kobyla. People then reportedly had to demolish and dismantle their houses at their own expense. Apart from the remains of the masonry of one of the buildings, the only material monument of the settlement today is the Chapel of St. Joseph. In the 1960s, Jiří Janičata trained in Ostrava for the rolling mills in Nová Huta, where he also took up a job in the local coke plant. During his military service with the railway troops he met his future wife Miloslava Chlupová. They married in 1971 and together they raised their two children Jiří and Eva. After the war, Jiří Janičata returned to Kobyla, where he built a house with his own help in the 1970s. He first worked in a fireclay factory in Vidnava and then worked for Czechoslovak State Railways until his retirement. From 1978 to 1998 he was a people’s judge, or lay judge in civil disputes. As chairman of the settlement committee, he joined the Communist Party in the second half of the 1980s, from which he resigned in 1990. At the time of the filming in 2023, he was still living in Kobyla nad Vidnavkou.
