Dr. Jan Štursa

* 1943

  • "You know, Sněžka, to use the title of a beautiful movie, it's the Never Ending Story. Really. When I think back to my early days here in the Giant Mountains, there were a couple of buildings on top of Sněžka, they were working badly, bad sewage treatment, there was an old weather station, an old Silesian hut, a Czech hut, a post office, a little wooden gingerbread house. And above all, from 1949 to 1951, the cable car, in its original form, was there churning out thousands and thousands of people; today it's about something else. Nowadays, if you look at the development, what's happened here in that time. First of all, there were several ideas on how to make the top of Sněžka accessible to as many people as possible. That was the famous slogan: 'The mountains belong to the workers!' What more do you want? Every working person must be able to get there, preferably with a pub on the top. So there were terrifying, bizarre architectural projects. Even the undermining of the top part of Snezka, hopefully we can get that into this series, what all was supposed to happen there. The sewage from the restaurant, which was supposed to have something like 250 people at a table, a terrible idea, was going to be piped through the saddle of the Pink Mountain to the Pink Mountain, and another pipeline all the way down to Pec. There were really unbelievable things going on, but above all, even from the point of view of political thinking, as I say, the slogan 'the mountains belong to the workers' speaks for itself. But consider that when 1990, 1992, 1993 was written, there were people like Jan Stránský, Minister Štěpová, who were all personalities who advocated that Sněžka be made accessible by cable car, no matter what the cost. In the end, we managed to create a huge campaign within the Czech professional and conservation community. When I think back to that time, three of us, surrounded of course by many other experts, wrote a kind of analysis of four options for accessibility of Sněžka, from accessibility on foot to accessibility by cable car, either just up or up and down. And when we did an informed public opinion poll, we were shocked to find that more than 60% of the Czech public wanted to go to the top of Sněžka, the highest Czech mountain, by cable car. It was a shock to us how little awareness of, or belonging to, such a precious nature as the Krkonoše Mountains our society has."

  • "I had arranged with him [Professor Jeník], who was working at the time in Ghana, West Africa, at the University of Accra, where he was lecturing on ecology and tropical forests, that I would send him the manuscript and he would write me some comments and I would edit it according to them. I took a large envelope, sealed the thick manuscript, and to get a reply, I wrote the sender's return address on the back. Only, I don't know what came over me, I also wrote the number of the military unit of the tank battalion in Louny. I got a reply about a month later from Africa. And in the morning, we had to report. Suddenly there was a bustle and somebody came running out. It was a scribe and he tells the chief that I should go up to the battalion commander. And on the stairs he says to me, 'Man, there's some trouble, there's officers upstairs. What have you done?' I get there and I see three comrades, looking down on me. And it started. The letter came back and it was clear that in their eyes I had committed almost treason. I gave out the number of my military unit in the 1960s. And you know what saved me? The letter came in a big envelope that had two beautiful purple stamps on it that said In Memory John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It was a year after the assassination, and what saved me from prison was that one of the officers was a philatelist. He took me aside and said he'd be interested in a stamp and if I gave it to him we'd flush it under the rug."

  • "In 1968 the first Czechoslovak intercamp was organized here in the Krkonoše Mountains, in Rýchory. It was a strange company, because at that time there were both Eastern and Western countries, in the form of young people, variously influenced by the politics of their country. We had a wonderful program and on the night of the twenty-first of August we had a beautiful bonfire on the top of Rýchory near the Sokolka hut. Jirka Sehnal, then editor of the Krkonoše magazine, said: 'What is going on, what are those planes doing? It´s some kind of a training.' In the morning we woke up and everything was clear, because the director Klapka came up and said: 'Everything is bad, we are occupied. There are Poles down in Maršov and a Russian unit is going east here.' So I was not lazy, I rushed down to Maršov to somehow get to Vrchlabí, where I had family. I heard some heavy vehicles coming from below, so I got stuck in the woods by the trees. And indeed a unit of Russian spies arrived at Rýchory. They camped near the Dvorsky Forest Reserve, which is a memorable place that photographers especially like for its forest-like atmosphere. And they began to plunder, they dug up earthworks in a nearby meadow and began to plunder the Dvorsky Forest by pulling all the lying wood and burning it."

  • "My father was a very enthusiastic member of the Communist Party. Of course, I still knew nothing about social life, what it meant to be a party member or not to be a party member, to be a kulak, a bourgeois element. But I received all this vicariously and made my own judgement about it. But thanks to the fact that I was surrounded by beautiful landscapes, nature, my experience of the social reality of the time, the political reality, was adequate. It was not painful."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Vrchlabí, 26.02.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:14:29
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
  • 2

    Hradec Králové, 11.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 01:03:57
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Those who want to make a difference shouldn’t look for the easy and beaten path.

Detail from the return after the expedition to Northern Manasulu, Jan Štursa, 1979
Detail from the return after the expedition to Northern Manasulu, Jan Štursa, 1979
photo: Archive of the witness

Jan Štursa was born on 3 August 1943 in Litomyšl. He grew up in Česká Třebová in a family where the railway trade was a traditional profession. However, instead of this profession, he was fascinated by nature. He therefore spent his childhood wandering in the surrounding countryside and getting to know various plants, animals and minerals. He studied at 11 year school and after graduating at 17, he considered whether to choose the path of a professional musician or to give priority to his passion for nature. In the end, the Faculty of Science at Charles University in Prague won out. After graduating, he immediately joined the Krkonoše National Park Administration, where he worked for 40 years. Since 1967 he has been a member of the Czech Botanical Society. From 1974 to 1989 he was Secretary of the Scientific Council of the Krkonoše National Park Administration and from 1990 to 1993 he was Director of the KRNAP Administration. He also worked as President for the Czech Republic in the EUROPARC Federation, a company that focuses on cooperation between countries in the field of nature conservation. For his many years of work in the field of European nature conservation, he was awarded the Alfred Töpfer Medal by this society. During his tenure at the KRNAP Administration, he has devoted himself to nature conservation and the education of young people, as well as extensive popularization activities. He has led and lectured countless lectures and field trips, been a consultant and opponent of dozens of diploma and doctoral theses. He belonged to a group of scientists who sought to stop inappropriate construction on the top of Sněžka. He cooperated with colleagues mainly from neighbouring Poland, Germany and Slovakia, and also visited them. He participated in a successful expedition to Nepal and many other natural science expeditions. Since the 1990s, he has travelled to many areas of natural scientific and conservation interest and informed the public about his travels at lectures. He has been married twice and raised two children with his first wife.