The Czech School museum recreates the conditions of education for children in the Czech period.

At the beginning of May 1919, the entire territory of Transcarpathia was occupied by bourgeois Czechoslovakia and boyarist Romania. According to the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 10 September 1919, Transcarpathia became part of Czechoslovakia under the name of Subcarpathian Rus. During the Czech period, Kolochava experienced the greatest growth in the cultural and educational level of development of the village.

The Czechoslovakian government and the authorities of Subcarpathian Rus inherited a heavy legacy in the field of education from Austro-Hungarian rule. The public school in Kolochava did not work. Omelian Skiba, who was sent to Kolochava by the Mukachevo diocese on 17 September 1918, taught children in a church school and then, from 1923, in a state Czechoslovak school. For several years, he was the only teacher in the village. He worked in two shifts because 147 children attended the school every day. He taught children in the vernacular Russian language, which is why the villagers loved him. However, he could not teach the whole village by himself, and therefore the level of education in the highland village of Kolochava was low. In order to eliminate the lack of education, courses for illiterates were organised.

Starting in 1923, a public Czechoslovakian school was established in Kolochava - a folk school with the Rusyn language of instruction.

The state secondary school with Czech as the language of instruction first opened its doors in 1931. It was attended mainly by the children of local Jews, as well as representatives of the Czech authorities - notaries, government officials, and gendarmes - who were sent to Zakarpattia from the Czech Republic. Their children did not know the local language, and therefore could not attend a school with Ruthenian as the language of instruction. The school was closed in 1938. Despite the fact that the Czech school existed for 7 years, it left a significant mark in the history of the village.

In 2007, the old building was restored and the Czech School Museum was opened.

The exhibition was prepared based on the memories of former students of the Czech school and academician Mykola Mushinka from the University of Presov in Slovakia and Dr. František Hybel, director of the Czech Comenius Museum.

The museum consists of two rooms - a classroom and a teacher's lounge. The exhibits in the main schoolroom show that the Czech public school not only cared about the knowledge of students, but also brought them up to love the "sweet" republic and its father, Tomáš Garig Masaryk. In front of the classroom entrance, there was a Czechoslovakian coat of arms, a portrait of the country's president next to the blackboard, and a bust of him near the door.

The piano score invites us to sing the national anthem, while geographical and physical maps of the country at the time show the vastness of Czechoslovakia from the Šumava Mountains to the Carpathian Range. Czech schoolchildren carried wooden pencil cases, used inkpots and quills, bulky compasses and heavy geometric shapes. On the school shelves there are works by Czech writers and class journals with marks from Kolochava students.

The bust of the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš Garík Masaryk, came to the Kolochava Czech School Museum thanks to the Czechs themselves. It was donated to the newly created museum in 2007 by the director of the Jan Kamensky Museum in Přerov, Dr František Hybel, along with numerous other Czech school supplies. Since then, the "father of the Czechoslovak Republic has stood in the corner of the museum's classroom ever since. Above it is his ever-relevant quote: "Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are. 

Information note:

The museum is open every day, without breaks and weekends, from 08:00 to 18:00 by appointment only.

📍 Kolochava village, Mizhhiria district 

📞 +38(031) 462-41-81, +38(067) 215-09-85

🌎 http://kolochava.com/