A village at the border

The Croatian colonization of Moravia goes as far back as the 16th century. At that time, the Croats were fleeing from the restless Balkans and Count Liechtenstein offered them to settle the deserted villages in his fiefdom. One of these villages was Přerov. The original settlement, Starý (Old) Přerov, had been burned down and thus the Croats settled nearby and called the new settlement Nový (New) Přerov. They built their houses of black clay bricks and covered the roofs with reeds. At the time of the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, Starý Přerov – by then not more than a manor belonging to Julius Meinl, became a part of Austria while Nový Přerov was ceded to Czechoslovakia. The new border complicated the lives of many of the Croatian inhabitants of the border village. They happened to have a large part of their fields on the Austrian side of the border. Josef Kusmič, a Croat born in Nový Přerov, recalls: “We had our fields in Austria. For instance Franc Kusmič had his field over there as well and he’d spend every day there. We only had four Metzens of land there, but some of the others would have 10 or maybe 15 Metzens over there. They would go there all the time. The customs officers didn’t bother to close the barriers anymore because there was some one passing all the time.” There’s another story as recalled by Josef Kusmič that bears testimony to the fact that the delineation of the border altogether disregarded the needs of the local population: “In Přerov, there used to be two hills, Mladý kopec Hill and Starý kopec Hill. The Croats had their cellars there, there were about five or six of them. And can you believe it, when they were delineating the border, they did it in such a way that it went right through one of the cellars. It was a stretched out cellar, very long, and one half belonged to Czechoslovakia and the other one to Austria. It was done in such a silly way!”