People in Řečkovice are signing a petition to save the brewery cellars

photo: https://spravnym.smerem.cz/

Brno – People in the Brno district of Řečkovice are gathering online a petition for the preservation of vast brewery cellars under the festival area. The city hall wants to repair the amphitheater, fill the underground corridors for safety reasons, and have one part of them with the so-called rotunda repaired, said Řečkovice Deputy Mayor René Černý to ČTK. According to underground expert Aleš Svoboda, the entire system of corridors is valuable and should be preserved for future generations.

"We, the residents of Brno-Řečkovice and Mokrá Hora, firmly protest against the destruction of our unique historical monument underground: the 17th-century brewery cellars. Such monuments are repaired and maintained by every municipality, while the leadership of our city hall wants to destroy it by filling it with concrete, which would not only lead to the irreversible destruction of the cellars but also cause an extraordinary ecological burden. Therefore, we call for the repair and maintenance of the historical brewery cellars in our municipality and support the request of the Association for Healthy Řečkovice for their inclusion in the list of cultural monuments of the Czech Republic,” states the petition.

According to Deputy Mayor Černý, a large part of the underground corridors is younger than the 17th century and their remediation would cost the city hall over 100 million korunas. "The area above the corridors is used throughout the summer for cultural events, but the corridors beneath it do not meet safety parameters anymore. These corridors do not have historical value, and we want to secure them with a special ash-concrete mixture to be able to repair the area above them," Černý stated. He added that there is already a completed project and feasibility study for this work, which could start next year.

Svoboda, who helped discover the underground labyrinth beneath the center of Brno, disagrees with the Deputy Mayor's claim. "I know these underground spaces well; not all of them are in such poor condition, they have just been neglected for decades. Even if not all corridors are from the 17th century, as a complex, they are very valuable and it is worth saving them for future generations,” Svoboda told ČTK.

He indicated that he had discussed the situation with several structural engineers, who confirmed that the cellars are not in such poor condition that burying them is the only solution. "For example, the Mincmistrovský cellar in the center of Brno was in much worse condition and is now a tourist attraction. There are problematic spots in the Řečkovice brewery cellars that need securing, but it is not necessary to repair everything at once. It is about priorities,” Svoboda added. The part the city hall wants to repair is, according to him, only one-tenth of the entire underground complex.

People can sign the petition online until the end of August; in September, the authors will send it to the Ministry of Culture's Heritage Department.