Komňa – Jan Amos Comenius Memorial – Granary

In 1992, on the occasion of the 400^th anniversary of the birth of Jan Amos Comenius, the new Comenius Memorial was opened in a heritage-protected granary. The granary, from 1774, is a single-storey stone building, plastered and whitewashed. There is a wooden gallery on the front face, which also features the entrance and two small windows on the ground floor. The gables are bricked up to the ridge of the slate roof. The gallery is covered with an extended roof. The granary houses a permanent exhibition on the town’s history from the first written mention in 1261, which concerns Zuvačov Castle, which used to stand on the Hrádek Hill. Many interesting artefacts were found on its former site, including traces of the Hussites who destroyed it; a 16^th-century source describes the castle as deserted. The exhibition records the many raids and disasters that befell the village, including diseases such as the plague and cholera, and severe weather phenomena – droughts, floods, crop failures, locust raids or frost in August. The village was burned down by the Bocskais in 1605, when only seven of its 62 families survived, and then again by the Turks in 1663 and Hungarian rebels in 1683. In 1705, it was raided by the Kurucs. The exhibition also displays a letter sent by the school board to Emperor Franz Joseph I in Vienna in 1893, pleading for an extension of the school building. There is also a mineralogical collection from the Bučník quarry, with its typical porcelanite. The entire first floor is dedicated to Comenius and his travels in Europe, as well as to the more than one hundred years of the mayorship of Comenius’s grandfather Jan Segeš and his descendants. There are documents from Comenius’s contemporaries and an explanation of the uncertainty concerning his place of birth. The attic houses a depository of various objects and tools used in agriculture. The memorial is managed by the Society for Honouring the Memory of Jan Amos Comenius, founded in 1993. The granary is a unique example of folk architecture in southeastern Moravia.