Negli anni ’60, la Cecoslovacchia decise di demolire la città di Most, fondata 700 anni fa, per raggiungere i depositi di carbone sottostanti. Hanno cancellato dalla mappa un’intera città medievale, edificio dopo edificio. L’unica struttura salvata è stata un’enorme chiesa gotica, che è stata trasportata per 841 metri su rotaie in 28 giorni. (Ripubblicare)

Wasn’t there any other way for them to get to the coal deposits in question?

TIL: They demolished a lot of buildings for filming ‘*The Bridge at Remagen’.*

let me guess it was a city built by Hungarians

It helped that Most had been mostly German-speaking until 1945, and had been called Brüx up to then. So the buildings left in that place belonged to the hated expelled minority, the memory of which the Czech nationalists wanted to erase, so the place was seen as doubly redundant because of it. After all, it is not racism if we are doing it to Germans ™.

That having been said, IIRC the church that was moved is to this day still the heaviest object ever moved over land by humans. It had some 12k tons – of course we have built much heavier ships, but floating structures are much easier to move than objects resting on solid ground. So this was actually quite an achievement.