Statues at the foot of Big Chlum - 11km

In 1902, an artistically gifted man, Stanislav Rolinek, was born in Boritov near Blansko, who created several remarkable works in the area during his short life. He loved painting and decided to create open-air sculptures in the local sandstone near his native village. First, he carved a sculpture of a girl's face with a fireman's ax and half a pair of shears for shearing sheep in a quarry on the southern slope of Big Chlum. But this did not meet with the understanding of fellow citizens. Rolinek, suffering from concussions, took refuge on the northwestern side of Big Chlum and began to work on a much more daring work. Around 1927, he depicted reliefs of three Hussites in sandstone, which earned him the attention of local and national newspapers. On the contrary, Boritov's Catholic dean Mazal called on the local youth to distance themselves from Rolinek and put Rolinek's family under a local curse. Among other things, the mayor and businessman Frantisek Burian in Kunstat learned about the sculpture at the foot of Big Chlum and offered Rolinek to make the sculptures for a planned tourist attraction near the town. Rolínek eventually created a giant monument to President Masaryk. The mayor had an artificial cave excavated in the sandstone near the village of Rudka, for which Rolinek made a statue of a lion that was supposed to guard it. Rolinek did not create the other intended figures of the knights of Blanica, the mayor carved them himself. Rolinek first entered a sanatorium with tuberculosis in the summer of 1929, and then in September of the same year went to Prague to study with Professor Otakar Spaniel. But poor health forced him to leave his stay at the Academy of Fine Arts. When he returned to Rudka, he discovered the Blanica knights, but of course he did not claim their authorship. He was persuaded to repair their faces, but in the cold temperatures the casts caught up with him completely. In the artificial cave, he only managed to make a large statue of St. Wenceslas. He died in 1931 in the house where he was born and is buried in the Boritov cemetery. And what about Masaryk's monument near Kunstat? For II. during World War II, local residents built a log cabin around it to disguise it from the Germans, then they even cut up the statue and buried it. But you know the helpful Czech people. According to reports, the occupiers found and destroyed the statue. Fortunately, the statue of the Hussite warriors at the foot of Big chlum has survived to this day.