We welcome a new member of the CNT top team, Amanda Tully

Amanda Tully

Amanda grew up in Denver, Colorado, USA and has Czech ancestors. She fell in love with Moravia while volunteering at the CNT working party on our project in Zdislavice. After she finished her studies she moved to Zlín and offered CNT her help. Amanda earned a BA in Art and History of Architecture from the Metropolitan University of Denver and a Historic Preservation Master from the University of Oregon. Amanda will lead our volunteer activities and will jointly manage our key project of the tomb and chapel of Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach in Zdislavice.  

Her first visit to Europe was a typical college student’s trip, with nothing but a backpack, a two-week timeline, and a plan to see as much as possible. After her visit, she was inspired by the vast history of architecture in the European capitals and this is what pushed her to apply for the master’s program in Oregon. During her master’s studies she again visited Europe, this time to Kroměříž, in cooperation with the Czech National Trust as a work-study experience.

It was during this summer working holiday that she fell in love with Czech history and culture. Her family ancestry also stems from Bohemia, so her connection with this land has deep roots. She quickly decided that her goal would be to move to the Czech Republic and fully experience all it had to offer. She achieved that goal and moved there in 2017. She currently lives in Zlín among the functionalist architecture of Tomáš Baťa.

After getting settled into life in a foreign country, she refocused her attention on involvement with the historic landscape of the Czech Republic and again reached out to CNT. After reconnecting with the organization, she was offered the opportunity to manage and organize the volunteer work at the CNT flagship project on the Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach family tomb. She is motivated and enthusiastic to help carry on the legacy of the organization that helped to bring her halfway around the world.

CNT launches the Staff Exchanges in European Cultural Heritage Trusts Project with the support of the ERASMUS+ Programme

Czech National Trust (CNT) is delighted to announce that the Staff Exchanges in European Cultural Heritage Trusts (SEECHT) Project is going to launch in just two weeks. This unique project will be supported and funded by the ERASMUS+ Programme with a grant of 71 653 Euros.

CNT is the main coordinator of the entire project which will launch on December 7, 2020, and which will run for 18 months until June 6, 2022. Partners of the SEECHT Project are various European trusts, namely the International National Trusts Organisation (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), Národný Trust n.o. (Slovakia), Herita (Belgium), Fondo Ambiente Italiano (Italy) a National Trust for Scotland (Scotland).

The project will start with a kick off meeting in Kroměříž, a town in the Zlín region of the Czech Republic not far from Zdislavice and the Memorial to Marie von Ebner-Eschnebach. Among other main SEECHT Project activities are the project output sharing meeting, along with the bi-annual INTO Antwerp Conference Day in March 2021, which attracts participants from more than 70 countires worldwide.

And what are the main goals of the Staff Exchanges in European Cultural Heritage Trusts Project? It offers opportunities for professionals from within the National Trust movement to share their learning and contribute to a more open and welcoming European heritage sector, and delivers a system of secondments for Europe’s future leaders of heritage trusts, offering on-the-job training by shadowing their contemporaries in other European contexts. Having learnt from their neighbouring trusts, participants will deliver projects that broaden access to all segments of the European public, whilst also welcoming members of heritage trusts from other countries as part of the reciprocal visiting programme.

 

                                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memorial to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Photo by Jakub Šnajdr, Source: Meeting Brno

Memorial to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Photo by Jakub Šnajdr, Source: Meeting Brno

 

A significant progress on our pilot project – Memorial to Marie von Ebner Eschenbach in Zdislavice: the newly restored rear terrace and the entrance to the chapel are looking fabulous!

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A significant progress on our pilot project – Memorial to Marie von Ebner Eschenbach in Zdislavice: restoration of the front terrace and of the entrance to the tomb is nearing its completion!

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How to celebrate 190th birth anniversary in style

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Eva Heyd presents the Ticket to the New World project in a webinar in collaboration with Czech Centre in New York

On Thursday, September 10, a webinar presenting the Ticket to the New World project took place in collaboration with the New York Czech Centre. The project depicts the extraordinary life stories of both internationally renowned and not so famous Czechoslovak artists who were forced to leave their home country at the beginning of the Second World War and ended up settling down in the United States, and their influence on the New World’s art scene. It is a multimedia project which will continue as an eponymous exhibition project in the Bohemian National Hall in New York. The exhibition will open in the fall of 2021.

The webinar was hosted by Marek Hilde and Eva Heyd, the curator of the project and a CNT project manager, while three guests appeared on the webinar as well: Julia Hammid, Véronique Firkušný and Ladislav Zikmund Lender. Julia Hammid and Véronique Firkušný recalled their exceptional fathers – photographer and documentarist Alexander Hammid and piano virtuoso Rudolf Firkušný. Ladislav Zikmund Lender, a Czech architecture historian, talked about the life and career of Jaroslav Polívka, a Czech architect and engineer who cooperated on several projects with the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. The viewers also had the opportunity to watch a short movie produced by the Czech National Trust as part of the webinar.

More information about the project can be found on the New York Czech Centre website here.

The webinar recording is available online:

We reached the final round in a Czech national competition for the best heritage project

Our project Memorial to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the public collection in its favour reached the finals of the Czech countrywide competition Máme vybráno (which can be translated into English as “A successful fund-raiser”), organized by the Institute for Monuments and Culture, o.p.s. It is the public who nominates and votes for the projects.

We would like to thank all supporters who voted for our project online – they helped us to increase our public collection by quite a few thousand crowns, which we won in the competition.

More information about the competition can be found here. Competition results are available here.

 

 

 

 

A significant progress on our pilot project – Memorial to Marie von Ebner Eschenbach in Zdislavice: away with the garden steps from 1960

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Brilliant animated film about Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach – will it help us get the heroine’s name back into Czech textbooks?

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