This article presents the consequences of the establishment of the Crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1348, which entailed the incorporation of Silesia with its rich and ambitious city of Wrocław. Initially, Wrocław posed many challenges for Prague, but over time, it became its competitor. The growing position of Wrocław in the Bohemian Crown stemmed from the legitimization of its rights to the Bohemian throne. Hence, Wrocław’s art and architecture of that time reveal many political undertones. In the winter of 1358/1359, the emperor chose Wrocław to ensure the succession of the Luxembourg secundogeniture. The birth of Wenceslaus IV in 1361 simplified the matter of succession. But when Charles IV’s younger son, Sigismund, was not accepted in Prague after his brother’s death in 1419, he took the Bohemian throne via Wrocław, calling it in 1420 “the second capital of his Rule and the source of law”.

The construction of Soviet shopping centres that started in the 1960s marked a new stage in the consumption possibilities of Soviet society with the environments of consumption playing an important role. The main objective of this article is stated as follows: to analyse, following the LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) case, what the idea of Soviet shopping centres and its realization in the LSSR was and to ascertain how the Soviet authorities used the shopping centres for the development of consumption in Soviet society employing the advertising of shopping centres and the contraposition between socialism and capitalism. To achieve the research objective, the main method used was to analyse the published and unpublished sources that reflect the process of the appearance of Soviet shopping centres. The research demonstrates that the idea of Soviet shopping centres was not an original product of the Soviet system. Some aspects of their construction and composition were copied and there were attempts to implement them using Western practices.

The study presents the state of research into burgher heraldry in Slovakia. It notes the perspectives and possibilities of further research, as well as the importance of the sigillographic study of burgher seals. On the basis of its fi ndings, it demonstrates discoveries on the uses of coats of arms, or more precisely, personal heraldic marks, by burghers in early modern towns of the Hungarian Kingdom (and includes, for instance, the issues of heritability of burgher marks and the ennoblement of burghers from a heraldic point of view).

The paper addresses the long-term impact of mining towns and the villages under the authority of these towns on the waterscapes in the northern mining area of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary (presentday Slovakia). The paper focuses on the privileging practices of the settlers of villages founded by burghers of a medieval mining town, Kremnica. The paper argues that analysing Kremnica’s practice in settling the towns’ surroundings may on the one hand shed light on the privileges of the settlers of the town itself, and on the other, be crucial to understanding a previously neglected environmental impact of mining in pre-modern times. The paper argues that while charters of privilege provided to mining towns seldom refer to the freedom to exploit water, the towns’ settlers did use the waterways to their benefit. In arguing for this the paper discusses the freedoms of the settlers’ villages of Kremnica in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries. The freedom of settlers – or the leading of the settling process – led to an increased pressure on waterways in mining town areas that had lasting consequences on the landscapes of these regions.

This study aims to provide an insight into the microworld of a group of witnesses to and participants in the Holocaust in Košice, a town ceded from dismembered Czechoslovakia to Hungary in November 1938. We argue that Košice represents a suitable case study for the examination of Aryanization of Jewish property on the municipality and individual levels in the Slovak-Hungarian border region (Southern Slovakia), which is a hitherto understudied field in Holocaust studies. Our analysis is centred around 253 petitions submitted by local residents to obtain rental rights to apartments previously occupied by Jews and supporting documentation preserved in the Košice City Archives. Our primary research question is who these petitioners for Jewish apartments actually were and how and why they became involved in the process. We explore the petitioners’ social stratification, occupational structure, gender, ethnic origin and other social indicators. Furthermore, we present and interpret their arguments, excuses and motivations. This issue also involves the striking question of how much these ordinary men and women understood they benefited from mass murder.

The study deals with the process of a power transition in Moravian nationally mixed towns after the First World War. The formation of Czechoslovakia was accompanied not only by the takeover of central political authorities, but necessarily also by a power transition at the regional level. The study takes particular note of the complicated process of the taking control of municipal councils in key Moravian towns, which were, until the formation of Czechoslovakia, in most cases under the decisive influence of the German bourgeoisie. Unlike in the Austro-Hungarian era, when the question of the composition of self-governments had been entirely in the hands of the local voters, the interest of the central institutions of the new state as well as of the political parties was now reflected in municipal affairs. In the process of the power transfer, the merging of municipalities played a very important role, being carried out in the post-war reality to serve as a means of solving the complex national-political situation in nationally mixed areas.

In the thirteenth century, in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, Venice became an important power in the Mediterranean, which caused profound change in its political, territorial and economic ambitions. The main strategy of Venice was to maintain the sea route from the northernmost point in the Adriatic to the Levant, and therefore it was crucial to dominate politically over the Eastern Adriatic: the cities there could serve as points of departure or safe harbours in which Venetian vessels could be sheltered and supplied with merchandise, food, water, and manpower. One of the ways to incorporate the Eastern Adriatic cities into a common area of governance was to construct recognizable public buildings, and to introduce and standardize a legal and administrative order that was mainly adapted to the central political entity, but also served the local urban communities. This paper follows the changes that were directly or indirectly mirrored in the urban structure of the cities during the thirteenth century: primarily the design of urban spaces (especially public ones) and the construction of public buildings linked to governance, defence, trade or administration. During the thirteenth century, one can follow the development of Venetian ambitions and their focus on particular areas or activities (economic, military) in the state, as well as the activities of Venetian patricians holding the governor’s offi ce. Naturally, the local circumstances and the local population had a crucial impact on the formation of urban space, but this paper focuses primarily on the role of the Venetian administration in this respect.

The main aim of this article is to present a comparative historical analysis of the mechanisms for the replacement of the political elites after the collapse of interwar Czechoslovakia and the declaration of the Slovak State under the infl uence of Nazi Germany in the years 1938–1940 at the level of municipal self-government with regard to the onset of an authoritarian regime. The subjects of the research are two towns, Prešov and Nitra, which provide an opportunity to look for similarities and diff erences in the changes implemented in two socio-economically and demographically similar towns with diff erent political climates. The research is based on primary and secondary historical sources confronted mainly with the theories of V. Pareto, R. Michels and J. J. Linz. Historical developments in Slovakia in the years 1938–1940 and the process of the replacement of municipal elites correlates with the framework formulated in the sociological theories of Pareto and Michels. The process of the replacement of municipal elites contributed also to the gaining of characteristic elements of the authoritarian regime in the sense of the defi nition of J. J. Linz established in Slovakia by the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party.

This article presents the results of archaeological excavations at the sites Košice-Galgovec I-III and Červený rak on the southeastern edge of Košice in 1997–2001 indicated several stages of settlement and their dating. AMS 14C dates for the Tiszadob group were 6260±35 BP, 5330–5140 calBC; for the early stage of the Bükk culture they were 6310±40-35 BP, 5285±42 calBC. Assessment of residential, farming and settlement features was carried out, and numerous remains of pottery and lithic industry were classified with regard to contemporary sites in the Košická kotlina basin and in northeastern Hungary. The researchers evaluated the settlement in the microregion of Košice from the beginning of the Eastern Linear Pottery culture – the Proto-Linear stage – to the Barca III group and the Tiszadob group and the subsequent settlement during the Bükk culture period.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the process of the organization of centralized water supply systems in small Russian towns at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The causes and the process of pipeline building in three small cities, each of which became signifi cant transport hubs by 1914 and had populations of less than 50,000 people, are described in the research. The research interest in these towns is led by understanding how the transport position of small cities promoted the improvement of water supplies in them. It was essential due to the growth of the urban populations and increasing cases of cholera epidemics in transport-hub cities.