Terezín

On 10 January 1780 Emperor Joseph II ordered a fortress to be built where the Ohře meets the Elbe, to guard the river crossings against Prussian armies coming from Saxony, and named it Theresienstadt after his mother, Maria Theresa. Construction began that October and took ten years. The result was a citadel, the Small Fortress, on the east bank, and a walled garrison town, the Main Fortress, on the west, covering almost four square kilometres; it could house about 5,600 soldiers in peacetime and twice as many in war, and its trenches could be flooded. Terezín became a free royal town in 1782, but the fortress was never besieged. In the 19th century the Small Fortress served as a prison, and in the First World War it held political prisoners, among them Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Franz Ferdinand, who died there in 1918.

After the German occupation of 1939 the Gestapo set up a prison in the Small Fortress in 1940, through which tens of thousands of people passed and about 2,600 died. In November 1941 the SS turned the Main Fortress into the Theresienstadt Ghetto. More than 150,000 Jews, including 15,000 children, were sent there, from Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, and later the Netherlands and Denmark. About 33,000 died in the ghetto from hunger, disease and overcrowding, and about 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The camp and prison were liberated by the Soviet Army on 9 May 1945.

After the war the Small Fortress became an internment camp for ethnic Germans until 1948, and the army kept a garrison in the town until 1996. The floods of 2002 damaged the crematorium; the fortress, then in a deteriorated condition, was listed on the 2002 World Monuments Watch, and a long-term conservation plan followed.

The town's identity is bound up with remembrance. The Terezín Memorial looks after the Small Fortress, the Ghetto Museum, the former Magdeburg Barracks, the cemeteries, the crematorium, the railway siding and the memorial on the bank of the Ohře. The ghetto was known for a relatively rich cultural life — concerts, lectures and secret schooling for children — made possible by a Jewish self-administration and the many "prominent" Jews imprisoned there. The Nazis also used Terezín for propaganda, dressing it up for a Red Cross visit in 1944 as an ordinary town, a deception the Ghetto Museum explains in detail.

The well-preserved centre of the 18th-century fortress town is protected as an urban monument reservation. Alongside the memorial, small museums in the restored Cavalier 2 building deal with the lives of the soldiers who once filled the barracks and with everyday objects from the socialist era.

Visitors are expected to behave as at any place of mourning: quietly and respectfully, above all in the cemeteries, where Christian crosses and Jewish stars stand side by side, and in the crematorium.

Terezín has about 2,900 inhabitants, living in four municipal parts. For two centuries the town existed for its garrison, and the army's departure in 1996 ended that role. A large state vegetable-processing enterprise that operated between Terezín and Bohušovice nad Ohří until the early 1990s was also transformed after the fall of communism.

Today the town depends mainly on tourism. With almost 260,000 visitors in 2024, the memorial was the most visited memorial site in the country and the second most visited attraction in the Ústí nad Labem Region. Days are shaped by the arrival of coaches and school groups, and the streets quieten in the evening, when many visitors return to Prague or Litoměřice.

Litoměřice, a few kilometres north, provides much of the shopping, schooling and services for local people, and the D8 motorway and the railways at Bohušovice and Litoměřice connect the town with Prague and Ústí nad Labem. A golf course has been laid out on a former military training ground towards Litoměřice.

Terezín's few restaurants serve the everyday Czech cooking found across Bohemia: roast pork with bread dumplings and sauerkraut, known as vepřo-knedlo-zelo; svíčková, marinated beef in a thick sauce of carrot, parsley root and celeriac, served with dumplings and cranberries; guláš, a stew of beef, pork or game with onions and spices; and smažený sýr, a slice of Edam-type cheese coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Pub snacks include utopenci, pickled sausages in a sweet-sour vinegar marinade, and pivní sýr, a soft cheese mixed with raw onion and mustard and spread on toast.

The surrounding Elbe valley eats and drinks well. Litoměřice holds an annual event called Zahrada Čech, the "garden of Bohemia". Vineyards around Litoměřice have been recorded since 1057, and the town is the centre of the Litoměřice wine subregion; Müller-Thurgau and Riesling are the most planted grapes in Bohemia. Saaz hops, named after the town of Žatec, flavour Czech lager, which is drunk in the town's pubs as everywhere in the country.