Přísečnice

For the Czech/German river Přísečnice, see Preßnitz.

Přísečnice
Former town
Old postcard from Přísečnice
Location in the Czech Republic
Coordinates: 50°27′55″N 13°7′55″E
Country	Czech Republic
Region	Ústí nad Labem
District	Chomutov

Přísečnice (German: Preßnitz) was a mining town in what is today the municipality of Kryštofovy Hamry in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It was located in the Ore Mountains.

Name

The town got its Czech name from the stream of the same name that flowed through it. The German name was created by distortion of the Czech name.

Another possible origin of the town's name is the Czech hydronym breznica.

History

The origins of the town are unclear. The surrounding area had been used by people in prehistory, but the oldest known archaeological evidence of medieval inhabitance in the area was a pyrotechnical object from the turn of the thirteenth century, this was located about 1.5 kilometers southeast of the town.

Přísečnice once sat on an important trade route from Saxony to Bohemia. The road to Bohemia spanned from Saxon Zwickau via Schlettau to Přísečnice, from where two branches continued into the Bohemian interior; the first spanned via Louchov to Kadaň and the second via Výsluní to Kralupy u Chomutova. The first written mention of Přísečnice is from 1335, when John of Bohemia granted the inhabitants an exemption from customs. It was disestablished in 1974 due to the construction of the Přísečnice Reservoir; though the region was already underpopulated due to the expulsion of the German population after World War II.

Demographics

Historical population

Year Pop. ±% 1869 2,988 —     1880 3,487 +16.7% 1890 3,433 −1.5% 1900 4,080 +18.8% 1910 3,668 −10.1%	Year Pop. ±% 1921 2,632 −28.2% 1930 2,606 −1.0% 1950 731 −71.9% 1961 660 −9.7% 1970 395 −40.2%
Source: Censuses

Notable people

• Richard Markgraf (1869–1916), palaeontologist
• Eugen Sänger (1905–1964), Austrian aerospace engineer