Wednesday marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Zindzif Fügner, who founded the Sokol Society with Miroslav Tirsz. Fügner was its first mayor, and he is credited with introducing the tick and being the first to come up with the idea for the uniform. Originally a Prague society, by the end of the 19th century it had become a powerful national movement.The Falcons played an important role in both world wars. Many were murdered by the Nazis.
Founded on February 16, 1862, the Sokol Gymnasium organization was associated with the prosperity of the Czech nation from its very beginning and also had the great advantage of promoting physical activity among the widest segments of the population. His two men, Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner, were involved in its founding.
The first founder, Fügner, was born into a family of German businessmen. He originally followed in his father’s footsteps in business, but later ran an insurance business. However, he also devoted himself to music, social interests and sports. He was fluent in several world languages.
Miroslav Tirsch was also born into a German-speaking family. However, from the age of six, he was raised by his uncle, a Czech patriot. He studied philosophy and was also involved in visual arts and aesthetics. In patriotic circles, he also met Hoogner, who founded Sokol in his early 60s.
According to historians, the ideological and organizational leader was Tilsch, who created, for example, the Czech gym nomenclature. I’m here. He was also the first to start wearing the red blouse that later became part of the association’s uniform. Jindřich Fügner didn’t live to see the organization’s biggest expansion. He died prematurely at just 43 years old.
In 1889, the local Czech Sokol organization merged into the Czech Sokolsk Community, followed two years later by the Moravian and Silesian organizations, forming the Moravian-Silesian Sokolsk Community. In 1904, both organizations merged into the single Czech Slavic community of Sokolska (ČOS). It worked after the outbreak of World War I, but soon became inconvenient for the Viennese government, and only in 1915 Sokol was banned. This is not the last time.
Participating in the functioning of the Legion and the creation of Czechoslovakia, Sokolov was one of the main forces of the First Republic and harassed the Nazis. Guardian Reinhard Heydrich.
After the war, Sokol was revived again and became the most popular festival, connecting more than one million people across Czechoslovakia. However, he was only active for seven years.
The spectacular June 1948 conference was not only a great demonstration of sports unity, but also the last public demonstration against the takeover of the Czechoslovak government in February. Communist forces unified and controlled all physical education in the country for the first time under the banner of Sokol in 1949.
The reorganization of physical education in 1952 meant the third abolition of the Sokol organization, and Sokol struggled to recover from a long hiatus of 38 years. The rally was then superseded by the large Spartakiad of State Organizations, the first of which was held in his 1955, and the last, the seventh, in his 1985.
During its release in the late 1960s, there were attempts to restore Sokol, but after August 1968 the plans were abandoned. Only in November 1989 did Sokolska Obek return, but it failed to attract hundreds of thousands of people, let alone millions interested in the movement.
Today, the organization has 160,000 members, with many delegates emerging from its ranks, including the first Olympic gold medalist, Bedřich Šupczyk. About half of them are under the age of 18. Since 2000, Sokol’s management has begun to focus more on sports support in addition to traditional training.
