In den 1960er Jahren beschloss die Tschechoslowakei, die 700 Jahre alte Stadt Most abzureißen, um an die darunter liegenden Kohlevorkommen zu gelangen. Sie löschten eine ganze mittelalterliche Stadt Gebäude für Gebäude von der Landkarte. Das einzige Bauwerk, das sie retteten, war eine riesige gotische Kirche, die auf Schienen in 28 Tagen 841 m weit transportiert wurde. (Repost)

Wasn’t there any other way for them to get to the coal deposits in question?

TIL: They demolished a lot of buildings for filming ‚*The Bridge at Remagen‘.*

let me guess it was a city built by Hungarians

It helped that Most had been mostly German-speaking until 1945, and had been called Brüx up to then. So the buildings left in that place belonged to the hated expelled minority, the memory of which the Czech nationalists wanted to erase, so the place was seen as doubly redundant because of it. After all, it is not racism if we are doing it to Germans ™.

That having been said, IIRC the church that was moved is to this day still the heaviest object ever moved over land by humans. It had some 12k tons – of course we have built much heavier ships, but floating structures are much easier to move than objects resting on solid ground. So this was actually quite an achievement.