The railway was brought to Uherské Hradiště by the Austrian Local Railway Company (ÖLEG) in 1883, and five years later the 20-kilometre local line running between Staré Město and Uherský Brod was linked to the Vláry line connecting Brno with the Slovak town of Trenčianska Teplá. In the mid-1920s, the Directorate of the State Railways in Brno had a pair of new, identical passenger buildings built, one in Uherský Brod, which opened on 12 October 1927, and one in Uherské Hradiště, which exactly three years later had its gala opening, attended by the Minister of Railways, Rudolf Mlčoch. The project for the station in Uherské Hradiště was drawn up by the Directorate’s construction department in 1925 but then revised by engineer Miloš Fikr (1892–1968), the Ministry of Railways’ official in charge of civil engineering projects, in which he used ‘elements of distinctive rustic architecture’, most notably apparent in the high wooden gables with slanted or fan-shaped planks and in the carpentry design applied to the roof structure over the station platform. The functional and asymmetrical layout of the building thus contributed to the creation of its ‘picturesque exterior’. At the initiative of the state organisation for the promotion of tourism (the Provincial Foreigners’ Association in Brno), the two new station buildings were also decorated with ornamentation representing examples of folk embroidery from the unique local ethnographic region of Moravian Slovakia. The artist Rozka Falesnikova (1900–1983) initially painted the decorations on plaster, but they were not durable enough, so during the first reconstruction of the building in 1957 she and her students painted them in a different way using the technique of two-tone sgraffito. The building was renovated again in 2004 and in 2011 it was named ‘Most Beautiful Railway Station’ in a national survey. Together with its less well-preserved twin in Uherský Brod, it is probably the most impressive outcome of contemporary efforts to reform and contextualise railway architecture using folkloric motifs.
