This is the eighth exhibition from the lengthy project of the City of Prague Museum about the historical suburbs of Prague. Strašnice is situated in the foreland of Prague which was afflicted by many sieges and wars: the Hussite Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years' War. Strašnice also played a crucial role in the modern era during the Prague Uprising in 1945.
Originally a small village with several houses, yet situated on important trade routes, Strašnice grew gradually during the 18th and 19th centuries. At the end of the 18th century, Nové Strašnice came into existence. The building boom dates from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and later in the early 20th century and the First Czechoslovak Republic when Strašnice was an important residential area for the Prague middle class.
In the second half of the 20th century, several significant enterprises such as Tesla, Mitas, Jawa, and Chirana were founded in Strašnice or in neighbouring districts. At that time, almost the entire area of Strašnice cadastre was developed – the housing estate Solidarita was built as early as the turn of the 1940s and 1950s followed by mostly high-rise block houses in other Strašnice locations. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was built sixty years after it was first planned.
The primarily iconographic exhibition accentuating photographs and postcards remaining from the period between the end of the 19th and the second half of the 20th century includes many designs, prints, and three-dimensional objects to illustrate the social, cultural, and sports life (Sokol Strašnice) in the Strašnice quarter. An amateur film of 1939 is another remarkable exhibit which depicts the Feast of the Corpus Christi procession through Strašnice, providing a lively idea about its historical atmosphere.