Oldřich Hurych

Oldřich Hurych was born on 19. 10. 1907 in Telč into the family of Emanuel Hurych, a railwayman (train conductor) (born 26. 7. 1878 Ottnang, Upper Austria) and Marie, née Procházková (born 9. 10. 1882 Puklice, Jihlava district). He had four siblings; his elder sister, Božena (born 26. 8. 1906 Puklice), and younger brothers Otto (born 3. 7. 1910 Telč), Bohuslav (born 19. 11. 1913 Telč), and Emanuel (born 25. 5. 1915). The Hurychs first lived in Telč-Podolí, no. 171 (now Staňkova 171). In the 1921 census, they were listed at Telč-Podolí, Furchova 26. From 1932, the family lived at Hradecká Street 6. Their home was in the village of Struhy (now a local part of the village of Čachovice) in the district of Mladá Boleslav.

After graduating from the State Real Grammar School in Telč in 1925, Oldřich Hurych studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU). From 1930, he was an assistant at the Geodetic Institute of the CTU, which was headed by Telč-born Professor Jaroslav Pantoflíček (born 25. 3. 1875 Telč, died 10. 1. 1951 Telč). In the 1930s, Hurych worked in Slovakia, in Velká Bytča (now a local part of Bytča), where he designed and built a bridge over the Váh River. After the establishment of the Slovak Republic in 1939, he returned to Bohemia. In the second half of 1939 and then from June 1945 to 1948, he worked as head of construction supervision on the construction of the motorway bridge over the Želivka River near Píště in the municipality of Vojslavice. The bridge is now hidden under a new motorway bridge built between 1972 and 1979.

Most likely during the war, Hurych married Zdenka Procházková, also originally from Telč (born 7. 11. 1908), with whom he had two sons, Zdeněk (born 1941) and Jiří (born 1944). From 1949, he worked as head of the road and bridge department of the technical division of the Regional Committee (Krajský národní výbor) in Jihlava. The Hurychs lived in a newly built apartment block at Wolkerova Street 43, designed by the architect César Grimmich. From 1958, Hurych worked in Prague as head of project administration at the Road and Railway Constructions Company (Stavby silnic a železnic).

He was responsible for the construction of two new road bridges for Jihlava – the Znojemský Bridge, which spanned the valley of the Koželužský stream (1950–1953), and the new Brněnský Bridge over the Jihlávka River (1953–1956). For the Znojemský Bridge, called “the bridge at Žampach” (after the owner of a neighbouring homestead) at the time of its construction, he supervised the construction and proposed modifications to the project drawn up in 1948 by Ing. Viktor Černý from Brno. These were groundbreaking constructions as they were among the first bridges in the Czech Republic with a prestressed concrete structure. Hurych also undoubtedly designed other bridge structures in the following years. However, only his involvement in the construction of the road bridges in Stříbro (1959) and Vokov (a local part of Třebeň) near Cheb (1964) has been documented so far.

From 1964–1967, he supervised the construction of two major bridges over the Euphrates River near Deir ez-Zor in Syria, and in 1971–1973, he worked for France as a technical expert in the construction of bridges in Algiers. However, this has yet to be proven by archival sources.

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