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BRNO
(BrEnn) "welcomes the visitor with new constructions", as the Communist-era travel brochures used to euphemistically put it. In fact, the high-rise tenements that surround the city play a major part in discouraging travellers from stopping here. But as the second largest city in the Czech Republic, with a couple of really good museums and galleries plus a handful of other sights and a fair bit of nightlife, it's worth a day or two of anyone's time.
Brno was a late developer, the first cloth factory being founded in 1766, but by the end of the nineteenth century this was easily the largest city in Moravia. Between the wars Brno enjoyed a cultural boom, heralded by the 1928 Exhibition of Contemporary Culture which provided an impetus for much of the city's modernist architecture. After the war, Brno's German-speakers (one quarter of the population) were sent packing on foot to Vienna. Capital fled with the capitalists and centralized state funds were diverted to Prague and Bratislava, pushing Brno firmly into third (now second) place
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