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Hospodářské noviny reports that the Czech national land registry plans to spend 250m koruna (€1m) on surveyors fees, launching “the first major effort to hand back church property,” which was confiscated without compensation by the communist regime.
In compliance with a ruling by the country’s constitutional court, announced on June 3, the Czech state must hand over property with an estimated value of €3bn to Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities. The daily adds that —
The complicated quest for historical documents, which were often drafted in Gothic script, to prove that properties did in fact belong to the churches before they were confiscated by the 1948 coup d’état, is the stuff of detective novels.
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