Abstract
The point of interest is construction and further development of the memorial of the so-called Duchcov viaduct, the clash between marching unemployed workers and gendarmes in 1931, resulting in four casualties from among the workers. The memorial was notable for its unusual dynamics.
Its construction in 1954 as well as its move in 1963 involved negotiations and had a big bearing on the town as a whole. Here, the memory policy was not only a retrieval of the offi cial narrative, but also a tangled web of political and social ties entered into by historical players with their own visions and interests.
The story of the killed unemployed, represented, besides other things, by the memorial, was above all a vehicle of legitimation of the communist rule on the local level. The Communist Party was represented here as the only protector of North-Bohemian workers and the only guarantor of the future corresponding to the socialist vision.
However, peculiar meanings were ascribed to the memory connected with the event, interactions and neighbouring with other memory frames occurred and last but not least, commemorations at the viaduct served for argumentation of individual goals. Pointing out the specifi cs of the memory creation process on the regional level is the main objective of the presented paper, the methodology of which draws on classic works on memory studies (Nora, Assmann).
The aim of this paper is to show the disputability of the idea of a clash between the memory "from the bottom" and the ideological imperative from top and present a more complex process of memory creation. The national memory frame is put aside; what is emphasized is creation of identity at the town level.