The communists took our garden shop away from us and closed it down as a loss-making business, even though it had previously been enough to feed our entire family
Stáhnout obrázek
Jiří Čermák was born on 7 July 1937 in Čechy pod Kosířem. His father Josef Čermák worked as a gardener at the local chateau, which at that time belonged to the noble Silva-Tarouc family originally from Portugal. After the war, the family moved to Luky nad Jihlavou, where Josef Čermák opened a horticultural business that soon began to prosper and supported the whole family. At the beginning of the 1950s, the gardening was nationalized by the communists and after a few years it was declared unprofitable and closed down. After primary school, Jiří Čermák was only allowed to go to an apprenticeship because of the unfavourable cadre profile, but in 1953, after the death of Stalin and Gottwald, he was able to enter the secondary school of horticulture in Děčín, which he successfully completed with the matriculation exam. After his military service, in 1961 he took up a position as a gardener at the flower garden in Kroměříž and after graduating from the higher school of horticulture in Lednice, which he had studied remotely since 1961, he was appointed its administrator. He held this position until 1995, when he became the director of the Archbishop‘s Chateau Kroměříž. He and his wife raised four children, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 2023 Jiří Čermák lived in a home for the elderly in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.
