Ústí nad Orlicí
Ústí nad Orlicí (; ) is a town in the Pardubice Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 14,000 inhabitants. The town lies in the Orlické Mountains on the confluence of the rivers Tichá Orlice and Třebovka. The town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument zone. Administrative parts. Town parts of Hylváty, Kerhartice and Knapovec and villages of Černovír, Dolní Houžovec, Horní Houžovec and Oldřichovice are administrative parts of Ústí nad Orlicí. Etymology. The name "Ústí" means literally "mouth (of the river)". It refers to its location on the confluence of  rivers. The German name "Wildenschwert" was created by a distortion of the original German name "Wilhelmswerd", which referred to one of colonizers on the area, Wilhelm von Dürnholz, and meant "Wilhelm's promontory". History. Ústí nad Orlicí was founded in the second half of the 13th century, during the reign of Ottokar II of Bohemia. It predecessor was a Slavic settlement called "Oustí". The first written mention of the town was in 1285, when the King Wenceslaus II gifted the town to Zavis of Falkenstein. In 1292, after Zavis' death, Wenceslaus II gifted the settlement to the Cistercian monks at  Königsaal. They passed the town to the Leitomischl bishopric in 1358. During the 15th and 16th centuries, it was owned by various noble families, including was the Kostka of Postupice or the Pernštejn family. The town was damaged by a large fire in 1495. After the Battle of White Mountain, Ústí was acquired by the Liechtenstein family. There were guilds of weavers established here in the 16th century. The town was slow to recover from the lootings of the Thirty Years' War, then was destroyed by fire in 1705. It gained municipal status in 1795. When Wildenschwert was connected to  the railway network by the Olomouc – Prague line in 1845, the textile business boomed. It gained the tagline of "The Manchester of Eastern Bohemia", and became an important textile centre. It was an important railway junction and from 1850 became a regional centre. It was a German-speaking town in Austria-Hungary until it was allocated to Czechoslovakia in 1918 at the conclusion of the World War I. Ústí nad Orlicí as it was now called remained an important textile town, and in the 1960s the Cotton Researching Institute developed the Open end spinning technique that provided a faster alternative  to ring spinning. Sights. Mírové Square is a regular rectangular square with a floor plan preserved since the founding of the town. The square is surrounded by valuable arcaded houses. In the middle of the square is Marian column from 1737. The Baroque town hall was built in 1721–1723 and replaced the old town hall destroyed by fire. A school was built next to it in 1793. In 1850, the two buildings were structurally connected. The Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is a late Baroque building from 1770–1776. The adjoining deanery building is from 1742–1748. Twin towns  – sister cities. Ústí nad Orlicí is twinned with: