Dvůr Králové nad Labem

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Statistics
Area:	35.8 km²
Population:	16,150 (2004)
Map

Dvůr Králové nad Labem (IPA: [ˈdvu:r ˈkra:lovɛ: ˈnadlabɛm]; German: Königinhof an der Elbe) is a town of the Czech Republic in Hradec Králové Region, in the Labe (Elbe) river valley.

Dvůr Králové was first mentioned in 1270. It was a dowry town, owned by the King's wife and responsible for her expenses when her husband died. Nowadays, it is a center of the textile and machinery industries.

The city has a famous zoo (containing 290 animal species, making it one of the biggest in Europe) and African Safari Museum. Outside the city, visitors can view an old residence of the Jesuits in Žireč and a castle in Kuks, both with many Baroque statues. The zoo was also the site of a mass killing of giraffes, at the time the largest herd in captivity anywhere in the world. Forty-seven of the 49 animals were killed on the night of April 30, 1975. The episode is fictionalized in the 2006 book Giraffe by author and journalist J. M. Ledgard. In the book, the animals were killed by Communist authorities to prevent the spread of a virus that was believed to pose a grave threat to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's livestock. The author acknowledges at the end of the book that an official explanation has never been given of the culling of the giraffe population at the zoo.

[edit] Manuscript affair

On September 16, 1817, Václav Hanka allegedly discovered a manuscript appearing to be from the 13th century in the tower of a local church. The Manuscript of Dvůr Kralové, probably in fact created by Hanka, was intended to help Czech patriots in the struggle against German culture. It was proven to be a forgery at the end of the 19th century by Professor Tomáš Masaryk and confirmed as such by later examinations [1]. A minority of historians still consider it genuine.