News Release
April 1999
"A Tour through Olomouc," a video and computer
presentation by Jim Green, is the final lecture of this semester’s
Roundtable series and is set for April 12 at 7:00 p.m. in Prosser Auditorium.
Jim plans a videotape and demonstration that will take guests on a virtual
tour around the city of Olomouc in central Moravia. The program is sponsored
by the Moravian College Alumni Association. The roundtable presentation
is free and open to the pubic.
Jim earned his undergraduate and advanced degrees at Lehigh
University. He was a member of the Moravian College faculty in the Computer
Science Department from 1979 until his retirement in 1998. For the past
three years, Jim, along with his wife, Mary Lou, has participated in
a series of computer-related workshops at Palacky University in Olomouc,
Czech Republic. This workshop endeavor resulted from collaboration between
Jim and David Skoupil, a faculty member at Palacky University. One product
of the workshop is a computer driven tour of Olomouc.
The workshop grew out of a student exchange program between
Palacky University and a number of colleges in the United States, including
Moravian, which was established by Charles Merrill, a teacher and benefactor,
around the time of the fall of Soviet domination in central and eastern
Europe. Under this program two students from Palacky have attended Moravian
each year from 1990 to the present time. David Skoupil, at the time
a computer science student, attended Moravian from 1990-91 as one of
the first pair of students to attend Moravian College.
Olomouc is a beautiful city in central Moravia, approximately
4½ hours east of Prague, with a history of nearly a thousand
years. It is or has been a fortress, a military garrison, a government
capital, the seat of an archbishop, and a university town. The city
has been occupied by a series of armies including the Austrians under
the Hapsburgs, and more recently the Germans and the Russians. It has
survived most of these occupations with little direct physical destruction,
although the Swedes left it in disrepair in 1650 after occupying it
for eight years during the Thirty Years’ War. Along with most
central and eastern European cities, Olomouc suffered from the combined
effects of neglect and pollution during the communist era. However,
in the past few years there has been a major effort to clean up and
restore the beautiful and historic buildings and monuments that fill
the city.
Prosser Auditorium is located in the Haupert Union Building
at Locust and Monocacy streets in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
