Miners as a profession in the background of the Ostrava region.

This thesis deals with the development of mining and mining colonies in the Ostrava region and also deals with the interpretation of interviews with miners performing their profession in the Ostrava-Karviná mining district between years 1950 and 1994. It focuses not only on the development of the environment and mining conditions in the Ostrava region, but also reasons and motivations for choosing a demanding and often life-threatening profession, as mining is. The thesis is produced using inductive method, where the processes at the individual level apply to wider groups. Such processing allows me to process interviews with witnesses alongside traditional written sources. The finding of the thesis is the fact that there are three main motives for the choosing of mining profession, which are family tradition, the possibility of not participating in two-year compulsory military training and last but not least, the above-standard wage. The thesis offers another view on how workers in socialist Czechoslovakia lived