Floods – a natural phenomenon that would always shake to surprise

In the last twenty years, disastrous floods occurring in the Czech Republic affected smaller or larger areas (three extreme events occurred in 2010 alone). A particularly great surprise was the flood disaster in the summer of 1997, which caught a greater part of the population unprepared because several generations had not experienced a similar hydrological extreme – the historic memory of floods had been lost. In the past, people living along large rivers took into account the usual and often annually occurring natural phenomenon. However, the relation of today’s inhabitants in riverine landscapes and of the whole society to rivers and phenomena occurring on them changed during the 20th century. This is why the awareness of floods should be constantly restored, which is the aim of this work. The paper reminds and documents several disastrous floods, today already forgotten, occurring on Moravian or Bohemian rivers from the 16th century until the present and their impacts