Fire destroys 70,000 pairs of shoes at ex-Bata factory

Canadian Czech-born businessman Tomas Bata, the owner of the Bata global shoe co-operation, poses for a picture inside one of his Prague' stores, June 22, 2005. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

A fire in a Czech warehouse on the premises of the former shoe-making Bata empire destroyed 70,000 pairs of shoes on Thursday, said the Vasky company which had made them.

The fire broke out on the ninth floor of the 11-storey building in the southeastern Czech city of Zlin before 0630 GMT on Thursday.

Nobody was injured, the fire brigade said, adding the fire was still out of control by 1600 GMT and the building kept collapsing.

“We have lost almost everything and we are facing the toughest test in the history of Vasky. It hurts,” Vasky founder Vaclav Stanek said on Facebook.

He put the value of the destroyed shoes and clothing at about US$7 million.

Stanek founded Vasky in 2016 in a bid to continue the shoe-making tradition in Zlin, started by Tomas Bata who had founded the shoe factory there in 1894.

Following his death in an air crash in 1932, Bata’s prosperous business was taken over by his half-brother Jan Antonin Bata.

Jan Antonin Bata fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 to expand the business into a global shoe-making empire after settling down in Brazil in 1941.

The Bata factory in Zlin was nationalized and renamed Svit after the Moscow-steered communists took power and introduced a command economy in Czechoslovakia in 1948.

Svit was closed after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 which toppled the communist rule four years before Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The premises were then refurbished to host regional government offices or a museum.

The building number 34, affected by the fire, was built at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s as a shoe warehouse in a place hit by Second World War bombing.

The Czech fire brigade said it was unlikely to put out the fire that hit three storeys and that the building would have to be torn down if it does not collapse on its own.

Stanek said that Vasky, producing shoes near Zlin and in neighbouring Slovakia, would keep making shoes despite the loss.

“We have lost what we had made, not the reason why we’re doing it. We still have people, the craft, and the resolve to start again,” Stanek added.