Isolated church

This little church (to someone named St. Linhart / Leonard) is sitting in a tiny uninhabited island in the middle of a big lake. And you may well wonder what the heck it’s doing there! I know I did. Turns out, it’s the only remaining bit of the town of Mušov that was swallowed up by the artificial lakes caused by the Nové Mlýny dam on the Thaya river. I haven’t been able to find much about the dam, except that it dates back to Communist days, and its original purpose (to provide a reservoir to help irrigate the surrounding land) turned out to be kind of useless since the infrastructure to move the water around wasn’t set up and agriculture didn’t need as much water as the planners calculated anyway (and even less is needed now).

So now the region has three linked reservoirs and a dam that nobody really wants but they’re kind of stuck with, since the middle one (pictured, with the church) is designated a conservation area with a special historic wetland ecosystem. Plans are afoot to gradually decrease the water level without affecting the dam’s other purpose of electricity generation, but there’s wrangling in the courts as to whether that’s possible, or wise, or legal. I am not a lawyer, I just read Wikipedia!