The Villa of Jan Vincenc Diviš is a neo-Baroque building designed and built by architect Rudolf Kříženecký in 1905. Its owner J. V. Diviš was one of the important figures of Přelouč, he was the director of the local sugar factory, the mayor, and outside Přelouč he was known as an important chemist, the author of several sugar patents and also a writer.

When Jan Vincenc Diviš became the director of the sugar factory in Přelouč in 1879, he had already had experience in several sugar factories all over the country. Trained as a chemist who was scientifically interested in carbohydrates, he eventually became one of the most prominent experts on carbohydrate chemistry and sugar production in his time. He wrote textbooks, created patents and also translated science fiction literature, wrote poems and books. Already as a respected and wealthy director of the sugar factory, he had his villa built by a prominent architect of his time, Rudolf Kříženecký, the author of, for example, the grounds of the Smíchov Brewery or the modern form of Villa America, today`s Antonín Dvořák Museum in Prague. It was Villa Amerika, originally designed by Kilián Ignác Dienzenhofer, which Kříženecký took as the model for Diviš`s villa in Přelouč. The two-storey neo-Baroque villa had three gardens and an ethnographic salon for visitors. But there was no running water in the sumptuous villa, and the poet Ivan Diviš, who grew up here in the 1930s, recalled how his grandmother (the wife of Jan V. Diviš) used to go to the well opposite the house to fetch water. After the war, the villa became a town museum and in the 1990s a nursing home run by Diaconia of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren.

Keywords: analytical chemistry; biochemistry; chemistry; industry; sugar industry; literature; inventor

Jan Vincenc Diviš`s Villa in Přelouč