🦁 A History of the Czech Lands

Picture a country where political disputes were settled by throwing officials out of the window, where a nation once decided to take its own language back because almost nobody could still write it, and where for forty years people were not allowed to travel west. Welcome to Czechia.

We are going from a time when there was no Czechia at all to the point where you can find it on a map. No dull lists of dates — but all the embarrassments, brilliant ideas and brutal turns that shaped this country in the middle of Europe. Hold on.

Chapter 1: Mammoth hunters and the people who were here first

We start a long way back — about twenty-five thousand years ago, near what is now Dolní Věstonice in south Moravia. Mammoth hunters lived there, and they were far more advanced than you probably imagine. Archaeologists found among them the oldest known ceramic figurine in the world: the Venus of Věstonice, some eleven centimetres of clay fired in a hearth. It is more than ten thousand years older than the first pots.

What is remarkable is that the figurine carries the print of a child's finger. Someone small touched it while it was still soft, and the print was fired along with it.

Then came the Celts — the Boii, from whom the name Bohemia survives, still the Latin name for the country. After them came Germanic peoples, and sometime in the sixth century the Slavic tribes our ancestors came from. Almost everything we know about their first state, Samo's realm, comes from a single source: the chronicle of a Frankish monk who noted of Samo that he was a merchant, had twelve wives and ruled for thirty-five years.

Chapter 2: The Přemyslids, Prince Wenceslas and a fratricide in the yard

Around 870 the Přemyslid dynasty appears in Prague, and with it the castle that still stands above the river. Legend says the line was founded by Přemysl the Ploughman, whom Princess Libuše chose as her husband after seeing him in a vision. Historians are more reserved, but the castle is real and so is the oldest church inside it.

The best known Přemyslid is Prince Wenceslas, whom Czechs know as a saint and the world knows as Good King Wenceslas from the English Christmas carol — which has nothing whatever to do with his actual life. Wenceslas was educated, knew Latin, tried to keep the peace with the neighbouring East Frankish king and paid him tribute for it. Part of the nobility disliked that, and in 935 (or 929) his brother Boleslav invited him to a feast at Stará Boleslav and had him killed in front of the church.

Boleslav then ruled, and was incidentally a rather capable monarch — he unified the country and began minting the first Czech coins. History has never been kind to him, though, because you only get called the Cruel once.

Wenceslas's skull is still carried in procession on coronation occasions. And his statue on Wenceslas Square has been, ever since, the place where everyone in Prague who wants to change something comes to meet.

Chapter 3: Charles IV, or what happens when a state gets a good manager

The year is 1346, Charles IV takes the throne, and the best century this country ever had begins. Charles was half Luxembourg, half Přemyslid, grew up in France, spoke five languages, and arrived in Prague as in a city he had barely known before.

What he managed in thirty years: he founded Charles University (1348), the first in central Europe. He had the Charles Bridge built, though at the time it was simply called the Stone Bridge. He laid out a brand-new quarter around the old core — so generously that the city fitted inside its boundaries for another five hundred years. He built Karlštejn to house the imperial crown jewels. And he got Prague raised to an archbishopric, so it no longer had to answer to Mainz.

One story attaches to the Charles Bridge that is most likely true. The foundation stone is said to have been laid in 1357, on the ninth of July, at 5 hours and 31 minutes in the morning. Written out in a row that gives 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1 — a palindrome. Charles took astrology seriously, and this number was meant to give the bridge its strength. The bridge is still standing.

Charles also wrote his own autobiography and had busts made for the triforium of St Vitus Cathedral — of himself, both his wives, the archbishops and the builders. It is the oldest set of genuine portraits north of the Alps.

Chapter 4: The Hussites, or when a chalice became a weapon

Charles's son Wenceslas IV had a harder time of it. He ruled at a moment when the Church happened to have three popes at once and people were beginning to feel that something was not right.

The preacher Jan Hus of the Bethlehem Chapel preached in Czech instead of Latin, criticised the sale of indulgences and argued that the authority was the Bible, not the office. In 1415 he was invited to the council at Constance, given a safe conduct — and burned. The reaction was fiercer than anyone expected.

Four years later, radicals in Prague threw the councillors out of the windows of the New Town hall. Those who survived the fall were beaten to death below. This method of political discussion came to be called defenestration, and Prague would use it twice more.

The Hussite wars followed, in which a small country defeated five crusades in a row. They were led by Jan Žižka, the one-eyed commander from Trocnov, who lost the other eye as well and went on commanding blind, from descriptions of the terrain. He invented the war wagon fort — ordinary farm carts chained into a fortress, fired from with hand guns so new that armoured cavalry had no idea what to do about them. Žižka never lost a battle.

The Hussite wars ended in a compromise, and Bohemia came out of them as the only country in Europe where two confessions legally existed side by side. For almost two hundred years.

Chapter 5: Rudolf II, or the emperor, alchemy and the stars

In 1583 something unexpected happens: Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg moves the seat of the empire from Vienna to Prague. Prague is suddenly the capital of half of Europe and fills up with people looking for work in it.

Rudolf was an eccentric and a collector. His cabinet of curiosities held paintings, clocks, automata, minerals, a unicorn's horn (in fact a narwhal's) and, supposedly, the clay Adam was made from. He was also a patron of science, which had consequences he knew nothing about.

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe worked at his court, holding the most accurate measurements of planetary positions that had ever existed. So did Johannes Kepler, who got hold of those measurements after Brahe's death and deduced from them that the planets move in ellipses, not circles. That opened the road to Newton. The laws of planetary motion were worked out in Prague.

Brahe, incidentally, had a metal replacement for the nose he lost in a duel, and died after a banquet from which, according to contemporary accounts, he would not get up to relieve himself before the emperor did. Modern analysis of his remains points rather to kidney failure, but the story is immortal.

The Prague of that time also has the legend of the Golem, the clay servant of Rabbi Löw. Rabbi Löw really existed and was a considerable scholar; the Golem only turns up in the sources two hundred years later.

Chapter 6: White Mountain and a darkness that was not entirely dark

In 1618 the Bohemian estates once again used the tried and tested method: they threw two royal governors and their secretary out of a window of Prague Castle. All three survived the fall, because they landed on a heap of refuse in the moat — the Catholic side declared it a miracle, the Protestant side declared it manure. This third Prague defenestration set off the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that laid waste to the whole of Europe.

It was decided quickly. On 8 November 1620, at White Mountain outside Prague, the battle lasted under two hours and the estates' army lost. A year later, twenty-seven leaders of the revolt were executed on the Old Town Square. Twenty-seven crosses are still there in the paving.

There followed recatholicisation, the forced emigration of non-Catholics and the loss of political independence. Among those who left was Jan Amos Comenius, the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren — and one of the most influential educators in history. He argued that teaching should be done by demonstration, in the mother tongue, and that girls belong in school too. In his day those were radical ideas. He died in the Netherlands and never saw the country again.

This period is called the age of darkness. That is a simplification: it is precisely when Czech Baroque came into being — Santini's churches, the statues on the Charles Bridge, and the music every village schoolmaster played. It was dark politically, not artistically.

Chapter 7: The National Revival, or how to resurrect a language

At the end of the eighteenth century Czech was the language of the countryside. The towns spoke German, the offices German, the university Latin and then German. And at that point a handful of people decided to do something about it.

The first systematic grammar was written by one of the earliest revivalists — in German, though, because Czech did not yet have the words for scholarly work. Josef Jungmann compiled a five-volume dictionary and simply invented the missing words, or took them from other Slavic languages. That is where the Czech words for air, apparatus, magazine and submarine come from. František Palacký wrote the history of the Czech nation and gave people a story they could place themselves in.

The revival also included one famous fraud. In 1817 the Dvůr Králové Manuscript was "found", a collection of supposedly medieval poems proving the antiquity of Czech culture. The enthusiasm was enormous. Doubts appeared early, but the manuscripts were finally demolished in the 1880s by Professor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk — and it cost him his popularity. He insisted that a nation built on a lie has no future. Thirty years later he was president.

In 1868 the foundation stone of the National Theatre was laid, built from the donations of ordinary people. In 1881 it burned down. Within two years the money was collected again and the theatre opened for the second time.

Chapter 8: 1918, or a state out of nothing

The First World War broke Austria-Hungary apart, and on 28 October 1918 Czechoslovakia came into being. The president was Masaryk, who was sixty-eight and had spent the war abroad persuading the powers that such a state ought to exist. A decisive part was played by the Czechoslovak Legions — tens of thousands of soldiers who took control of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia and proved that a nation without a state nonetheless had an army.

Interwar Czechoslovakia was one of the ten most industrialised countries in the world. Baťa in Zlín made shoes by methods studied all over the world, and built an entire town around it. The Škoda works in Plzeň were among the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. The soil plough, the ship's propeller and contact lenses come from here — and so does the word robot, coined by Josef Čapek for his brother Karel's play.

Then came Munich. In September 1938, France and Britain agreed with Hitler and Mussolini that Czechoslovakia would surrender its borderlands. Without Czechoslovakia present. The country had a good army and fortifications, but alone against Germany it stood no chance. It gave in without a fight, and six months later Germany occupied all of it.

Chapter 9: The Protectorate, the assassination and a village wiped out

Under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the country was Germany's industrial workshop. The resistance functioned, but at a price. In May 1942 the acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, was fatally wounded in Prague in an attack carried out by the paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, dropped from England.

The reprisal was beyond imagining. The Nazis burned the village of Lidice, executed every man over fifteen, sent the women to a concentration camp and murdered most of the children. They levelled the village, ploughed it over and erased it from the maps. After the war, dozens of streets and several towns around the world were given the name Lidice — precisely the opposite of what was intended.

The paratroopers were betrayed by one of their own. Seven men died in the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street, where they held out for several hours until the ammunition ran out. The facade of the church is still shot through with bullet holes and nobody repairs it.

Of the roughly 118,000 Jews living in the Czech lands before the war, fewer than one in ten survived the Holocaust.

Chapter 10: Forty years behind the curtain

In February 1948 the communists took power and the country vanished behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. There followed nationalisation, a currency reform that took people's savings, political trials, and the execution of Milada Horáková, a lawyer and member of parliament, condemned in a fabricated trial.

In the sixties things loosened for a while. The Czechoslovak New Wave appeared, the films of Miloš Forman and Věra Chytilová, two Oscars for best foreign language film, the small-format theatres, Werich, Suchý and Šlitr. In 1968 reform communists led by Alexander Dubček set about building socialism with a human face.

It ended on 21 August 1968, when troops from five Warsaw Pact states occupied the country. What followed was called normalisation: half a million people thrown out of the party and out of their jobs, banned books, closed borders. In January 1969 the student Jan Palach burned himself to death on Wenceslas Square in protest at society's resignation.

People went on writing all the same. Václav Havel wrote plays, went to prison for them and became the spokesman of Charter 77. Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký wrote in exile. Bohumil Hrabal came out in samizdat — typewritten copies, in editions of however many sheets of carbon paper would take.

Chapter 11: The Velvet Revolution and a divorce without a single shot

On 17 November 1989 the police broke up a student demonstration on Národní třída. Ten days later nearly a million people stood on the Letná plain in Prague. After thirty-one days the government resigned. After forty-one days Václav Havel — a playwright who had still been in prison at the start of that year — was elected president.

Nobody was killed. Hence the Velvet Revolution.

Three years later Czechia and Slovakia separated. Without a referendum, by agreement between politicians, on 1 January 1993. It was one of the few peaceful break-ups of a state in history — for comparison, Yugoslavia was falling apart into war at the same moment. The property was divided too, two to one by population, aircraft and gold reserves included.

Czechia joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

Chapter 12: The country under your feet

Today's Czechia is a country the size of Austria with ten and a half million inhabitants and the highest density of castles and châteaux in the world — over two thousand of them. It has seventeen sites on the UNESCO list.

Soft contact lenses were invented here (Otto Wichterle made them at home on a children's Merkur construction set), along with Semtex, the ship's propeller, the soil plough, sugar cubes and the word robot. Antonín Dvořák wrote the New World Symphony in New York, and a century later the astronauts of Apollo 11 took its main theme to the Moon.

And there is still the thing everyone who comes here notices: the pub. Czechia has the highest beer consumption per head in the world and has held it without interruption since 1993. Beer has been brewed here since at least 993, when the monks at Břevnov monastery started making it — a few hundred years before the Pilsner lager that today accounts for most of the beer in the world.

From the mammoth hunters at Věstonice to this is a strangely winding road. And that is the whole history of the Czech lands — now look around you, because some of it is probably still standing.