Key Dates
- 796 – Great Moravian Empire established
- 896 – Magyar invasion ends the Empire and the association of the Czechs and Slovaks
- 1346–1378 – Reign of Charles IV
- 1415 – Jan Hus burned at the stake as a heretic
- 1529 – Establishment of Habsburg rule
- 1618–1648 – The Thirty Years War
- 1867 – Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary proclaimed
- 1918 – Creation of Czechoslovakia
- 1938 – Annexation of the Sudetenland
- 1948 – Communist coup
- 1968 – The Prague Spring
- 1989 – The Velvet Revolution
Overview
Czechoslovakia had existed for only 74 years when the Czech and Slovak Republics decided to go their separate ways in 1993. Despite common Slavic roots, the Czechs and Slovaks developed in very different geo-political environments after the collapse of the Great Moravian Empire in the 10th century.
The Czech Republic consists of the areas known as Bohemia, centred on the capital Prague, and Moravia, whose provincial capital is Brno. The country is divided into nine administrative regions and has a population of approximately 10.5 million. Slovakia has four administrative regions, including the capital Bratislava, and a population of about 5.3 million.
The two republics feature very diverse countryside, from the rolling Bohemian hills and forests to the granite alpine peaks of the High Tatras of northeastern Slovakia. The flat Danube basin contrasts with the beech forests of the far east and the coal basins of north Moravia.
The food of the region is typically solid central European fare. The national drink is beer, and the most famous Czech brew is Pilsner Urquell from Pilsen. Budvar is the original Czech beer, adopted by an American brewery in 1876 and renamed Budweiser.
Czech cars are now identified with the letters CZ, Slovakian cars with SK (previously, Czechoslovakia used CS). Both countries speak variants of the same Slavonic language, which are mutually comprehensible, with various regional dialects. In addition to the ethnic Czech and Slovak populations there are other long-standing ethnic groups, chief among them Hungarians, Poles, Ruthenians from Eastern Slovakia, and Romanies.
History
Origins
Lying at the very heart of Europe, this region has been fought over throughout history. In the 5th century BC, the Celtic Boii tribe, who gave their name to Bohemia, were displaced by Germanic tribes, who then harassed the Roman legions stationed along the Danube. With the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD, the Huns invaded, followed a century later by the Avars and finally, in the 6th century, by the Slavs, ancestors of the Czechs.
According to legend, it was at this time that the city of Prague was founded. Princess Libuse climbed the hill of Vyšehrad where she saw a vision of a beautiful city reaching to the stars. Her attendants encountered a ploughman named Přemysl laying the threshold (prah in Czech) of his cottage. She married him and founded Prague and the Přemyslid dynasty.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Moravian Empire
The first historic record of the Slavs is of the Great Moravian Empire, established in 796. Centred on the river Morava, it included Slovakia, Bohemia and parts of present-day Hungary and Poland. This was the first time that Czechs and Slovaks were united under one ruler.
Along with other Slavonic lands, the Empire was Christianised by the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, who created the Cyrillic alphabet with which to write down the scriptures. After their deaths the area fell decisively under the influence of the Catholic Church and the Roman alphabet was adopted, resulting in some of the complicated spelling in modern Czech.
In 896 the Magyar invasion put an end not only to the Great Moravian Empire, but also to the linking of the Czech and Slovak peoples. Moravia’s destiny followed that of Bohemia in the region that became known as the Czech lands, while Slovakia was subsumed into the Magyar (Hungarian) Empire and followed its fortunes until the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918.
Dynasties
During the 10th century, the Přemyslid rulers consolidated the political strength of their country. The best known is Wenceslas (Václav in Czech), a devout Christian who was murdered by his pagan brother Boleslav the Cruel. Although the popular 19th century carol has no basis in Czech history, Wenceslas did build the fortress at Vyšehrad and the first church of St Vitus at Prague Castle, where he is buried. He was canonised and became the patron saint of Bohemia.
The 13th century was the high point of the Přemyslid dynasty. They secured permission from the Emperor to use the royal title and became Kings of Bohemia, with the additional honour of being one of the seven Electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. The discovery of gold and silver throughout the Czech lands and Slovakia led to large-scale German immigration. German miners and craftsmen founded whole towns in the interior, where they were guaranteed German civil rights.
The 14th century opened with a series of dynastic disputes, messy even by medieval standards. The Přemyslid dynasty had died out, and eventually an exasperated nobility, prompted by merchants’ desire for stability, offered the throne to John of Luxembourg. He spent most of his reign participating in foreign wars at Bohemia’s expense and lost his life on the battlefield of Crécy. His son, however, ushered in the Czech nation’s golden age.
The Golden Age
Charles IV, whose real name was Václav, had a Czech mother and was a Bohemian at heart. Elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, he founded Charles University two years later. He promoted Prague as the cultural capital of central Europe and Czech as an official language alongside Latin and German.
Charles adorned the city with magnificent Gothic buildings, including St Vitus’ Cathedral and the Charles Bridge. From Prague, the imperial capital, he presided over a period of relative peace in central Europe while western Europe was torn apart by the Hundred Years War.
Golden ages tend to be followed by less happy periods. Charles’s heir, Wenceslas IV, was no match for the religious disturbances of the early 15th century that anticipated the Reformation. In Bohemia, religious differences were exacerbated by tensions between the Czech and German populations and strains in the feudal system. The Great Schism, when rival Popes ruled from Rome and Avignon, weakened Rome’s power to control events.
Jan Hus
In 1403 Jan Hus was elected Rector of Prague University. A follower of the English reformer John Wycliffe, he preached in Czech against the wealth, corruption and hierarchical tendencies within the Church. A mild-mannered and devout man, he became the unlikely figurehead of a popular revolt and was burned at the stake in 1415.
Hus’s martyrdom sparked widespread rebellion in Bohemia and the first of Prague’s notorious defenestrations, when Catholic councillors and burghers were thrown from the windows of the Nové Město Town Hall onto the pikes of a Hussite mob. A century of religious and political turmoil ensued, uniting almost all Czechs, clergy and laity, peasants and nobles alike, against the Catholic Church and its mostly German conservative clergy. As in many religious conflicts, it widened into a social, economic and ethnic struggle.
The Habsburgs
In 1526 the Czech kingdom and Slovakia came under the control of the Catholic Habsburgs with the election of Ferdinand I. In the second half of the century the kingdom prospered under Emperor Rudolph II. Threatened by the Turks in Vienna, he moved the imperial capital to Prague.
A passionate patron of the arts and an inquisitive intellectual, Rudolph founded major art collections and invited renowned artists and scholars to his court. But the shadow that followed this second golden age was long. In 1618 the Bohemian Estates, protesting against the loss of their privileges and independence and the Habsburg failure to guarantee religious tolerance, threw two councillors from a window of Prague Castle in another defenestration.
This event is taken as the official start of the Thirty Years War, a messy religious and political conflict that devastated much of Central Europe and shattered Bohemia’s economy. The Estates elected Frederick of the Palatinate, the “Winter King,” as ruler and champion of the Protestant cause, but defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 led to savage repression by the Habsburgs.
Twenty-seven nobles were executed, 150,000 Protestants were exiled and Czechs lost their rights and much of their property through enforced Catholicisation and Germanisation. By 1648 the population had been reduced by up to 40% in some areas. The Habsburgs moved their capital back to Vienna and Prague became a provincial town.
The next two centuries of Habsburg rule are known to Czechs as the dark ages. The Counter Reformation brought education under Jesuit control and instruction was conducted exclusively in German. Fresh waves of German immigration boosted the depleted population but reduced Czech to a despised dialect spoken mainly by illiterate peasants, artisans and servants. One positive aspect of the period was the importation of the baroque style; Italian architects filled the cities with churches and convents and the Germanised aristocracy built baroque palaces and monuments. The Charles Bridge acquired its famous statues at this time.
In the 18th century, under the enlightened rule of Maria Theresia, conditions improved somewhat after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Her successor Joseph II introduced religious tolerance, dissolved many monasteries and abolished serfdom.
National Revival and the End of Habsburg Rule
In the early 19th century the first stirrings of national revival appeared in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. The movement was initially expressed in literature and the arts and was deeply rooted in language disputes. The Moravian Protestant and historian František Palacký wrote the first modern history of the Czech nation, rehabilitating Hus and the Czech reformers. In Slovakia, Ľudovít Štúr proposed a Slovak literary language to make nationalist ideas more accessible to ordinary people.
The reforms of Maria Theresia had expanded access to schooling, and with the Industrial Revolution a vocal middle class emerged. Textile, glass, coal and iron industries grew, and the steady stream of Czech labourers arriving in the towns swamped the largely Germanised urban populations.
As the Habsburg Empire weakened, both Czechs and Slovaks took part in the 1848 revolutions, demanding more rights for the Empire’s nationalities. The Pan-Slav movement alarmed the substantial minority of ethnic Germans in the Czech lands and initially the status quo was preserved. The creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867 was a bitter disappointment to the Czechs, who remained second-class citizens while Hungarians became the Austrians’ equals.
For Slovaks, the new regime was disastrous. Hungarian authorities embarked on a policy of forced Magyarisation. Education was conducted exclusively in Hungarian, most non-Magyars remained disenfranchised peasants and by 1914 around 20% of the Slovak population had emigrated, mostly to the USA.
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk has strong links with the United States through his American wife, whose name he added to his own, and through his visits to negotiate the creation of Czechoslovakia during World War I. Born in Moravia in 1850, the son of an illiterate Slovak peasant father and a German-speaking mother, he embodied the region’s mixed nationalities.
Masaryk trained as a blacksmith before studying in Brno and eventually becoming a professor of philosophy at Charles University. He served as a Social Democrat representative in the Viennese Imperial Parliament and became the first and longest-serving president of Czechoslovakia. A committed liberal humanist, he created one of the most progressive liberal democracies in central Europe. Re-elected four times, he was accorded the title “President and Liberator” on his resignation in 1935.
At his death in 1937 the country went into mourning as his successor, Edvard Beneš, struggled to hold back the advance of totalitarianism. A year later the Sudetenland was occupied by Nazi troops and Masaryk’s republican ideals lay in ruins. After the Communist coup in 1948, the image of the “bourgeois” First Republic was systematically dismantled. References to Masaryk were removed from textbooks, street names and statues. After 1989 the Communists suffered a similar fate and Masaryk was rehabilitated as the father of Czech democracy.
World War I and the Founding of the Czechoslovak Republic
During World War I the Czechs and Slovaks were unenthusiastic about fighting alongside their old enemies, the Austrians, Germans and Hungarians, against their Slav brothers, the Russians and Serbians. Large numbers defected and formed the Czechoslovak Legion, which eventually numbered around 100,000.
Meanwhile, political manoeuvres paved the way for a new state. Masaryk travelled to the USA, while his deputies, the Czech Edvard Beneš and the Slovak Milan Štefánik, lobbied in France and Britain. Czechs and Slovaks agreed to form a single federal state of two equal republics, confirmed in agreements brokered by US President Woodrow Wilson and signed in Cleveland in 1915 and in Pittsburgh in 1918.
In October 1918 the new Czechoslovak republic was declared with Allied support. Prague became the federal capital and Masaryk the first president. The new nation began life with a strong commitment to social democracy, supported by Masaryk until his resignation. Universal suffrage, land reform and language laws ensuring bilingualism in areas with significant minorities aimed to reduce ethnic and class tensions.
Czechoslovakia inherited up to 80% of Austro-Hungary’s industry and ranked tenth in the world industrial league table. However, its complex ethnic mix would later contribute to its undoing. A core population of 6 million Czechs and 2 million Slovaks lived alongside 3 million Germans, 600,000 Hungarians and smaller communities of Ruthenians, Poles and Jews. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought economic hardship and political instability. Slovak resentment at the failure to fully implement the Pittsburgh Agreement on autonomy fed support for the increasingly separatist People’s Party, while the Sudetenland’s German speakers resented inclusion in the new republic.
The Build-up to World War II and War
After the Crash, rocketing unemployment enabled the proto-Nazi Sudeten German Party, led by Konrad Henlein, to win 60% of the vote in the 1935 elections. Encouraged by Hitler, Henlein demanded autonomy for the Sudeten Germans and later full secession to the German Reich.
Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, then turned to the Sudetenland. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew twice to meet Hitler, assuring the British public that the country would not go to war “because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of which we know nothing.” On September 30th Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Daladier signed the Munich Agreement with Mussolini and Hitler, conceding the Sudetenland.
On October 15th German troops occupied the Sudetenland. On March 15th the following year they invaded what remained of the Czech Republic without opposition from Britain or France. One day before the collapse of the Czech state, Slovakia declared itself an independent state under Jozef Tiso, leader of the right-wing People’s Party. Tiso banned political opposition and imposed censorship and anti-Jewish measures along Nazi lines. After a brutally suppressed national uprising in 1944, Slovakia came under full Nazi occupation.
Lidice
The small mining town of Lidice, northwest of Prague, became infamous on the day it ceased to exist, June 10th 1942. It was chosen as the scapegoat for the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Two days after his funeral all 173 men of the village were rounded up and shot by the SS, 189 women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and 89 children were either sent with them or, if considered sufficiently “Aryan,” sent to Germany for adoption. The entire village was burned to the ground. Two weeks later the village of Ležáky suffered a similar fate.
The assassination of Heydrich was an ill-conceived plan formulated by the government-in-exile in London despite fierce opposition from the resistance at home. They feared exactly the reprisals that followed. The shoot-out between Heydrich, his driver and three agents was chaotic, involving jammed guns and a wild chase through Prague. The agents were finally pinned down in the crypt of the Church of St Cyril and Methodius by 700 Waffen SS soldiers after a colleague betrayed them. A pitched battle involving explosives and flooding ended when all seven agents took their own lives rather than be captured.
As soon as news of the massacre became known, a “Lidice shall live” campaign was launched and villages around the world adopted the name. Far from erasing a place, the Nazis had created a potent symbol of anti-fascist resistance.
At the end of the war Czechoslovakia was liberated from the east, with Czechoslovak and Russian troops moving into Ruthenia in late 1944. Prague was liberated by its own people on May 5th, many hoping to prompt the advance of General Patton’s Third Army from Pilsen. The Americans, however, respected pre-agreed demarcation lines and remained in place. The Czechs allowed German troops free passage out of the city and most had left by the time the Russians arrived on May 9th. Liberation Day is now celebrated on May 8th rather than, as under the Communists, on May 9th.
After the War and Communism
Violent reprisals against collaborators and German-speakers began immediately after the war. Germans received the same rations that Jews had been granted under Nazi rule and thousands were summarily executed or worse. A policy of forced expulsion meant that by 1947 around 2.5 million Germans had been driven out of the country or had fled in fear.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party rode the tide of pro-Soviet sentiment and won 40% of the vote in the 1946 elections. President Beneš appointed Party leader Klement Gottwald prime minister of a coalition government. In 1948 the Communists staged a coup with Soviet backing and proposed a new constitution confirming the “leading role” of the Communist Party. Beneš refused to sign and resigned in favour of Gottwald.
A period of harsh repression and forced Stalinisation followed. Ninety percent of industry was nationalised and compulsory collectivisation imposed. Many people were imprisoned and hundreds were executed or died in labour camps. A series of purges and show trials saw large numbers of high-ranking Party members executed.
By the mid-1960s there were calls for economic and political reform. The Slovak reformer Alexander Dubček replaced hardliner Antonín Novotný as Party leader in 1968 and coined the slogan “socialism with a human face.” For a short period the population enjoyed a degree of freedom unknown for three decades. The world watched as the “Prague Spring” unfolded, echoing youth protest movements in the United States and the student demonstrations in Paris that same year.
The Soviets, horrified at the challenge to orthodox socialism, responded on August 21st 1968 when Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the fragile reforms. Although casualties were lighter than during the 1956 uprising in Budapest, the long-term cost was greater. Dubček was replaced by another Slovak, Gustáv Husák, who was moved to a minor post and then sidelined, and a policy of “normalisation” followed.
Some 150,000 people fled the country before the borders closed, about 500,000 were expelled from the Party and roughly one million lost their jobs or, like writer Milan Kundera, were forced into menial labour. In January 1969 Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, set fire to himself in Wenceslas Square in protest. Six weeks later Jan Zajíc followed his example. They are commemorated today with photographs, candles and flowers at a shrine to the victims of communism near the top of the square.
Throughout the 1970s a carefully managed consumer boom raised living standards to one of the highest levels in Eastern Europe, in return for passive collaboration with the regime. In 1977 a group of dissidents and intellectuals formed Charter 77 to monitor human rights abuses in a country that had recently signed the Helsinki Agreement. Among its members was Václav Havel, who, along with many others, suffered relentless persecution and long prison sentences over the next decade.
The communist regime under Miloš Jakeš, who took over from Husák in 1987, remained in control even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite losing support from an increasingly outward-looking Kremlin under Mikhail Gorbachev. On November 17th 1989, however, events took a decisive turn. A peaceful demonstration of 50,000 people, called by the Communist youth organisation in memory of nine students killed by the Nazis in 1939, was brutally attacked by riot police. The following days saw constant demonstrations and strikes by students, artists and writers, and soon almost the entire population became involved.
Velvet Revolution and Divorce
The days after November 17th are known as the Velvet Revolution because there was no bloodshed. The early 1990s were a period of intense optimism and energy. Czechoslovakia had a strong interwar democratic tradition, a relatively high standard of living and a solid economic base, all of which made it attractive to investors and institutions keen to bring the country into the Western capitalist fold.
Nonetheless, the country was in worse shape than many had realised. It was environmentally damaged and its people suffered from what Havel called “post-prison psychosis,” a very real difficulty in thinking and acting independently after decades of authoritarian rule.
The June 1990 elections produced a record turnout of 99%. Civic Forum and its Slovak counterpart, People Against Violence, gained a clear victory and the government set about transforming the country into a market economy. Differences over how to achieve this led to the “Velvet Divorce” between the Czech and Slovak republics. Slovak calls for autonomy grew louder, with Vladimir Mečiar arguing for a slower approach to market reforms, while Czech finance minister Václav Klaus advocated a rapid move towards a liberal market economy.
Traditional resentment of Czech dominance and of Prague’s spectacular post-communist tourist boom, which left Bratislava in the shade, also contributed to the push for separation. Despite opinion polls showing majority support for the federation, Czechoslovakia was officially divided into two states on January 1st 1993.
Since the divorce, Slovakia has faced higher unemployment, a weaker currency and an unstable political situation. Moves towards privatisation and economic reform have often been blocked or delayed. The Czech Republic has seen stronger economic recovery, low unemployment and a rising standard of living, though it has also experienced increased crime, prostitution, drug trafficking, a shortage of affordable housing in gentrifying city centres, ongoing pollution and a deteriorating health system. Overall, the Czechs can look to the future with cautious optimism as society adjusts to freedoms and opportunities long denied and to deeper integration into Europe.
Flags
The traditional flag of the Czechs and Moravians consisted of equal horizontal red and white bands, but as two other nations share the same design the old federal flag, with a blue wedge between the bands, has been retained. This caused friction with Slovakia, as there had been an agreement not to use former federal symbols after independence.
The Slovak flag has three horizontal stripes of white, blue and red, similar to the flags of Russia and Slovenia, but with the national coat of arms superimposed.
Arts and Culture
Music
During the flowering of the Czech national revival, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) created a national musical style by incorporating folk songs and dances into classical compositions. The son of a brewer from eastern Bohemia, he studied and later taught music in Prague before working as a conductor and teacher in Göteborg, Sweden. His best-known pieces include the symphonic poems of the cycle Má vlast (My Country), especially “The Vltava,” a musical evocation of the river from its source through the woods and valleys of Bohemia to majestic Prague and the sea. He also composed the operas The Bartered Bride and Libuše. The annual Prague Spring music festival starts on his anniversary and traditionally opens with a selection of his works.
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), the son of an innkeeper and butcher from a small town near Prague, is probably the best-known Czech composer. He studied at the Prague Organ School and played viola in the opera orchestra. In 1884 he made the first of several visits to London, and later spent three years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where he wrote his famous “From the New World” symphony. His cello concerto, Te Deum and Stabat Mater are also widely performed.
Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), born in Moravia, also studied at the Prague Organ School before becoming a professor at the Prague Conservatory. His best known work is the opera Jenůfa, but he wrote several other operas as well as many chamber and piano pieces.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited Prague several times and was always warmly received. He said that only the Praguers truly appreciated his music. Don Giovanni premiered at the Estates Theatre to a rapturous audience, the overture having reputedly been written on the coach journey from Vienna.
Literature
The writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924), a Prague Jew who wrote in German, gained international attention after the Second World War. Theologians, communists, psychologists and existentialists have all offered interpretations of his very personal, claustrophobic world, which can be seen as a metaphor for the dehumanising aspects of modern life. He spent most of his life around Josefov and the Old Town Square, and one winter in a little house on Golden Lane inside the castle area. Many of his novels and stories, including The Castle and The Trial, were published posthumously and against his wishes, and later adapted for film.
A classic of Czech literature is The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923), a very long novel that the author did not finish before his death. Švejk’s behaviour leads his superiors in the Austro-Hungarian army to consider him a hopeless idiot, but his apparent obtuseness allows him to disobey orders, avoid work and poke fun at authority. For many Czechs he embodies certain national characteristics and the humour that persisted even under totalitarian rule. One story tells of Communist Party First Secretary Husák being forced to cancel a speech because students would not stop chanting, “Long live the Communist Party, long live Husák” in a deliberately mocking way – an incident worthy of Švejk.
The contemporary author Milan Kundera, born in 1929, is best known for the atmospheric and moving The Unbearable Lightness of Being, later adapted as a film, and the semi-autobiographical The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Art and Architecture
Prague is a showpiece of Gothic and Baroque architecture, but it also boasts wonderful Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) and Cubist buildings. Examples include the House of the Black Madonna (Dům U Černé Matky Boží) on Celetná, a Cubist landmark, and the Obecní dům (Municipal House) on Náměstí Republiky and the Hotel Evropa on Wenceslas Square, both fine examples of Art Nouveau.
The graphic artist and designer Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) is widely known for his work in Paris, where he made his name with posters for Sarah Bernhardt and helped define the decorative Art Nouveau style. After some years in America he returned to Prague, where he is buried in Vyšehrad Cemetery. His work can be seen, among other places, on the façade of the main train station.
Performance Art
Prague’s Black Light Theatres, the most famous being Lanterna Magika, present performances that combine mime, dance, music and puppetry with shadow play and black light effects. The best companies create a distinctive visual style that evocatively captures the mysterious spirit of medieval Prague, its alchemists, sorcerers and ghosts.
During the long years of communist censorship and repression, Czech artists developed a superficially naïve style in animated film, puppetry, mime, book illustration and text-based drama. This allowed them to express ideas that were unacceptable to the regime. Stories are told of censors sitting with notebooks in hand, unable to pinpoint any overt subversion, while audiences chuckled at the underlying meaning.
Science
Tycho Brahe, the famous Danish astronomer, arrived in Prague in 1597 sporting a gold and silver false nose, having lost his own in a duel in Rostock. He had previously built an observatory in Denmark equipped with enormous astronomical instruments, in the days before the telescope. He became court astronomer to Rudolph II but died only two years later, in 1601, of a burst bladder after an epic drinking bout.
Johannes Kepler succeeded him, and Brahe’s meticulous observations formed the groundwork for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Brahe himself continued to regard the earth as the centre of the universe and his hybrid system long competed with the Copernican model.
Legends
The Golem of Prague
In the late 16th century, during the reign of Rudolph II, legend tells of a terrifying giant stalking the streets of the Jewish ghetto. Created by Rabbi Löw from the mud of the Vltava and animated by the unspeakable name of God written on a parchment (the shem) placed in its mouth, this creature was the Golem. Many stories describe his exploits, sometimes sinister, but generally he used his strength to protect the Jews against persecution.
On one occasion Rabbi Löw forgot to let his servant rest on the Sabbath and the Golem rebelled, causing havoc. The rabbi was forced to interrupt a service at the Old-New Synagogue to subdue the creature. He snatched the shem from the Golem’s mouth and the clay returned to clay. He hid the remains on the synagogue roof and continued the service. To this day, the congregation is said to repeat the verse of the psalm that Rabbi Löw was reciting when he was interrupted.
Further Reading and Resources
Books
- A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
- We the People: The Revolutions of ’89, Timothy Garton Ash
- Disturbing the Peace, Václav Havel
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- The Spirit of Prague, Ivan Klíma
Websites
The Visit
Prague
Prague today is one of the most beautiful and appealing cities in Europe. Since the fall of communism it has blossomed, now bustling with life, commerce and creative energy. By day the narrow, largely car-free streets of the Old Town are thronged with tourists shopping for hand-crafted items, Bohemian crystal and designer clothes. At night, theatres, concerts, clubs and traditional bars provide varied entertainment, while ancient churches, squares and the castle are brought to life with atmospheric floodlighting.
Magnificently situated on the river Vltava, Prague can be seen as four interlinked cities, each with its own distinctive atmosphere and charm. The vast complex of castle, cathedral, palaces and galleries of Hradčany is the main focus of the guided tour. High above the river and town, the district offers splendid views and narrow alleyways, including the Golden Lane. Its spirit is one of royal magnificence shot through with legends of ghosts, alchemy and mystery. Emperor Rudolph II filled it with painters, sculptors, astronomers and alchemists and Prague became a hive of creative activity, a fantastical city ruled by a melancholy king obsessed with finding the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Between the castle and the Vltava, Malá Strana (the Lesser Town) tumbles down the hill in a maze of narrow streets lined with Baroque buildings. This was the town created by the Přemyslid kings in the Middle Ages to accommodate the German merchants and craftsmen who had flooded into Prague. Later, the Baroque building boom of the 18th century saw palaces built here for the nobility, many of which now house embassies. Despite fierce fighting at the end of the Second World War, Prague’s buildings, particularly in Malá Strana, suffered little serious damage and the area has preserved the authentic feel of a previous age.
The quiet back streets and shady squares of Malá Strana have a unique atmosphere. Director Miloš Forman used them for the street scenes in his film Amadeus, as he felt they resembled Mozart’s Vienna more closely than modern Vienna itself. Today there are a few local shops and many small wine bars that, in summer, spill out onto the squares, making the area particularly atmospheric in the evenings.