History | Topic Archive

Jiří Vidím, a former teacher, entered the hotel business almost at the very moment that communism fell in Czechoslovakia, and seized the opportunities that freedom brought. For two decades now he has been running Unitas House, a hotel in downtown Prague with a fascinating history.

Last year in this programme I played some archive recordings from the pre-war gatherings of the “Sokol” movement, which brought together tens of thousands of people in displays of mass gymnastics, all in an atmosphere of great patriotic fervour. After the war, the communists suppressed the Sokol movement as part of the old political order, instead staging their own spectacular calisthenics displays in honour of the Communist Party.

In the heart of Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood is Rixdorf, an area that is also known as the Bohemian Village. The settlement originated in the first half of the 18th century, under the auspices of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I., who welcomed Bohemian Protestant refugees into his empire. In the Habsburg Empire, they had been banned from exercising their faith. We recently visited this fascinating area of Berlin and talked to Cordelia Pollina, the director of the Bohemian Museum, which is devoted to the history of this neighborhood.

The Habsburg imperial family ruled the Czech lands for nearly four centuries but few of the emperors and empresses found favour with their Czech subjects. One of the exceptions whom Czechs took to their hearts was Ferdinand V the Benign who spent nearly three decades living at Prague Castle as its last imperial inhabitant. A new exhibition which recently opened at Prague Castle looks at the life and times of the last crowned king of Bohemia.

Part of the American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a threat to boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. The Soviet troops stayed put and the boycott went ahead, led by US President Jimmy Carter. To a greater or lesser extent, dozens of countries joined the protest.

Only a handful of the hundreds of British women who moved to this part of the world with their Czechoslovak husbands after World War II remain in the Czech Republic. Many have died, while some returned home to the U.K. decades ago. One of the few British war brides still living here is Lillian Schořová, whose home is in North Bohemia. Radio Prague’s Sarah Borufka visited her there for this episode of Czech Life.

William N. Oatis, an Associated Press correspondent who served in Prague in the hardline 1950s entered cold war history when the communist regime made him confess falsely to espionage and sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Now, fifteen years after his death, recordings of that shameful show trial have unexpectedly been unearthed in the country’s National Archives.

For first-time visitors the world-famous Konopiště Chateau or Karlštejn Castle are natural choices for daytrips outside of Prague but one destination visitors might want to consider is the royal Czech town of Rakovník, a veritable historic gem found less than 60 kilometres west of the Czech capital. Archaeologists have found that long before it was established as a town, the site of Rakovník and its surroundings, was favoured by tribes as far back as the Stone Age. Finds on display at the local TG Masaryk Museum in Rakovník show some of the oldest

On Sunday Czechs marked the 70th anniversary one of the biggest tragedies in the country’s history the extermination of Lidice village, the Nazis’ brutal revenge for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. The unprecedented massacre of civilians, followed just two weeks later by the razing to the ground of a second village, Ležáky, opened the eyes of the international community to the true nature of the regime and to this day remains one of the most powerful mementos of WWII.

In the last years of the Cold War, Radio Prague’s English department was many times bigger than it is today and divided into several sections, devoted to different parts of the world. One of the most important was the Afro-Asian service. Africa was an important Cold War battleground and Radio Prague’s Afro-Asian service was not just telling the people of Africa about Czechoslovakia. It also covered events within Africa itself, following closely the Soviet political line. At one time the department was receiving tens of thousands of listeners’ letters