ROB CAMERON

Jezeří castle sits on the border between two worlds. Surrounded by lush forest, it’s a splendid example of Bohemian baroque – Beethoven’s Third Symphony was performed here for the very first time. But just a few hundred metres away is a barren, moon-crater landscape – site of the largest open cast lignite mine in the country. And local villages find themselves under threat.

Born Marie Jana Körbelová in Prague, Madeleine Albright (1937 – 2022) spent the war in London. After the Communist coup of 1948, her family emigrated to the U.S., where she later became the first female Secretary of State. “What I learnt as a result of being born here was that when the United States was not involved – as in Munich – terrible things happened.”

The anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on November 17th 1989 is now a national holiday. It’s an opportunity to look back on a defining moment and take the temperature of Czech (and Slovak) society. For the 20th anniversary, those who were at the heart of the revolution – including the shy playwright who became president – shared their memories and thoughts.

A Czech travel agency is offering package holidays for people nostalgic for the trade union perks of Communist Czechoslovakia, when factory workers were bussed off to recuperate from the daily grind. For a modest sum, guests can stay at a grim-looking hotel in Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains, to relive the sights, sounds, and smells of pre-1989 holidays.

The story of the late Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who helped save hundreds of mostly Jewish children from the Nazis, has been immortalised in books, documentaries and films – most recently One Life. In 2011, Sir Nicholas was in Prague to attend the premiere of the film Nicky’s Family, and to meet some of those he had helped to save.

Václav Havel died at his country home – Hrádeček – on the morning of Sunday, December 18th, 2011. He’d appeared a few months previously at the unveiling of a statue to Woodrow Wilson, looking frail and gaunt. However his death – at the age of 75 – still came as a great shock. Havel’s state funeral five days later was a momentous and immensely moving experience.

Holidays can expose the traveller to cultures, languages and adventures they would never have experienced at home. Trying to recreate them many years later however can be a bit of a challenge. In the summer of 2012, I returned to the idyllic town of Vimperk in South Bohemia – the place where twenty years previously I’d decided to start a new life.

The Czech Republic may be a landlocked country but its historical borders once stretched as far as the Adriatic. People still yearn for the sea – there were even plans in the 1970s to build a tunnel to Yugoslavia. Most have to content themselves with an annual trip to Greece or Croatia, but a pair of Czech adventurers are building a boat… out of plastic bottles.

The grandson of British wartime leader Winston Churchill has unveiled a statue in the Czech capital Prague dedicated to the 2,500 Czech and Slovak airmen who fought in Britain’s Royal Air Force. The monument, called the Winged Lion, is a gift from Prague’s British expatriate community in gratitude for the airmen’s contribution during World War Two.

Scotland went to the polls on September 18th, 2014 to decide whether to leave the United Kingdom and begin a new chapter as an independent state. The only country in Europe that has peacefully divided in recent decades is Czechoslovakia, which split into two on January 1st, 1993, without a drop of blood being spilt. So what advice would Czechs and Slovaks give the Scots?

Thousands of people have protested against Czech President Miloš Zeman on the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which ended communist rule. Demonstrators carried football-style red cards as a warning to Mr Zeman, while others threw eggs. One accidentally hit the German president. Many are angry with Mr Zeman, who they see as too sympathetic to Russia.

Tomáš Baťa built the world’s greatest shoe empire out of a tiny family workshop by using revolutionary methods that still find application today. From his high-rise, red-brick headquarters in Zlín, Baťa oversaw an empire of 1,825 outlets in Czechoslovakia and another 660 across the globe. Entire towns – in Europe, India and South America – are still named after him.

The government of the Czech Republic is making a new push to use ‘Czechia’ – the official short name of the country in English – pointing out that few people say ‘the Federal Republic of Germany’ instead of ‘Germany’, or ‘the Russian Federation’ for ‘Russia’. However, the short form is struggling to find recognition – both at home and abroad.

The assassination of senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík in 1942 was one of the outstanding feats of daring in World War Two. The killing led to terrible reprisals, not least for the pair themselves, who were surrounded and killed by the Germans. But one question has long troubled historians: where are their bodies?

A Czech DNA expert is carrying out tests on clothes belonging to the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The tests should provide a definitive answer to an explosive claim that has fascinated readers for almost a century. Was Masaryk – champion of Slav rights and father of the Czechoslovak state – the illegitimate son of the Austro-Hungarian emperor?

In 2018 allegations were made by a former Czechoslovak spy that the then opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been a paid informer for the country’s communist era secret police, the StB. Mr Corbyn emphatically denied the claims, but a few sheaves of old paper still have the power to throw lives into turmoil.

Czechs are marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, when a 250,000-strong invasion force from five Warsaw Pact countries invaded the country from the north, east and south. They were sent by Moscow to crush the so-called Prague Spring – the liberalising reforms of Czechoslovak communist leader Alexander Dubcek.

For a quarter of a century tourists and locals passing through the bottom of Prague’s Wenceslas Square were stepping unaware on Jewish gravestones. They were looted from abandoned cemeteries in the 1980s and cut up to make cobbles. The truth about the stones came to light thanks to the head of Prague’s Jewish Museum – who slipped a few into his pocket as a young man.

For decades, archaeologists have grappled with the identity of a 10th-Century skeleton discovered at Prague Castle. The remains were exploited by both the Nazis and Soviets for ideological purposes, claiming it as proof of a pre-existing Germanic – or Slavic – presence. But attempts to pin a clear ethnic label on a 1,000-year-old corpse perhaps reveal more about us than him.

The so-called Velvet Revolution precipitated the end of communism in Czechoslovakia. Three locations in Prague symbolise the regime and its downfall. They include a controversial statue to Ivan Stepanovich Konev, the Soviet general whose forces liberated much of the country in 1945, but also oversaw the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

A random face in a documentary about the Prague Spring led to a wild goose chase to track down its owner. It belonged to Zdeněk ‘Sid’ Kučera, a jazz trumpeter and singer whose band was filmed performing Georgie Fame’s Bonnie and Clyde in a Prague club. Sid emigrated not long after the Soviet tanks arrived – but finally got in touch from his adopted home in Switzerland.

150,000 Jews from across Europe were interned in the Terezín – or Theresienstadt – ghetto during WW2. It was a transit camp – where Jews were gathered before being sent eastwards to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. Conditions at Terezín were horrific, and some 35,000 died there. But eighty years on, the buildings themselves are falling into ruin.

Czech-Russian relations were already chilly before the invasion of Ukraine; today they are icy, verging on frozen. Revelations that Moscow’s notorious GRU spy agency had blown up a Czech arms dump in 2014 led to a spate of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions. The annual flashpoint is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia – or rather the eastern two-thirds of it.

January 1st, 2023 marked the 30th anniversary of the break-up of Czechoslovakia; one of the few cases in history when a state has been divided up without a single life being lost. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia enjoy a harmonious, friction-free friendship – tinged with a touch of regret perhaps for what was once a happy marriage.

Milena Fleischmann was nine when she boarded a train in Prague to begin a new life in England. She was clutching a card, showing she had been granted leave by His Majesty’s Government to enter the U.K. – one of only a handful of Jewish children allowed to do so. Only decades later did she learn that her escape from the Nazis had been organised by Sir Nicholas Winton.