History

The Celts & the New Bohemians -- A Celtic tribe, the Boii, first settled 300 years before Christ in the land around the Vltava River, which forms the heart of the present-day Czech territory. The Latin term Bohemia (Land of the Boii) became etched in history.

The Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe, banished the Boii around 100 B.C., only to be chucked out by the Huns by A.D. 450. The Huns, in turn, were expelled by a Turkic tribe, the Avars, about a century later.

Near the turn of the 6th century, Slavs crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Europe, and the westernmost of the Slavic tribes tried to set up a kingdom in Bohemia. The farming Slavs often fell prey to the nomadic Avars, but in 624 a Franconian merchant named Samo united the Slavs and began expelling the Avars from central Europe.

Moravian Empire -- Throughout the 9th century, the Slavs around the Morava River consolidated their power. Mojmír I declared his Great Moravian Empire -- a kingdom that eventually encompassed Bohemia, Slovakia, and parts of modern Poland and Hungary -- into a Christian organization still outside the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire.

In 863, the Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius arrived in Moravia to preach the Eastern Christian rite to a people who didn't understand them. They created a new language mixing Slavic with a separate script, which came to be known as Cyrillic. When Methodius died in 885, the Moravian rulers reestablished the Latin liturgy, though followers of Cyril and Methodius continued to preach their faith in missions to the east. Ultimately the Slavonic rite took hold in Kiev and Russia, where the Cyrillic alphabet is still used, while western Slavs kept the Latin script and followed Rome.

The Great Moravian Empire lasted about a century -- until the Magyar invasion of 896 -- and not until the 20th century would the Czechs and Slovaks unite under a single government. After the invasion, the Slavs living east of the Morava swore allegiance to the Magyars, while the Czechs, who lived west of the river, fell under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire.

Bohemia Looks to the West -- Borivoj, the first king of the now-separate Bohemia and Moravia, built Prague's first royal palace at the end of the 9th century on the site of the present Prague Castle on Hradcany Hill. In 973, a bishopric was established in Prague, answering to the archbishopric of Mainz. Thus, before the end of the first millennium, the German influence in Bohemia was firmly established.

The kings who followed Borivoj in the Premyslid dynasty ruled over Bohemia for more than 300 years, during which time Prague became a major commercial area along central Europe's trade routes. In the 12th century, two fortified castles were built at Vysehrad and Hradcany, and a wooden plank bridge stood near where the stone Charles Bridge spans the Vltava today. Václavské námestí (Wenceslas Sq.) was a horse market, and the city's 3,500 residents rarely lived to the age of 45. In 1234, Staré Mesto (Old Town), the first of Prague's historic five towns, was founded.

Encouraged by Bohemia's rulers, who guaranteed German civic rights to western settlers, Germans founded entire towns around Prague, including Malá Strana (Lesser Town) in 1257. The Premyslid dynasty of the Czechs ended with the 1306 death of teenage Václav III, who had no heirs. After much debate, the throne was offered to John of Luxembourg, husband of Václav III's younger sister, a foreigner who knew little of Bohemia. It was John's first-born son who left the most lasting marks on Prague.

Prague's First Golden Age -- Charles IV (Karel IV), christened first as Václav, took the throne when his father died while fighting in France in 1346. Educated among French royalty and fluent in four languages (but not Czech), Charles almost single-handedly ushered in Prague's first golden age (the second occurred in the late 16th c.).

Even before his reign, Charles wanted to make Prague a glorious city (he eventually learned to speak Czech). In 1344, he won an archbishopric for Prague independent of Mainz. When he became king of Bohemia, Charles also became, by election, Holy Roman emperor.

During the next 30 years of his reign, Charles transformed Prague into the bustling capital of the Holy Roman Empire and one of Europe's most important cities, with some of the most glorious architecture of its day. He commissioned St. Vitus Cathedral's construction at Prague Castle as well as the bridge that would eventually bear his name. He was most proud of founding Prague University in 1348, the first higher-education institution in central Europe, now known as Charles University. In 1378, Charles died of natural causes at age 62.

Protestant Reformation -- While Charles IV was the most heralded of the Bohemian kings, the short reign of his son Václav IV was marked by social upheaval, a devastating plague, and the advent of turbulent religious dissent.

Reformist priest Jan Hus drew large crowds to Bethlehem Chapel, where he preached against what he considered the corrupt tendencies of Prague's bishopric. Hus became widely popular among Czech nationals who rallied behind his crusade against the German-dominated establishment. Excommunicated in 1412 and charged with heresy 2 years later, Hus was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415, in Konstanz (Constance), Germany, an event that sparked widespread riots and ultimately civil war. Czechs still commemorate the day as a national holiday.

The Hussite Wars -- The hostilities began simply enough. Rioting Hussites (followers of Jan Hus) threw several Roman Catholic councilors to their deaths from the windows of Prague's New Town Hall (Novomestská radnice) in 1419, a deed known as the First Defenestration. It didn't take long for the pope to declare a crusade against the Czech heretics. The conflict widened into class struggle, and by 1420 several major battles were being fought between the peasant Hussites and the Catholic crusaders, who were supported by the nobility. A schism split the Hussites when a more moderate faction, known as the Utraquists, signed a 1433 peace agreement with Rome at the Council of Basel. Still, the more radical Taborites continued to fight, until they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Lipany.

Habsburg Rule -- Following this, the nobility of Bohemia concentrated its power, forming fiefdoms called the Estates. In 1526, the nobles elected Archduke Ferdinand king of Bohemia, marking the beginning of Roman Catholic rule by the Austrian Habsburgs, which continued until World War I. Rudolf II ascended to the throne in 1576, reestablishing Prague as the seat of the Habsburg empire and presiding over what was to be known as Prague's second Ggolden age. He invited the great astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho de Brahe to Prague and endowed the city's museums with some of Europe's finest art. The Rudolfinum, which was recently restored and houses the Czech Philharmonic, pays tribute to Rudolf's opulence.

Conflicts between the Catholic Habsburgs and Bohemia's growing Protestant nobility came to a head on May 23, 1618, when two Catholic governors were thrown out of the windows of Prague Castle, in the Second Defenestration. This event marked the start of a series of complex politico-religious conflicts known as the Thirty Years' War. After a Swedish army was defeated on Charles Bridge by a local force that included Prague's Jews and students, the war came to an end with the Peace of Westphalia. The Catholics won a decisive victory, and the empire's focus shifted back to Vienna. Fresh waves of immigrants turned Prague and other towns into Germanic cities. By the end of the 18th century, the Czech language was on the verge of dying out.

Into the 20th Century

The Czech Republic -- In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution drew Czechs from the countryside into Prague, where a Czech national revival began.

As the industrial economy grew, Prague's Czech population increased in number and power, overtaking the Germans. In 1868, the Czech people threw open the doors to the gilded symbol of their revival, the neo-Renaissance National Theater (Národní divadlo), with the bold proclamation NÁROD SOBE ("The Nation for Itself") inscribed over the proscenium. Then, in 1890, at the top of Wenceslas Square, the massive National Museum Building (Národní muzeum) opened, packed with exhibits celebrating the rich history and culture of the Czech people.

As the new century emerged, Prague was on the cusp of the Art Nouveau wave sweeping Europe, and Moravian Alfons Mucha's sensuous painting of Sarah Bernhardt wowed Paris.

The Founding of the Republic of Czechoslovakia -- As Czech political parties continued to call for more autonomy from Vienna, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off World War I. Meanwhile, a 65-year-old philosophy professor named Tomás Masaryk seized the opportunity to tour Europe and America, speaking in favor of creating a combined democratic Czech and Slovak state. He was supported by a Slovak scientist, Milan Stefánik.

As the German and Austrian armies wore down in 1918, the concept of "Czechoslovakia" gained international support. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson backed Masaryk on October 18, 1918, in Washington, D.C., as the professor proclaimed the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic in the Washington Declaration. On October 28, 1918, the sovereign Republic of Czechoslovakia was founded in Prague. Masaryk returned home in December after being elected (in absentia) Czechoslovakia's first president.

The First Republic -- The 1920s ushered in an exceptional but brief period of freedom and prosperity in Prague. Czechoslovakia, its industrial strength intact after the war, was one of the 10 strongest economies in the world. Prague's capitalists lived the Jazz Age on a par with New York's industrial barons. Palatial Art Nouveau villas graced the fashionable Bubenec and Hanspaulka districts, where smart parties were held nonstop.

The Great Depression gradually spread to Prague, however, drawing sharper lines between the classes and nationalities. As ethnic Germans in Czech border regions found a champion in the new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1933, their calls to unify under the Third Reich grew louder.

In 1938, Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Edouard Daladier, seeking to avoid conflict with the increasingly belligerent Germans, met Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini in Munich. Their agreement to cede the Bohemian areas (which Germans called the Sudetenland) to Hitler on September 30 marked one of the darkest days in Czech history.

Chamberlain returned to London to tell a cheering crowd that he'd achieved "peace in our time." But within a year, Hitler absorbed the rest of the Czech lands and installed a puppet government in Slovakia. Soon Europe was again at war.

World War II -- During the next 6 years, more than 130,000 Czechs were systematically murdered, including more than 80,000 Jews. Though Hitler ordered devastation for other cities, he sought to preserve Prague and its Jewish ghetto as part of his planned museum of the extinct race.

The Nazi concentration camp at Terezín, about 48km (30 miles) northwest of Prague, became a way station for many Czech Jews bound for death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Thousands died of starvation and disease at Terezín even though the Nazis managed to dress it up as a "show" camp for Red Cross investigators.

Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak government in exile, led by Masaryk's successor, Edvard Benes, tried to organize resistance from friendly territory in London. One initiative was launched in May 1942 when two Czechoslovak paratroopers, in a mission called Anthropoid, attempted to assassinate Hitler's lead man in Prague, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. Setting a charge at an intersection north of Prague, the soldiers stopped Heydrich's limousine and opened fire, fatally wounding him.

Hitler retaliated by ordering the total liquidation of a nearby Czech village, Lidice, where 192 men were shot dead and more than 300 women and children were sent to concentration camps. Every building in the town was bulldozed to the ground.

The soldiers, Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubis, were hunted down by Nazi police and trapped in the Cyril and Methodius church on Resslova Street near the Vltava. They reportedly shot themselves to avoid being captured. The debate still rages on whether Anthropoid brought anything but more terror to occupied Bohemia.

The Advent of Communism -- The final act of World War II in Europe played out where the Nazis started it, in Bohemia. As U.S. troops liberated the western part of the country, Gen. George Patton was told to hold his troops at Plzen and wait for the Soviet army to sweep through Prague because of the Allied Powers agreement made at Yalta months before. Soviet soldiers and Czech civilians liberated Prague in a bloody street battle on May 9, 1945, a day after the Germans had signed their capitulation. Throughout Prague you can see small wall memorials on the spots where Czechs fell that day battling the Germans.

On his return from exile in England, Edvard Benes ordered the expulsion of 2.5 million Germans from Czechoslovakia and the confiscation of all their property. (An agreement between Prague and Bonn in early 1997 tried to put an end to compensation demands from the families of expropriated Germans and the Czech victims of war crimes by setting up a joint fund, but the demands continue.) Meanwhile, the government, exhausted and bewildered by fascism, nationalized 60% of the country's industries, and many looked to Soviet-style Communism as a new model. Elections were held in 1946, and Communist leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister after his party won about one-third of the vote.

Through a series of Cabinet maneuvers, Communists seized full control of the government in 1948, and Benes was ousted. Little dissent was tolerated, and a series of show trials began, purging hundreds of perceived threats to Stalinist Communist authority. Another wave of political refugees fled the country. The sterile, centrally planned Communist architecture began seeping into classical Prague.

The Prague Spring -- In January 1968, Alexander Dubcek, a career Slovak Communist, became first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Long before Mikhail Gorbachev, Dubcek tinkered with Communist reforms that he called "socialism with a human face." His program of political, economic, and social reform (while seeking to maintain one-party rule) blossomed into a brief intellectual and artistic renaissance known as the "Prague Spring."

Increasingly nervous about what seemed to them a loss of party control, Communist hard-liners in Prague and other Eastern European capitals conspired with the Soviet Union to remove Dubcek and the government. On August 21, 1968, Prague awoke to the rumble of tanks and 200,000 invading Warsaw Pact soldiers claiming "fraternal assistance." Believing that they'd be welcomed as liberators, these soldiers from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary were bewildered when angry Czechs confronted them with rocks and flaming torches. The Communist grip tightened, however, and Prague fell deeper into the Soviet sphere of influence. Another wave of refugees fled. The following January, a university student named Jan Palach, in a lonely protest to Soviet occupation, doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire in Wenceslas Square. He died days later, becoming a martyr for the dissident movement. But the Soviet soldiers stayed for more than 2 decades during the gray period the Communists called "normalization."

Charter 77 -- In 1976, during the worst of "normalization," the Communists arrested a popular underground rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe on charges of disturbing the peace. This motivated some of Prague's most prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals, led by playwright Václav Havel, to establish Charter 77, a human-rights advocacy group formed to pressure the government -- then Europe's most repressive -- into observing the human rights principles of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. In the years that followed, Havel, the group's perceived leader, was constantly monitored by the secret police, the StB. He was put under house arrest and jailed several times for "threatening public order."

The Velvet Revolution & Beyond

The Velvet Revolution -- Just after the Berlin Wall fell, and with major change imminent in Eastern Europe, thousands of students set out on a chilly candlelit March on November 17, 1989. As part of their nonviolent campaign, they held signs simply calling for a dialog with the government. Against police warnings, they marched from the southern citadel at Vysehrad and turned up National Boulevard (Národní trída), where they soon met columns of helmeted riot police. Holding their fingers in peace signs and chanting, "Our hands are free," the bravest 500 sat down at the feet of the police. After an excruciating standoff, the police moved in, squeezing the students against buildings and wildly beating them with clubs.

Although nobody was killed and the official Communist-run media presented the story as the quiet, justified end to the whims of student radicals, clandestine videotapes and accounts of the incident blanketed the country. By the next day, Praguers began organizing their outrage. Havel and his artistic allies seized the moment and called a meeting of intellectuals at the Laterna Magika on Národní, where they planned more nonviolent protests. Students and theaters went on strike, and hundreds of thousands of Praguers began pouring into Wenceslas Square, chanting for the end of Communist rule. Within days, factory workers and citizens in towns throughout the country joined in a general strike. In Wenceslas Square, the protesters jingled their keys, a signal to the Politburo that it was time to go. On November 24, General Secretary Milos Jakes resigned, and by the end of the year, the Communist government fell. By New Year's Eve, Havel, joined by Dubcek, gave his first speech as president of a free Czechoslovakia. Because hardly any blood was spilled, the coup d'état was dubbed "the Velvet Revolution."

Economic & Political Changes -- In June 1990, the first free elections in 44 years gave power to the Civic Forum, the movement led by Havel. But it was Václav Klaus who launched the country on its course of economic reform. First as federal finance minister and then as Czech prime minister, Klaus, an economist, helped form a right-wing offshoot of the Civic Forum called the Civic Democratic Party; it won the 1992 elections on a program of massive privatization. First, thousands of small businesses were auctioned off for a song. By the end of 1994, shares in some 1,800 large companies were privatized by giving citizens government coupons they could exchange for stock or fund shares. In less than 5 years, private companies churned out 80% of the Czech economy.

A Velvet Divorce Gives Way to a New Union -- In 1992, leaders of the Czech and Slovak republics peacefully agreed to split into separate states. The Slovaks wanted to get out of the shadow of Prague (Slovak nationalists had been calling for that since 1918), and the Czech government was happy to get rid of the expected financial burdens of Slovakia's slower reconstruction. The "Velvet Divorce" was final on January 1, 1993, with common property split on a 2-to-1 ratio, without lawyers taking anything -- yet. They're still arguing over gold assets and bank accounts, just like any other acrimonious couple.

Privatization, however, did little to bring in new capital or energize management at larger companies. Meanwhile, Czechs bought up Western goods and equipment and ignored domestic suppliers. Speculators pounced on the imbalance to force the central bank to float the Czech crown, causing it to dive in the spring of 1997.

As socioeconomic divisions have widened, voices of discontent have grown louder. Czech reforms hit a wall in 1997, damaged by a series of financial scandals and poor competitiveness. Klaus and his center-right government barely clung to power in the 1996 elections. In November 1997, a fund-raising scandal blew up around Klaus and his party, forcing the government to resign. New elections were held in mid-1998, bringing the first left-wing government to power since the revolution, the center-left Social Democrats, not the Communists.

Still, Czech politicians pushed to prove that the country belongs in the big leagues. The Czechs became one of the first former Soviet-bloc states to join NATO in 1999, along with Poland and Hungary (though about half of the country, according to polls, isn't sure it's a good idea).

In May 2004, the Czechs joined nine other countries to become new members of the European Union, completing a quest that the newly elected Democratic leaders started 14 years ago. While the country has promised to eventually change to the E.U.'s common currency, the euro, this won't happen for several years, until there is even more convergence in economic strength. In the meantime, things generally are more expensive as GDP grows. Even though wider access to better-quality suppliers and the competition created by it led to lower prices on some goods, luxurious items and electronics are still more expensive than in western Europe. On the other hand, food and services are cheaper and more affordable.

Crime & Racism -- Throughout Eastern Europe, overt racism appears to be an unwelcome byproduct of revolution. Romanies (Gypsies) and Jews have been the targets of many attacks. The government has stepped up efforts to weed out and crack down on racist groups (most are called Skinheads) after several violent incidents. In 1997, hundreds of Romanies sold their meager possessions to pay for plane tickets to Canada because of a local TV report that said they would find asylum there. They didn't, and most were sent back, penniless and hopeless. Since then, many more have tried to win asylum in Britain, Sweden, and Finland, creating friction in talks on E.U. membership.

With police carrying a smaller stick, crime has risen sharply, as pickpockets and car thieves take advantage of Prague's new prosperity. Violent crime, while rising, is still well under American levels, and Prague's streets and parks are safer than those in most large Western cities.