The first inhabitants who gave this land its name were the Boii, a Celtic tribe that settled in the Bohemian basin in the last centuries before Christ. From them comes the Latin name Boiohaemum, 'the homeland of the Boii', which through Germanic and Latin became the Bohemia that Europe still uses. The Boii minted coins, traded with the Mediterranean world and built oppida, fortified settlements such as Závist near Prague, one of the largest Celtic centres north of the Alps.
Around the turn of the era, under pressure from the movement of peoples, the Celts were displaced by Germanic tribes. The Marcomanni, led by King Marobod (Maroboduus), founded a powerful kingdom in Bohemia at the beginning of the first century that came to worry Rome itself; the so-called Marcomannic Wars pitted these Germanic peoples against the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who fought on the Danube and died, by tradition, at Vindobona (present-day Vienna) in the year 180. For centuries the frontier of the Roman Empire lay at the gates of this region, which was never conquered by Rome but was deeply influenced by it.
In the course of the great migrations, between the fifth and sixth centuries, the West Slavs arrived in the region, the direct ancestors of today's Czechs. They settled in the fertile valleys of Bohemia and Moravia, displacing or absorbing the last Germanic inhabitants. A founding legend, written down centuries later by the chronicler Cosmas of Prague, traces the Czechs back to a patriarch named Čech who is said to have led his people to Mount Říp, in central Bohemia. With the Slavs the history of the people who would inhabit these lands to this day properly begins.
The first great Slavic state in central Europe was born in Moravia in the ninth century. Great Moravia, which at its height stretched across territory in today's Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Poland, had its centres of power in strongholds such as Mikulčice and Staré Město (the old Veligrad), where archaeology has brought to light palaces, goldsmiths' workshops and the foundations of a dozen stone churches, evidence of a surprisingly developed state. Under princes such as Mojmír I and above all Rastislav, Moravia asserted itself against the pressure of the East Frankish empire.
The decisive episode came in the year 863. Prince Rastislav, who wanted to free his Church from Frankish clergy and their language, asked the Byzantine emperor to send him Christian teachers. Constantinople dispatched two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine — who at the end of his life would take the monastic name Cyril — and Methodius. Great scholars and fluent in Slavic, they created for the occasion the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet designed specifically for a Slavic language, and translated the Bible and the liturgy into what is known as Old Church Slavonic. It was the birth of the first Slavic literary culture in history, and the reason Cyril and Methodius are venerated as the 'apostles of the Slavs' and co-patrons of Europe.
The brothers' work ran into resistance from the Frankish-Latin clergy, and after Methodius died in 885 his disciples were expelled; many went south to Bulgaria, where they developed the Cyrillic alphabet that Russians, Bulgarians and Serbs still use today. Great Moravia, weakened by internal struggles, fell at the beginning of the tenth century to raids by the Magyars (Hungarians), who settled on the Pannonian plain and separated the northern Slavs from the southern ones for good. But the Christian and cultural seed had already been sown, and its legacy would pass to the duchy of Bohemia.
With the decline of Great Moravia, the centre of gravity shifted to Bohemia, where a local dynasty, the Přemyslids, united the Czech tribes around Prague. Its semi-legendary founder, Prince Přemysl the Ploughman, and his wife Libuše — who according to legend prophesied Prague's glory — open a genealogy that becomes historical with Bořivoj I, the first documented duke of Bohemia, baptised around the year 883, together with his wife Ludmila, by Methodius himself or by his disciples. Bohemia thus entered Latin Christendom.
Ludmila's grandson, Duke Wenceslas (Václav), became the country's patron saint. Raised in the Christian faith by his grandmother — whom a pagan faction had strangled — Wenceslas ruled Bohemia until he was murdered around the year 935 by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel, at the door of a church in Stará Boleslav. His martyrdom made him at once a symbol of the Czech state: he is the 'Good King Wenceslas' of the English carol, his equestrian statue presides over the great Prague square that bears his name and his crown is the emblem of the sovereignty of the Czech lands. Under Boleslav's successors the duchy consolidated, and in 1085 it obtained the royal title for the first time.
Přemyslid power peaked between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Bohemia became a hereditary kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire and one of its richest members. The source of that wealth was silver: the discovery of deposits at Kutná Hora around 1298 turned Bohemia almost overnight into one of the most prosperous states in Europe. In 1300 King Wenceslas II launched the Prague groschen, a high-quality silver coin that circulated across central Europe for centuries. The dynasty died out in 1306 with the murder of the young Wenceslas III, who left no male heir, opening a succession crisis that would bring a foreign house to the throne: the Luxembourgs.
The reign of Charles IV (1346-1378) was the golden age of Bohemia and of Prague. The son of John of Luxembourg and of Elizabeth, the last Přemyslid princess, Charles grew up at the French court, spoke several languages and combined Czech blood with imperial ambition. King of Bohemia and, from 1355, Holy Roman Emperor, he made Prague the capital of the empire and the greatest political and cultural centre in central Europe. Czechs remember him as 'the father of the homeland' and voted him, in a public television poll, the greatest Czech in history.
Charles transformed Prague into a great medieval capital. In 1348 he founded the University of Prague, the first university in central Europe, today called Charles University in his honour; that same year he laid out the New Town (Nové Město), an ambitious extension that multiplied the size of the city. He ordered the building of the stone bridge over the Vltava that bears his name — the Charles Bridge, with its Gothic towers — and drove the construction of St Vitus Cathedral at the castle, entrusted first to Matthias of Arras and then to the brilliant Peter Parler. On the outskirts he raised Karlštejn castle to guard the imperial crown jewels. Earlier, in 1344, he had managed to raise the bishopric of Prague to an archbishopric, giving Bohemia a Church of its own, independent of the German one.
Under Charles IV, Prague was a cosmopolitan city of Czechs, Germans, Italians and Jews, a focus of Gothic art, study and trade that rivalled Paris. His reign left such a deep mark on the urban landscape — the bridge, the cathedral, the university, the New Town — that the Prague travellers walk through today is largely the one he imagined. But that prosperity coexisted with religious and social tensions that, barely a generation after his death, would explode into the first great religious revolution in Europe.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a hundred years before Luther, Bohemia led the first great religious reform in Europe. Its central figure was Jan Hus, priest, rector of the University of Prague and preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, where he denounced in the Czech language the corruption of the clergy, the sale of indulgences and the wealth of the Church, and, influenced by the Englishman John Wycliffe, called for a return to Scripture. Summoned to the Council of Constance with an imperial safe conduct that was then not honoured, Hus was condemned as a heretic and burned alive at the stake on 6 July 1415. His death, far from silencing his ideas, set the whole of Bohemia alight: today 6 July is a national holiday in Czechia.
The outrage turned into a revolution. On 30 July 1419, a Hussite procession led by the preacher Jan Želivský stormed the town hall of Prague's New Town and threw the Catholic councillors out of the windows, killing them in the fall: this was the first defenestration of Prague, the spark of the Hussite wars. Against the Hussites, the papacy and the emperor Sigismund launched several crusades, but they were defeated again and again by peasant and burgher armies commanded by the brilliant one-eyed general Jan Žižka, who turned war wagons into a revolutionary and unbeaten tactic. The Hussites split between the moderate Utraquists — who demanded communion in both kinds, bread and wine, for all the faithful, hence the chalice as their symbol — and the radical Taborites, egalitarian and millenarian.
The wars ended in 1434 at the battle of Lipany, where a coalition of moderate Utraquists and Catholics crushed the radical Taborites, opening the way to a compromise. Bohemia thus became a mostly Hussite country inside a Catholic Europe, a religious anomaly that would last two centuries. In 1458 the Czech Diet elected George of Poděbrady king, the first and only Hussite monarch, also remembered for a pioneering plan for a peaceful union of the Christian princes of Europe. Hussitism left the Czechs a tradition of religious dissent and national pride that would echo centuries later in the patriotic discourse of the nineteenth century and in the country's own flag.
After the death of George of Poděbrady, the crown of Bohemia passed to the Polish-Lithuanian Jagiellon dynasty, who ruled without great strength at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, in a kingdom dominated by a powerful nobility and divided between Hussites and Catholics. Everything changed on 29 August 1526, when the young king Louis II Jagiellon died at the battle of Mohács, crushed by the Ottoman Turks along with much of the Hungarian nobility. His brother-in-law, Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, brother of the emperor Charles V, was elected king of Bohemia. So began the long link — almost four centuries — between the Czech lands and the House of Austria.
At first the Habsburgs respected the religious liberties and the privileges of the Czech estates, though tensions between the Catholic court and the Protestant majority kept growing. The brightest moment of this period was the reign of Rudolf II (1576-1611), who moved his imperial court from Vienna to Prague and turned the city into an extraordinary focus of art and science. Eccentric and melancholy, an insatiable collector, Rudolf drew to Prague the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler — who formulated his laws of planetary motion here — along with Mannerist painters and alchemists from all over Europe. The city filled with cabinets of curiosities, laboratories and workshops, in an intellectual atmosphere that still feeds Prague's magical legend today.
Under pressure from his family and from religious divisions, Rudolf II was forced in 1609 to sign the Letter of Majesty, which guaranteed broad freedom of worship to the Protestants of Bohemia. But his successor and the hardest Catholic circles at court set out to reverse those concessions. The clash between a largely Protestant nobility, jealous of its rights, and a Catholic monarchy determined to impose the Counter-Reformation became inevitable. In 1618, at Prague Castle, that tension would explode in the most literal way.
On 23 May 1618, a group of Czech Protestant nobles burst into Prague Castle and threw two Catholic imperial governors and their secretary out of a window. All three survived the fall of some twenty metres — saved by angels, according to the Catholics; cushioned by a heap of manure, according to the Protestants — but the gesture was a declaration of war. This second defenestration of Prague set off the revolt of the Bohemian estates, who deposed the Habsburgs and crowned the Protestant elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, the 'winter king'. The conflict spread across the continent and became the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), the most devastating Europe had known until then.
The outcome for Bohemia was swift and catastrophic. On 8 November 1620, at the battle of White Mountain (Bílá hora), at the gates of Prague, the imperial and Catholic League army crushed the troops of the Czech estates in little more than an hour. Frederick V fled, and the repression was implacable: on 21 June 1621, twenty-seven leaders of the revolt — nobles and burghers — were publicly executed on Prague's Old Town Square, whose cobbles still recall the event with twenty-seven crosses. The rebels' property was confiscated and shared out among a new Catholic and foreign nobility loyal to Vienna.
White Mountain opened almost three centuries of Austrian rule and of harsh Counter-Reformation. Protestantism was banned, and anyone who would not convert to Catholicism had to emigrate: tens of thousands of Czechs — among them the great educationalist Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) — went into exile. German became the language of administration, culture and the elites, while Czech was pushed back to the countryside and the lower classes; this process of Germanisation, on top of the losses of the war and the epidemics, cut the population drastically. Bohemia and Moravia remained rich and industrious territories of the Habsburg monarchy, but their political, religious and cultural life was overseen from Vienna. The memory of White Mountain as a national catastrophe would weigh on the Czech conscience for centuries.
At the end of the eighteenth century, when Czech looked doomed to be a language of peasants in the face of dominant German, a handful of scholars, writers and musicians set about resurrecting it. This was the Národní obrození, the Czech 'national revival', a cultural movement that in a few decades recovered the language, rewrote the country's history and forged a modern national consciousness. The philologist Josef Dobrovský laid the scholarly foundations for the study of Czech, and Josef Jungmann crowned the enterprise with his monumental five-volume Czech-German dictionary (1834-1839), which proved the language could express any cultivated or scientific idea.
The historical soul of the movement was František Palacký, 'the father of the nation', whose monumental History of the Czech People gave the Czechs an account of their past — from Great Moravia to the Hussites — that fed their pride and their political demands. In 1831 Palacký drove the founding of the Matice česká, an institution for publishing books in Czech, linked to the National Museum. Culture became the great weapon of a people that still had no state: newspapers, learned societies, theatres and choirs were founded, and the memory of Hus and of Hussite Bohemia was proudly reclaimed.
Music was the most universal vehicle of that awakening. Bedřich Smetana, considered the father of Czech national music, composed operas such as The Bartered Bride and the symphonic cycle Má vlast ('My Homeland'), whose poem The Vltava became a second national anthem; in 1868 he symbolically laid the foundation stone of the National Theatre in Prague, funded by public subscription and opened in 1881 as a temple of Czech art. His successor, Antonín Dvořák — who in that same year of 1868 was playing viola in the orchestra — took Czech music to the whole world with his symphonies and his Slavonic Dances. By the end of the century the Czechs were already a modern nation, with their language, their literature, their music and their institutions, and all they wanted was to complete their cultural awakening with political autonomy.
The First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 gave Czechs and Slovaks their historic chance at independence. On 28 October 1918 the Republic of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague, a new state joining the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia) with Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Its architect was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a philosopher and university professor who had campaigned for the Czechoslovak cause in the Allied capitals during the war; elected first president, he enjoyed such moral authority that he was compared to George Washington. He was supported by the diplomat Edvard Beneš and by the Slovak Milan Rastislav Štefánik.
In interwar Europe the First Republic was a notable exception: while democracies were falling and authoritarian regimes triumphing all around it, Czechoslovakia remained a stable parliamentary system, secular and respectful of civil liberties. It was also one of the ten most industrialised economies in the world, heir to the powerful Austro-Hungarian factory system: Škoda arms and cars from Plzeň and Mladá Boleslav, Baťa shoes from Zlín — with its pioneering company-town model — Bohemian glass, textiles and sugar made it an export power. Prague and Brno lived through an artistic and architectural fervour, with Czech cubism and avant-garde functionalism.
But the First Republic carried a fundamental weakness: it was a multinational state. Alongside Czechs and Slovaks lived more than three million Germans — concentrated in the border regions of the Sudetenland — as well as Hungarians, Ruthenians, Poles and Jews. In a democracy that made an effort to integrate them, the minorities, and above all the German one, never felt fully represented. When Adolf Hitler came to power in neighbouring Germany in 1933, Sudeten German nationalism, embodied in Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party, became an instrument in Berlin's hands. By the late 1930s the young Czechoslovak democracy found itself at the centre of the European storm.
In 1938 Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland on the pretext of protecting its German population. At the Munich Conference, on the night of 29-30 September 1938, the Western powers — Chamberlain's United Kingdom and Daladier's France — gave in to the dictator's demands and agreed to hand Germany the border regions of Czechoslovakia, without the country concerned even being invited to the table. The Munich Agreement lives in Czech memory as 'the Munich betrayal': an ally abandoned by those who were supposed to defend it. Stripped of its border fortifications and its industry, Czechoslovakia was left defenceless. On 15 March 1939 the Wehrmacht occupied what was left of the country; Bohemia and Moravia became a 'Protectorate' of the Reich and Slovakia a puppet state.
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was subjected to an increasingly brutal occupation. In 1941 Hitler appointed as Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, nicknamed 'the butcher of Prague' for his repression. On 27 May 1942, two Czechoslovak paratroopers trained in London, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, attacked him in Prague in Operation Anthropoid; Heydrich died of his wounds days later. The Nazi reprisal was appalling: on 10 June 1942, on the false pretext that the attackers were hiding there, the SS destroyed the village of Lidice, shot the 173 men and adolescent boys of the village, deported the women to Ravensbrück and sent most of the children to their deaths. Lidice was wiped off the map and its name became an international symbol of Nazi terror.
The Jewish community of the Czech lands — one of the oldest and most flourishing in central Europe — was all but annihilated. The Nazis turned the fortress of Terezín (Theresienstadt), north of Prague, into a ghetto and transit camp that they used as a false propaganda showcase for the Red Cross, while deporting tens of thousands of Jews from there to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Of the roughly 118,000 Jews living in the Protectorate, some 78,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. The war ended in May 1945 with the Prague Uprising and the arrival of the Red Army, while western Bohemia, including Plzeň, was liberated by General Patton's American army.
At the end of the Second World War, Czech society, scarred by six years of Nazi occupation, turned against the German minority that had inhabited the border regions for centuries. Between 1945 and 1946, around three million Germans from the Sudetenland and other areas were expelled from Czechoslovakia and their property confiscated. The legal framework for this expulsion and for stripping Germans and Hungarians of citizenship was the so-called Beneš decrees, issued in 1945. The organised expulsion, endorsed by the victorious powers at the Potsdam Conference, formally began in January 1946; but it was preceded, in the months after liberation, by the 'wild expulsions' of May to August 1945.
These events are real and grave, and they have to be named precisely. The first months were marked by episodes of extreme violence committed by Czech military and paramilitary groups — lynchings, summary executions, forced marches, internment in camps — against a civilian population that included the elderly, women and children. The death tolls have been the subject of study and of historiographical debate: for decades very high estimates circulated, but a joint commission of Czech and German historians has set the number of victims at a range of approximately 17,000 to 30,000 dead, including those who died of violence, hunger, disease and suicide during the process.
The expulsion transformed the human geography of the Czech lands at the root: whole regions of Bohemia and Moravia that had been German-majority for centuries were left empty and were resettled by Czechs and Slovaks, with lasting economic and cultural losses. The matter remains, to this day, a delicate issue in relations between Czechia, Germany and Austria: the Beneš decrees have never been repealed, and their assessment divides those who see them as an unjust collective punishment from those who read them in the context of the Nazi occupation and of the collaboration of a good part of the Sudeten Germans with the Third Reich. Recent historiography insists on describing the events without justifying or relativising them, and without erasing the context that preceded them either.
Liberation by the Red Army and the discredit of the Western powers after Munich strengthened the Czechoslovak left. The Communist Party won the most votes in the free elections of 1946, and in February 1948 it staged a show of force that handed it total control of the state. Four decades of a communist regime aligned with Moscow began. Czechoslovak Stalinism in the 1950s was particularly harsh: nationalisations, forced collectivisation of the countryside, labour camps and rigged political trials, such as the case against the communist leader Rudolf Slánský himself and thirteen other defendants in 1952, eleven of whom were executed, in a trial with a strong antisemitic component.
In 1968 a reformist wing of the party itself, headed by the Slovak Alexander Dubček — elected first secretary in January — tried to build 'socialism with a human face': censorship was loosened, victims of repression were rehabilitated and a brief period of freedom flourished, known as the Prague Spring. But Moscow would not tolerate dissent inside the bloc. On the night of 20-21 August 1968, troops of the Soviet Union and of four other Warsaw Pact countries — Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and East Germany — invaded Czechoslovakia with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tanks, crushing the reforms. The resistance was largely peaceful and desperate.
The most harrowing symbol of that desperation was Jan Palach, a twenty-year-old student who on 16 January 1969 set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in Prague in protest at the occupation and at his people's resignation; he died three days later, and his funeral became a huge demonstration of mourning and rejection. Then came the 'normalisation' directed by Gustáv Husák: a purge of reformists, the restoration of censorship and police control, and two decades of grey conformity under Soviet occupation, which would last until 1989. Hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks were thrown out of their jobs or went into exile.
Against the silence of normalisation rose a small but tenacious dissident movement. In 1977, a group of intellectuals, artists and citizens — prompted, among other things, by the trial of the underground rock group The Plastic People of the Universe — signed Charter 77, a manifesto demanding that the government respect the human rights it had itself undertaken to guarantee by signing the Helsinki Accords. Among its authors and spokesmen the playwright Václav Havel stood out; he paid for his commitment with several years in prison and became the moral conscience of the opposition. For more than a decade, Charter 77 kept the flame of freedom alive.
The outcome came in November 1989, as the communist bloc crumbled across Eastern Europe. On 17 November the police violently broke up a student demonstration in Prague, and the outrage unleashed an unstoppable wave of protests and strikes. Within a few weeks half a million people were gathering in the squares chanting 'Havel to the castle!', and the communist regime collapsed with hardly any violence: that is why it was called the Velvet Revolution. On 29 December 1989, Václav Havel — the dissident who had been in prison months earlier — was elected president by the same parliament that until then had been communist. The country recovered democracy, a market economy and its place in Europe.
With freedom regained, the old tensions between Czechs and Slovaks over the shape of the shared state resurfaced. Without a referendum and by agreement of the political elites — headed by the Czech Václav Klaus and the Slovak Vladimír Mečiar — Czechoslovakia split peacefully: at midnight on 31 December 1992, after 74 years of existence, the country dissolved, and on 1 January 1993 two independent states were born, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It was the 'velvet divorce', a separation without a single shot fired, unheard of in European history. The young Czechia later joined NATO (1999) and the European Union (2004), and today it is a democratic and prosperous republic at the heart of the continent, one that still looks at its history — Hussite, imperial, occupied and free — with a mixture of pride and remembrance.
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Moravia, the eastern Czech land, gives its name to the first great Slavic state in central Europe: ninth-century Great Moravia. It was in this region, on the banks of the river Morava, that princes such as Mojmír I, Rastislav and Svatopluk built a powerful kingdom whose centres of power archaeologists have uncovered at places such as Mikulčice — where the foundations of a dozen stone churches, palaces and rich grave goods have been found — and Staré Město, the old Veligrad.
Here, in the year 863, came the founding episode of Slavic culture: the arrival of the brothers Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, sent from Byzantium at the request of Prince Rastislav. The two missionaries created the Glagolitic alphabet, translated the Bible and the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic and laid the foundations of the first Slavic literature. Cyril and Methodius are today co-patrons of Europe, and 5 July, their feast day, is a national holiday in Czechia; the pilgrimage site of Velehrad, in Moravia, keeps their memory alive.
That legacy gave Moravia an identity of its own, distinct from Bohemia's, which has lasted a thousand years. Although from the Middle Ages Moravia was joined to the Czech crown — as a margraviate within the kingdom of Bohemia — Moravians kept a strong regional feeling, their dialects, their costumes, their music and their folk traditions, especially alive in the south-east, in the Moravian Slovakia region (Slovácko). Being Moravian, even today, is a particular way of being Czech.
For centuries Olomouc was the historic capital of Moravia and its great religious centre. A bishopric was established there as early as 1063, making the city the ecclesiastical seat of the whole region and one of the most important dioceses in the Czech lands. Around its cathedral of St Wenceslas and its episcopal power, Olomouc grew as a city of clergy, merchants and students, capital of the margraviate of Moravia.
Its intellectual role was reinforced in the sixteenth century with the founding of a Jesuit university in 1573, the second oldest in the Czech lands after Prague's; centuries later the young Mendel would study there. The history of Olomouc was nonetheless marked by war: during the Thirty Years' War the city was taken and occupied for eight years by the Swedes (1642-1650), who sacked and depopulated it, a blow it was slow to recover from and which cost it its primacy to Brno.
Olomouc's prestige peaked in 1777, when its bishopric was raised to an archbishopric by Pope Pius VI at the request of the empress Maria Theresa. A city of palaces, baroque churches and monumental fountains, Olomouc keeps on its main square the impressive Holy Trinity Column, a masterpiece of central European baroque inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Today it is a lively university city that many consider the country's second monumental jewel after Prague.
Brno, the largest city in Moravia and the second in Czechia, is today the region's modern capital and the seat of the country's Constitutional Court. Dominated by the Špilberk fortress — which the Habsburgs turned into a feared political prison, 'the jail of the nations', where they locked up Italian, Hungarian and Polish patriots — and by the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, Brno was a prosperous industrial city, so full of textile mills that it too earned the nickname 'the Moravian Manchester'.
But Brno's greatest glory is a discreet one: a monastery garden. At the Augustinian abbey of St Thomas, the friar Gregor Mendel carried out between 1856 and 1863 his patient experiments with thousands of pea plants, crossing them and counting their traits. From that work he deduced the fundamental laws of heredity — the 'factors' now called genes — which founded modern genetics. Mendel, who had studied in Olomouc and went on to become abbot of his monastery, published his results in 1866, but his genius was not recognised until decades after his death. Today the Mendel Museum, in the abbey itself, honours the 'father of genetics'.
Brno is also a capital of twentieth-century architecture. Here stands the Villa Tugendhat, a masterpiece of functionalism designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe between 1928 and 1930, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an icon of modern architecture. A university and technology city, with international trade fairs and an intense cultural life, Brno combines its industrial past and its scientific legacy with a dynamic, young present.
In south-western Moravia, next to the Bohemian border, the small town of Telč preserves one of the most beautiful squares in Europe: a long triangular space ringed by burgher houses with arcades and painted gables, all in Italian Renaissance style, which look as though they stopped in the sixteenth century. It is 'the most perfect example of the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps', in the formula usually repeated, and an almost untouched image of a town of that era.
That unity and harmony are down to one man and one fire. After a blaze devastated the town in 1530, the lord of Telč, Zachariáš of Hradec, who had travelled in Italy and been dazzled by its architecture, decided to rebuild both his Gothic castle — turning it into an elegant Renaissance palace — and the houses on the square, imposing a uniform style. The result was an ensemble of extraordinary coherence, ringed by ponds that reinforce its air of an enchanted town.
Because later history kept it apart from the great transformations, Telč preserved its historic centre practically unaltered for almost five centuries. In 1992 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and today it is one of Moravia's essential visits, a direct journey into the town planning and aesthetics of the central European Renaissance.
Southern Moravia, warm and sunny, is Czechia's great wine region: the vast majority of Czech wine comes from here. Vines have been grown on these slopes since very ancient times — there are signs of viticulture as far back as the Romans and Great Moravia — and towns such as Mikulov, Valtice and Znojmo are today the heart of a deeply rooted wine culture, with their cellars, their harvest festivals and their Moravian folk traditions, among the liveliest in the country.
In this district on the Austrian border lies one of the most singular landscapes in Europe: the Lednice-Valtice complex. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the powerful princely family of Liechtenstein transformed their southern Moravian estates into an immense landscaped garden of some 200 square kilometres, one of the largest man-made designed landscapes on the continent. Around their two residences — the neo-Gothic palace of Lednice and the baroque castle of Valtice — they laid out avenues, lakes, woods and a series of romantic pavilions and follies (a minaret, a temple of Apollo, a triumphal arch) scattered across the countryside.
The cultural landscape of Lednice-Valtice, the deliberate work of a single family over generations, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996 for its exceptional value as a landscaped garden. Combined with the vineyards, the cellars and the Moravian traditions of the region, it makes southern Moravia one of the most pleasant and light-filled corners of Czechia, very different from industrial Bohemia or monumental Prague.
Prague reached its peak in the fourteenth century under the king of Bohemia and emperor Charles IV (1346-1378), who made it the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and one of the largest cities in Europe. Charles, raised in France and of both Czech and Luxembourg blood, wanted to make Prague a new Rome or a new Paris, and to that end he launched a building programme without precedent that still defines the face of the city.
In 1348 he founded the University of Prague — the first in central Europe, today Charles University — and laid out the New Town (Nové Město), a huge extension that wrapped around the Old Town. He ordered the stone bridge over the Vltava that bears his name, with the Gothic Old Town tower by Peter Parler, and entrusted the same master with the construction of St Vitus Cathedral at the castle, burial place of the kings and home of the crown jewels of St Wenceslas. In 1344 he had also managed to raise the bishopric of Prague to an archbishopric, giving Bohemia a Church of its own.
That cosmopolitan Prague of Czechs, Germans, Italians and Jews was a focus of Gothic art, trade and study that drew travellers from across the continent. The city visitors walk through today — the castle, the cathedral, the Charles Bridge, the Old Town Square with its astronomical clock — largely keeps the shape given to it by the emperor the Czechs still call 'the father of the homeland'.
Prague was the cradle of the first great religious reform in Europe. At the Bethlehem Chapel (Betlémská kaple) in the Old Town, Jan Hus, priest and rector of the university, preached at the beginning of the fifteenth century, denouncing in the Czech language the corruption of the clergy and the sale of indulgences. When Hus was burned as a heretic in Constance on 6 July 1415, outrage took hold of the city and of the whole kingdom.
The explosion came in Prague itself. On 30 July 1419, a Hussite procession led by the preacher Jan Želivský stormed the New Town hall and threw the Catholic councillors out of the windows; they died falling onto the pikes of the crowd below. This was the first defenestration of Prague, the spark of the Hussite wars. For the following years Prague was the bastion of the Hussite revolution, governed by its factions and defended by the armies of General Jan Žižka against the imperial crusades.
The Hussite mark stayed etched on the city. On the Old Town Square stands the imposing monument to Jan Hus, unveiled in 1915 on the five hundredth anniversary of his death, while 6 July is a national holiday across Czechia. The memory of Hus, martyr of conscience and symbol of Czech resistance to power, runs through the whole later history of the country.
Two centuries later, Prague was again the scene of a defenestration that changed the history of Europe. On 23 May 1618, at Prague Castle, Czech Protestant nobles threw two Catholic imperial governors and their secretary out of a window in protest at violations of their religious liberties. All three survived the fall, but the gesture set off the revolt of the Bohemian estates and lit the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).
The outcome was catastrophic for Prague and for the whole of Bohemia. On 8 November 1620, at the battle of White Mountain (Bílá hora), on the outskirts of the city, the imperial and Catholic army crushed the troops of the Czech estates in an hour. The repression was implacable: on 21 June 1621, twenty-seven leaders of the revolt were publicly executed on the Old Town Square. Twenty-seven crosses set into the pavement in front of the town hall still recall that day.
The defeat opened almost three centuries of Habsburg rule, Catholic Counter-Reformation and Germanisation of the elites. Prague lost its rank as imperial capital — the court was in Vienna — and was reduced to a provincial city of the Austrian monarchy, though it kept its extraordinary baroque heritage, largely the fruit of the Counter-Reformation itself. Only with the national revival of the nineteenth century would the city recover its role as the capital of Czech consciousness.
Prague is home to one of the oldest and most significant Jewish communities in Europe. Its quarter, Josefov — today part of the Old Town — was for centuries a walled ghetto where Jewish life flourished despite persecutions and expulsions. It preserves the Old-New Synagogue (Staronová synagoga), from the thirteenth century, the oldest still in use in Europe, and the moving Old Jewish Cemetery, with its thousands of headstones crowded into layers piled on top of one another for lack of space.
To that Jewish Prague belongs the legend of the Golem, the clay creature said to have been made in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the Maharal) to protect the ghetto, brought to life with the sacred word and deactivated when it slipped out of his control. It is one of the city's most famous legends, a symbol of the ingenuity and the fragility of that community. From the world of German-speaking Jewish Prague came, in the twentieth century, one of the greatest writers in world literature: Franz Kafka, born in Prague in 1883, whose work — The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis — distils the anguish and absurdity of a labyrinthine world that many associate with the city itself.
That thousand-year-old community was all but annihilated by the Holocaust: most of Prague's Jews were deported to Terezín and from there to the extermination camps. The Nazis, paradoxically, preserved Prague's synagogues and ritual objects with the intention of creating a 'museum of an extinct race', and much of today's Jewish Museum in Prague, one of the most important in the world, comes from that macabre project. Josefov is now an essential place of memory for understanding the history of the city.
In the twentieth century, Wenceslas Square (Václavské náměstí) — the great New Town boulevard presided over by the equestrian statue of the patron saint — became the symbolic stage of the struggle for freedom. It was where the Prague Spring of 1968 played out, Alexander Dubček's reformist attempt to build 'socialism with a human face', crushed on the night of 20-21 August 1968 by the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies.
On that same square, on 16 January 1969, the student Jan Palach set himself on fire in protest at the Soviet occupation and at his people's resignation; he died three days later, and today a bronze cross in the ground near the St Wenceslas monument recalls his sacrifice and that of Jan Zajíc, who followed his example weeks afterwards. Twenty years of grey 'normalisation' followed that defeat, with the dissidence of Charter 77 and of Václav Havel keeping the flame alive underground.
Liberation came in November 1989. After the brutal breaking-up of a student demonstration on 17 November, hundreds of thousands of Praguers gathered on Wenceslas Square chanting 'Havel to the castle!', and within a few weeks the communist regime collapsed without violence: the Velvet Revolution. On 29 December 1989, Václav Havel was elected president. Prague, which had been an imperial capital, an occupied city and a symbol of resistance, was once again the capital of a free and democratic country.
Some seventy kilometres east of Prague, Kutná Hora was in the Middle Ages the second most important city in the kingdom and the source of the Czech crown's wealth. The discovery of rich silver deposits around 1298 set off a mining rush that drew miners from all over central Europe; at its height, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the mines of Kutná Hora produced close to twenty tonnes of silver a year and made Bohemia one of the most prosperous states on the continent.
That silver minted the Prague groschen, the coin King Wenceslas II began striking in 1300 at the Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr) in Kutná Hora, a mint to which he summoned Florentine masters. The silver groschen circulated for almost three centuries across central and eastern Europe and funded the splendour of medieval Bohemia. The city's opulence took shape in its architectural jewel: the Gothic cathedral of St Barbara, patron saint of miners, one of the most dazzling churches in the country, whose construction was funded by the mining guilds themselves.
On the outskirts, in the Sedlec district, is another of the great Czech curiosities: the Sedlec ossuary, a chapel decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people, arranged into chandeliers, coats of arms and garlands by a nineteenth-century woodcarver. When the silver seams ran out, around the sixteenth century, Kutná Hora declined and was frozen in time, which is why it has kept its medieval core almost intact, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Southern Bohemia was for centuries the domain of the house of Rožmberk (Rosenberg), the most powerful noble family in the kingdom after the kings themselves. A branch of the old Vítkovci, the Rožmberks settled around 1250 at Rožmberk castle and, shortly afterwards, around 1253, built the castle of Český Krumlov, which became the centre of their vast estate. Their emblem, the red five-petalled rose, still presides over the walls of half of southern Bohemia.
Under the Rožmberks, and especially during the Renaissance, Český Krumlov flourished as a small cultural capital. William of Rožmberk (Vilém), the family's most notable figure in the sixteenth century, turned his court into a centre of refinement, and his brother Petr Vok was the last of the line. In debt, Petr Vok was forced in 1601 to sell Krumlov castle to the emperor Rudolf II and to move his residence to Třeboň, where he assembled one of the largest libraries in Europe. With his death in 1611 the house of Rožmberk died out.
The castle then passed to other great families — the Eggenbergs and the Schwarzenbergs — who enlarged it and gave it its baroque appearance, including its famous baroque theatre, preserved almost intact. Wedged into a bend of the Vltava, with its perfectly preserved medieval and Renaissance core dominated by the painted castle tower, Český Krumlov is today one of the most beautiful historic ensembles in central Europe, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1992.
Against the seigneurial power of the Rožmberks, the Czech crown founded its own stronghold in southern Bohemia: České Budějovice (Budweis in German). The town was created in 1265 by King Přemysl Otakar II as a fortified royal seat to counterbalance the influence of the local nobility, and around its enormous square plaza — one of the largest in Europe, Přemysl Otakar II Square — a prosperous merchant town grew up.
Its wealth rested on trade, on silver mining in the area and, above all, on salt, which came from Austria along a trade route that in the nineteenth century took the form of one of the first horse-drawn railways on the continent, between České Budějovice and Linz in Austria. The town kept its loyalty to the crown and its largely Catholic and partly German-speaking character for centuries.
Like Plzeň, České Budějovice is tied forever to beer. This is where Budějovický Budvar is brewed, known internationally as Budweiser, whose name — derived from Budweis, the German name of the town — has been the subject of a long and famous legal dispute with the American brewer Anheuser-Busch over use of the 'Budweiser' trademark. The town's brewing tradition goes back to the Middle Ages, when it already held brewing rights.
One of the most original legacies of the Rožmberks is the vast system of fish ponds in the Třeboň region, a man-made water landscape created over the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In a district of low, marshy land the Rožmberks saw a business: around 1367 they founded the monastery of Třeboň and, over time, turned the wetlands into a network of large ponds for raising carp, which became one of their main sources of wealth.
The work was possible thanks to two brilliant hydraulic engineers in the family's service. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Štěpánek Netolický devised an ingenious canal, the 'Zlatá stoka' (the golden channel), which regulated the water of the whole system; later, Jakub Krčín of Jelčany built the largest ponds, among them the giant Rožmberk, the biggest pond in Czechia, and the Svět, on the edge of Třeboň itself. These sheets of water, set among forest and meadow, still produce the carp the Czechs traditionally eat at Christmas.
The landscape of ponds, woods and peat bogs of the Třeboň district is today a UNESCO biosphere reserve, an ecosystem of great value for waterbirds and biodiversity. The town of Třeboň itself, with its Renaissance castle — where the last Rožmberk, Petr Vok, retired and died — its historic centre and its spa tradition of peat baths, is a quiet corner of southern Bohemia, living evidence of that ingenious taming of water.
In northern Bohemia, at the foot of the mountains that separate it from Germany and Poland, Liberec (Reichenberg in German) was for centuries the great centre of the region's textile industry. Founded in the thirteenth century and holding a town charter since 1577, it developed under the noble Redern family and, with the Industrial Revolution, became the heart of the textile industry of the Habsburg monarchy, earning the nickname 'the Manchester of Bohemia' (or 'the Austrian Manchester') for its cloth, carpet and fabric mills.
Like much of northern Bohemia, Liberec was until 1945 a majority-German city, and that character determined its tragic twentieth-century history. In the 1930s the Sudetenland became the stronghold of Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party, which stirred up the discontent of the German minority in the service of Nazi Germany; Henlein himself was based in Liberec. After the Munich Agreement of 1938 the city was annexed by the Third Reich and made the capital of the Sudetenland region (Reichsgau Sudetenland).
At the end of the war, the German population of Liberec and of the whole of northern Bohemia was expelled in 1945-1946 under the Beneš decrees, and the city was resettled by Czechs. That demographic upheaval erased centuries of Germanic life in the region within a few months. Today Liberec is a lively university city, dominated by its spectacular neo-Renaissance town hall and by the tower and hotel on nearby Mount Ještěd, an icon of modern Czech architecture, and it serves as the gateway to the northern mountains.
In the far north of Bohemia, on the German border, lies one of the most astonishing natural landscapes in the country: Bohemian Switzerland (České Švýcarsko), a region of spectacular sandstone formations — canyons, gorges, towers and rock walls sculpted by erosion over millions of years — crossed by the river Elbe (Labe) and its tributary the Kamenice. Its jewel is the Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, a rock bridge of monumental proportions.
The name, an odd one, has a history. The region was 'discovered' and named in the eighteenth century by two Swiss Romantic painters, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, who were working in Dresden and found that these rocky landscapes reminded them of home; they called the German side 'Saxon Switzerland' (Sächsische Schweiz), and the name spread to the Czech side as 'Bohemian Switzerland'. The sublime landscape of these rocks fascinated the painters of Romanticism, among them the great Caspar David Friedrich, and inspired a whole aesthetic of wild nature.
To protect this natural heritage, on 1 January 2000 the Czech part was declared Bohemian Switzerland National Park, adjoining the German Saxon Switzerland park and together forming a large protected cross-border area. In 2022 a devastating forest fire — the largest in the country's modern history — burned much of the park's woodland, an episode that was a reminder of how fragile these ecosystems are. Recovering from that wound, Bohemian Switzerland remains one of Czechia's great hiking destinations, with the village of Hřensko as its gateway.
Western Bohemia stretches to the mountains that separate it from Bavaria and Saxony, and for centuries it was a land of frontier and of contact between the Czech and German worlds. From the Middle Ages onwards, German settlers moved into its mountain and border areas — part of the so-called Sudetenland — drawn by mining, forestry and trade, giving the region a strong Germanic stamp that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century.
That double identity, Czech and German, shaped its history. The wealth beneath the ground — silver, tin, coal, kaolin — and of the thermal waters drove mining, industry and spa culture from early on, while the towns held both Czech and German populations. In the nineteenth century the region industrialised strongly, and its spas became fashionable resorts for the European aristocracy.
The twentieth century brought the drama of the border. The German majority in the frontier districts made western Bohemia one of the flashpoints of the Sudeten crisis: annexed by Hitler after the Munich Agreement of 1938, the region then lived through the expulsion of its German population in 1945-1946 at the end of the war, which emptied and transformed much of its border villages. During the Cold War, Czechia's western border was part of the Iron Curtain, sealed with wire fences and watchtowers facing West Germany.
Karlovy Vary — Karlsbad in German — is the most famous of the Czech spa towns, and its very name points to Charles IV: tradition credits the emperor with discovering its thermal springs around 1370 and founding the town, to which he gave his name ('Charles's baths'). Around its hot mineral waters, which rise from a dozen springs — the most spectacular, the Vřídlo geyser, shoots a boiling jet several metres into the air — a spa culture grew up over the centuries.
The great era of Karlovy Vary came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it became one of the fashionable spas of Europe, a meeting point for the continent's aristocracy, artists and monarchs. Figures such as Goethe, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Tsar Peter the Great and the writer Gogol passed along its colonnades and springs to 'take the waters'. The town filled with grand hotels, bathhouses, theatres and gardens, in an elegant style that still defines its historic centre, wedged into a wooded valley.
To its spa fame were added products that made its name known worldwide: the Becherovka herbal liqueur, created in Karlovy Vary at the beginning of the nineteenth century and considered the town's 'thirteenth spring'; the fine Moser glass; and the spa wafers (oplatky). In 2021, Karlovy Vary was inscribed, along with ten other European spa towns, on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the 'Great Spa Towns of Europe'. Today it also hosts a prestigious international film festival.
Plzeň (Pilsen), the great city of western Bohemia, was founded in 1295 by King Wenceslas II as a market and military town at the crossing of trade routes towards Bavaria. A rich city that had held brewing rights since the Middle Ages, it entered world history for one very specific reason: this is where, in 1842, the most widely drunk type of beer on the planet was born.
For centuries the beer of Plzeň had been of uneven quality. Fed up with a bad product, the town's brewers joined forces to build a new municipal brewery and hired a Bavarian brewmaster, Josef Groll, who on 5 October 1842 produced a revolutionary batch: a bottom-fermented lager, pale, golden and clear, quite unlike the cloudy dark beers of the day. That golden beer, Pilsner Urquell — 'the original source of Pilsen' — became so popular and was so widely imitated that it gave rise to a whole style: today the vast majority of beer drunk in the world is a pale lager of the 'pilsen' or 'pils' type.
The Pilsner Urquell brewery, with its vast underground cellars and its monumental gateway, remains the city's great emblem and an essential visit. Plzeň is also one of the brewing capitals of the country that drinks more beer per head than any other in the world, and its name is tied forever to a drink that conquered the planet.
Beyond beer, Plzeň was for a century and a half one of the great industrial centres of central Europe. In 1859 a machinery factory was set up in the city which, bought in 1869 by the engineer Emil Škoda, became the famous Škoda Works (Škodovy závody): a giant metallurgical and armaments complex that grew into one of the largest in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and then in the First Czechoslovak Republic.
The Škoda works in Plzeň produced steel, locomotives, turbines, bridges, heavy machinery and, above all, weapons: guns and war materiel that supplied the armies of half of Europe. (It is worth not confusing this Plzeň Škoda, the heavy industry one, with Škoda cars, built in Mladá Boleslav, although both grew from the same business trunk.) During the Nazi occupation the Škoda Works served the German war machine, which made Plzeň a target for Allied bombing.
The end of the war left Plzeň with a singular episode: while the rest of Bohemia was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, the west of the country, including Plzeň, was liberated in May 1945 by General George Patton's American army. Every year the city marks that liberation with a festival, something that was silenced under the communist regime and is now openly celebrated as part of local memory.
After the Second World War, western Bohemia was marked by two traumatic processes. The first was the expulsion, in 1945-1946, of the large German population of its border districts, which emptied whole villages and erased centuries of Germanic presence in the region. The second was the raising of the Iron Curtain: with the communist coup of 1948 and the Cold War, the border with West Germany became a sealed military zone, with electrified fences, minefields and watchtowers that cost the lives of many who tried to escape.
The fall of communism in 1989 and Czechia's later integration into the European Union (2004) and the Schengen area completely transformed this once hermetic border, today open and busy, with intense economic and tourist exchange with neighbouring Bavaria. The border villages and forests, depopulated during the Cold War, have in some cases become protected natural areas of great value.
Free of those tensions, western Bohemia lives today from its twin historic callings: the industry of Plzeň and its world-famous beer, and the luxury spa trade of the so-called 'spa triangle' of Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) and Františkovy Lázně (Franzensbad), three spa towns recognised by UNESCO. This is the elegant Bohemia of colonnades and healing waters, which has recovered its old prestige as a destination for health and rest.