Useful Notes / Czech Republic

aka: Czechia

Czech it out!

The Czech Republic (Czech: Česká republika), now more preferably known as Czechia (Czech: Česko) and formerly as Bohemia, is a country in Central / Eastern Europe, with a population of 10.5 million people. Czech Republic was established in 1993 after the Velvet Divorce of Czechoslovakia; it comprises the historical countries of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. Even though it was formerly part of the Soviet Bloc (not the Union), popular ideas about Eastern European countries largely don't apply. While the history of The 20th Century landed Czechia in the Communist bloc, located to the east side of the Iron Curtain, for many centuries before that it had far more cultural and political ties with Germany, Austria and other Western or Southern European countries than it did with countries further East, like Romania, Ukraine or Russia; and of course many centuries leave a more lasting mark on the country and culture than a couple of decades. For this reason, Czechs emphatically prefer the Central Europe designation.

With a history of The Protestant Reformation predating Martin Luther and John Calvin (utraquists and Unity of Brethren), recatholisation under the Habsburgs, and state atheism under the Communists, most of the population today is atheist (or agnostic). There is a Catholic minority, and even smaller Protestant and other religious minorities.

The official language is Czech, a Western Slavic language. It is mutually intelligible with Slovak, and, as with all Slavic languages, quite easy to learn if you know another Slavic language. (In the case of Czech, this is particularly true of the third major West Slavic language, Polish, which is almost but not quite mutually intelligible. Beware false friends between Slavic languages.^note Especially between Russian and Czech, where usually neutral Eastern Slavic words have often taken on negative meanings in Western Slavic languages.) Beware also of Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable - Czech word accent is always on the first syllable, so accents on any other syllables are symptomatic of foreigners. Czech is one of the few phonetically written languages, which means that words are written pretty much exactly how they sound. Including the fact that words comprised entirely of consonants are, indeed, comprised entirely of consonants: The Czech sentence "Strč prst skrz krk" (meaning "shove your finger through your neck") is considered one of the most difficult tongue-twisters on Earth. Although that traditional primacy may have in fact more recently been beaten by the longest recorded-to-date sentence comprised entirely of consonants that does more or less make sense in Czech: it consists of sixteen words and fifty-two consonants. (Czechs are also, possibly, the nation that invented those weird tea-leaves above letters, called diacritics, which definitely help Czech in being a phonetically written language.)

Just like the Central African Republic and the Dominican Republic, it is one the few countries that has "Republic" in its colloquial English name. Czechia^CzechČesko is now the official short form name in English and is slowly becoming more widely used - Google Maps now uses it.
One of the reasons for this name is because Czech Republic refers to the country formed in 1993, but Czechia refers to all the countries the Czech nation resided in, dating back to the 7th century. (I.e. similar to the difference between Italy and 1946-onward's Italian Republic).

Very famous for its beer, the Czech Republic has the highest beer consuption per capita. The first monastic breweries in the area started operating in the 12th century. The most well known international brands are Pilsner Urquell (Plzeňský Prazdroj) and Budweiser Budvar (Budějovický Budvar), but there is also a number of small local breweries. However, wine is also grown, particularly in Southern Moravia. The Czech Republic is one of the northernmost wine-growing countries, with the first vines introduced in the 14th century by Charles IV. But foreigners rarely learn this, because Czechs tend to drink all the produce themselves.

When Czechs are mentioned in anglophone fiction, expect an inevitable Czech/Check/Cheque pun.^note For example, a young Czech immigrant is getting picked on by some of the other students and is trying to hide from them, so she asks the teacher, "Could you cache a little Czech?" More obnoxiously, when Ian Hislop settled a libel case filed by Robert Maxwell, he famously said, "I've just written a fat cheque to a fat Czech." N.B.: Maxwell was not actually Czech—born Jan Hoch, he was a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Carpathian Ruthenia. This region was part of Czechoslovakia when he was born, but was neither truly Czech nor Slovak land; it was a mix of Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Jews (largely Yiddish-speaking), and Rusyns (the largest group, whose East Slavic language is closely related to Ukrainian), but not really any Czechs. Also, the region has been part of Ukraine since the end of World War II. So Maxwell was Czechoslovakian—and had even served in the Czechoslovakian military—but not actually Czech. He was fat, however.

It is also notable for being one of the most libertarian nations in Europe with very loose gun laws, even looser drug laws (all recreational drugs are decriminalized in personal-use quantities, and possession of smaller commercial quantities is equivalent to a parking ticket), and major movements towards privatization and deregulation (except where that conflicts with European Union directives). However, it also still suffers from high levels of bureaucracy.

The Czech Republic has one of the densest railway networks in use in the world. Trainspotting is a fairly popular hobby, usually involving photography; the other is complaining about the company České dráhy (Czech Railways). The quality of the tracks is, indeed, somewhat lacking behind Western Europe, but compared to e.g. the United States, like most of Europe the Czech Republic is a public transport paradise. A modern Czech train got a role in Casino Royale (2006). Trains appear quite often in Czech films as well, e.g. in Closely Watched Trains. Related to these trains is the Prague Metro, which is legendary in public-transport circles for having the highest ridership per capita of any heavy-rail public transit system in the whole world thanks to its superb network design and alignment with actual land use in Prague. (There's a reason this wiki had an article for the Prague Metro before it had one for the city of Prague itself.)

Czechs are also very fond of "nature", hiking, mushroom picking, cycling, canoeing down rivers and so on. About a third of the country's area is covered in forests, although only a very small part of that is primeval. There is a large number of nature programs on TV (and some of the most popular radio programmes had to do with following the lives of animals and birds), various scientific pursuits are fairly popular, and there is a Czech research station in Antarctica.

The landscape is quite varied, with most of the country being hilly. Most of the country's borders are "natural" borders of mountain ranges (along the majority of the borders) or rivers (in South Moravia). There are also areas of fertile flatlands along the rivers Labe (Elbe) and Morava. The highest mountain is Sněžka (which can be loosely translated as "Snow Mountain") in the Krkonoše mountains, at the border with Poland, 1603 m above the sea level. The lowest point above sea level is the surface of the Labe river in Hřensko, at the border with Germany, 115 m above the sea level.

History

A word of forewarning: Czech history (like most of history) is full of unrememberable dates. Many of the dates worth remembering involve the number 8. Some Czechs therefore feel superstitious about years that end in 8.

Before there were Slavs, there were Germanic tribes, and before there were Germanic tribes, there were Celtic tribes, which is where the name Bohemia for the Western part of the country originally comes from. And before the Celts, there was the closely related Knovíz Culture, which archeological forensics reveals to have been a Cannibal Tribe. The first Slavic consolidated state in the approximate area was Great Moravia, which is where the name for Moravia comes from, more or less.^note Not really, because it's actually the name of a river, Morava, but, well, let's simplify things. It was for the Slavs of Great Moravia that Cyril and Methodius created the not-yet-Cyrillic alphabet. (And it hasn't been in use in the area for centuries.)

After the fall of Great Moravia at the beginning of the 10th century, the centre of power in the region shifted to Prague and the Přemyslid dynasty. There was the usual period of frequent infighting and dynastic disputes in the The Low Middle Ages, interrupted by power wrangling with the neighbouring countries (especially Germany). The most famous ruler from this early period is St Wenceslas (Václav in Czech), who was immortalised in the anglophone world by the song Good King Wenceslas, but actually wasn't a king.

It was only Premysl Otakar I who gained a hereditary royal title in 1198. This, obviously, gave the country and the dynasty some added weight in international dealings. Chivalric lifestyle (the original) flourished. The Přemyslid kings also invited German settlers to help tame the wilder areas of the country, which lay foundations to the large German minority in the following centuries. Lots of castles were built, providing future filmmakers with a wide choice of shooting locations.

With Václav III's murder in 1306, there were only female Přemyslid heirs left, and with medieval politics being what they were, there was some fighting between their husbands before the reign settled with the Luxembourg dynasty. Charles IV, Czech king and Holy Roman Emperor, widely considered the greatest ruler of the Czech lands, was the second of that dynasty on the Czech throne. He founded the university in Prague and many other medieval monuments present in the country today, and made Prague into the cultural centre of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was also during his reign that the first religious dissenters started working in the country; during the reign of Charles' son Václav, the most famous of them, Jan Hus, gained prominency to such an extent that the Catholic church first excommunicated him and later (in 1415) burned him at the stake for heresy. His Czech followers were not pleased with that turn of events. That displeasure eventually grew into full on armed rebellion against the Prague city council; Václav apparently had a stroke when he heard the bad news, his brother the Roman Emperor Sigismund was not welcome in the Czech lands anymore and the Hussite Wars followed.

There was, eventually, a settlement that allowed Czechs to follow some of their beliefs with the rest of the Catholic church ignoring them. ^note After the more militant side not satisfied with this solution received a thorough beating in the Battle of Lipany in 1434, Sigismund came back as Czech king (and died a few years later). Later in the 15th century, the Czech nobility elected one of their own, Jiří z Poděbrad, as Czech king; he's notable for being the only one to be elected so, being the only non-Catholic on the Czech throne, and trying to start a peaceful union of (Christian) European nations against the Turkish threat.^note Some Czechs now like to claim that idea was a predecessor to the European Union, except that a) it was more like the UN or NATO in concept, anyway; b) everyone else ignored him because he was not Catholic. Czech history does tend to come across as "we never get what we want even though we're right," to the point that Czech popular culture frequently pokes fun at it.

After yet another king died prematurely in 1526, the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty succeeded on the Czech throne, and stayed there until 1918 ^note although the last couple of them didn't even bother being crowned Czech Kings specifically. The last time Prague was a cultural centre was during the reign of Rudolf II (which is also the time when the famous legend of the Golem takes place). After more political (and religious) tensions, Czech people once again resorted to defenestration against officials in Prague in 1618, starting the Thirty Years' War (which, unlike The Hundred Years War between England and France, did indeed last thirty years). After another Czech Famous Defeat in the Battle of White Mountain, the Habsburgs consollidated their power by proclaiming Catholicism as the only religion allowed in the country. All the Protestants who could afford to do so, emigrated (often to Poland). This left the country without whole generations of intellectual elites and open to recatholisation and the influx of foreign nobility. The following centuries were the period when chateaus and palaces were built, providing a different kind of wide choice of filming backdrops for future filmmakers.

Another side effect of these events was the fact that at the end of the 18th century, the Czech language was largely the language of peasants. Attempts to revitalise it and start a new Czech culture eventually, throughout the 19th century, led to attempts at greater political autonomy as well, which however did not materialise until independent Czechoslovakia was formed after WW1. During the war, many Czechs were forced to fight for Austria against their will. When Czechoslovak legions were formed on the Allied side, naturally many Czech soldiers surrendered so they could join their national cause.^note This started the 20th century trend of global events landing Czechs on the side they did not necessarily want to be.

A collection of a number of different ethnicities^note  (Czechs/Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians, and Ukrainians, and several stateless minorities like Jews or Romani), Czechoslovakia was formed after the Treaty of Versailles, but its diversity made it unstable. While it was economically (and culturally!) successful and notably retained a democratic system when many European nation states formed after World War I fell into various totalitarian practices, the Germans and Hungarians wanted the self-determination doctrines paraded by America but not delivered at Versailles. After World War I, people in other countries like Britain started to feel sorry for the Germans, who weren't maltreated in Czechoslovakia but didn't have any political autonomy. This sentiment was hijacked by Nazi Germany and used as an excuse to annex the German-populated Sudetenland in the autumn of 1938, which was given to Germany on the basis of the Munich Agreement. That pact was signed by Germany, Italy, the the United Kingdom, and France - the latter two being Czechoslovakia's closest allies at the time. This allowed Adolf Hitler to step over the large border fortification system unscathed. He proceeded to take the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939, blatantly defying his previous assertion that Sudetenland was the only claim Germany would make on Europe. Slovakia split into a fascist state. War did not break out until Hitler moved on Poland later in 1939.

Prague was comparatively untouched by World War II. Czech people were not. Hundreds of thousands went to the death camps, and the Lidice massacre, one of the most notorious war crimes of the war, took place as revenge for the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. As Slavs, Czechs were considered sub-human and useful only for labour by the Nazis. ^note For example, after an incident with students, all universities were closed and young people of certain age were all sent to work for the Reich. The International Students' Day was designated in memory of these events. The country's flourishing industry was put to work for the war machine, and as a result, later in the war, several industrial cities (like Plzeň and Brno) and their surroundings suffered from bombing raids by the Allies. Like in the rest of Nazi-controlled Europe, the previously numerous Jewish population was nearly exterminated. However, other Czechs were actively fighting on the Allied side outside of the country. For example, Czechoslovak pilots fought with the RAF in WW2, and there was a number of Real Life Ace Pilots among them.

After World War II the Germans and Hungarians were expelled en-masse and Subcarpatian Ruthenia was annexed by the Soviet Union. In 1948, the Communists seized power through a coup d'etat^note An embarrassing moment in history, because it became possible through bad planning on the side of people who wanted to stop the growing communist power!, and dissident elements, including the Church(es), were quickly purged and subdued. Czechoslovakia was a founding member of Comecon (Soviet bloc economic organization) and the Warsaw Pact.

Readers who do not wish to come across as ignorant are strongly advised to remember that Czechoslovakia was never, ever part of the Soviet Union proper, only the so-called "Soviet bloc". Never using the adjective "Soviet" in reference to things Czech(oslovak) is a vital part of remembering.

In The '60s, the atmosphere slowly thawed, leading to a surge in culture. In 1968, a Slovak reformist, Alexander Dubček, came to power and started a short period of liberalization, the Prague Spring, which lasted a few months until the other Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania) invaded the country. When the Czech army was told they were being invaded, they ran to fortify the Western border, because invasion from their allies was inconceivable. Popular protest, at first almost universal, slowly died down; Jan Palach's 1969 attempt to rouse people did not have the desired effect.

In 1989, as part of Hole in Flag, the Velvet Revolution took place, the Communists were overthrown, and Czechoslovakia became a democracy. ^note In another recall of 20th century history throughout the 20th century, the popular protests that led to the regime's downfall started on November 17th, the International Students' Day, during a student memorial observation of the incidents from WW2. Three years later, the Czech and Slovakian halves separated in the "Velvet Divorce", with much of the national property ^note such as the Su-25 ground attack aircraft being split 2:1 for the Czechs because of their larger population.

The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, The European Union in 2004 and the Schengen Area (open borders inside Europe) in 2007. As of 2020, the currency is still koruna česká (the Czech Koruna, CZK). ^note Do not confuse with Koruna Česká, the small Czech monarchist party you're not very likely to come across.

Prague and other cities

Prague is the capital of the country and a global city. Despite the global status, it's far less expensive than most European cities of its stature (even notoriously cheap Berlin is more expensive). Being—as mentioned above—relatively untouched by the bombs of World War II, Prague is a popular place to film, particularly when an "old Europe" feeling is required. The Barrandov Studios are a particularly popular filming location for Hollywood movies such as xXx, Blade II, Mission: Impossible and The Bourne Identity. The cheapness also attracts tourists; Prague is a popular destination for Americans (and Canadians and Australians...) looking for a good time on a budget while still being able to say they went to Europe, as well as other Europeans (including, to the annoyance of many Praguers, British stag parties) looking for a short trip without expending too much on transportation or things when you get there. It is also a major European cultural centre. And the only city in the country with a metro.

Prague has a population of approximately 1.2 million people, which, of course, means there's a good 9.3 million Czechs who live somewhere else, for example in Brno (pronounced with two syllables, as in "Brur-no"), the second largest city and the capital of Moravia. Brno maintains a rivalry with Prague. It tends to be the more industrial of the two, usually holds the largest trade fairs in the country and has a major racetrack. It is, however, also another cultural centre, with its own National Theatre (formed three years after the one in Prague, back in the 19th century when Moravia was still nominally a separate political entity). It is also quickly becoming a more cosmopolitan city, possibly faster than Prague. Its historical centre is smaller than in Prague, but there are some notable examples of Modernist architecture, such as the Villa Tugendhat, to be found in Brno. Thanks to the closeness to the border with Slovakia and a number of Slovak students, you are much more likely to hear the Slovak language in Brno than in other Czech cities like Ostrava (originally noted for being the "black" - coal-mining - city, but becoming greener in recent years), Plzeň (noted for its beer and industry), Liberec (originally a very German city, these days noted for the transmitting tower and hotel on Ještěd), etc.

Famous Czechs

• 2K Czech (previously known as Illusion Softworks), a video game development studio (Hidden & Dangerous, the Mafia series, Vietcong...)
• Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State (1997-2001) was born 'Marie Jana Korbelová' in Prague
• Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV and wife of Richard II of England, "Good Queen Anne"
• Karel Čapek, probably the most influential Czech author of the 20th century (e.g. R.U.R.)
• Věra Čáslavská, gymnast and seven-times Olympic gold winner
• Petr Čech, legendary football goalkeeper, key player in Chelsea's rise as a top team in the 2000s. Ended his playing career with Arsenal; has since returned to Chelsea as a technical advisor.
• Jára Cimrman. Despite being virtually unknown abroad, Cimrman's spirit looms large over Czech culture and popular consciousness. Born in Vienna,^note which is in Austria and has always been in Austria he was the quintessential entrepreneurial, creative and hopelessly unsuccessful Czech underdog of the late Habsburg period. He was an inventor, a writer, a playwright, a composer, a criminologist, and many other things. He also would have won the "Greatest Czech" poll held by the Czech TV in 2005 (following a template from the BBC), were it not for the perfectly negligible technicality that he is completely and utterly fictional.
• Charles IV (Karel IV.), Czech king and Holy Roman Emperor, who founded the first university in the country in 1348, and was the eventual official winner of the aforementioned TV poll.
• Ema Destinnová (Emmy Destinn), opera singer
• Druhá Tráva, an accoustic-sound band with its roots in bluegrass, popular even in the genre's birthplace
• Antoní­n Dvořák, world-famous composer (e.g. "New World Symphony") and Rail Enthusiast Extraordinaire
• Miloš Forman, film director
• Karel Gott, singer
• Dominik Hašek, legendary ice hockey goaltender; regarded by most as the greatest European goalie in NHL history
• Václav Havel, playwright and the first president of the country after the fall of Communism
• Eva "Hello Boys" Herzigová, model
• Václav Hollar, baroque artist, famous for his depictions of London pre-Great Fire and other European landmarks
• Antonín Holý, chemist and co-inventor of a successful anti-HIV drug
• Markéta Irglová, musician, co-winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2007 (with Glen Hansard) and the youngest person ever to win that particular award.
• Jaromír Jágr, ice hockey player; second only to Wayne Gretzky (by a wide margin) in career NHL scoring^note goals plus assists
• Leoš Janáček, composer
• Eliška Junková, early car-racer and the first woman to win a Grand Prix event
• Franz Kafka, author (Prague Jewish, wrote mostly in German)
• Gertan Klauber, character actor
• Jan Ámos Komenský (Comenius), 17th century author, philosopher, theologian and "father of modern education." Famous for the notion that school should be fun.
• Petr Korda, tennis player with 1 career Grand Slam win (1998 Australian Open), but perhaps now better known as the father of the following sportspeople, all born in and representing the US:
  • Jessica Korda, golfer; winner of 6 LPGA Tour events (as of late September 2021)
  • Nelly Korda, also a golfer; winner of 6 LPGA Tour events, including 1 major, as well as an Olympic gold medal at Tokyo 2020/21
  • Sebastian Korda, tennis player
• Milan Kundera, contemporary author, who effectively renounced his Czech status, not that anyone cares
• Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, philosopher and early sociologist
• Gregor Johann Mendel (German-speaking), "father of modern genetics"
• Alphonse Mucha, prominent Art Nouveau artist, patronized by college students everywhere
• Martina Navratilova, tennis player
• Božena Němcová, 19th century writer and folklore collector, whose versions of fairy tales are probably the most popular in the country
• Jan Neruda, 19th century poet, writer and journalist
• Olympic, a pop band with origins in The '60s, with members like Peter Janda, Jiří Korn, František Ringo Čech, Pavel Bobek, and many others.
• Pavel Nedvěd, football player
• The Plastic People of the Universe, famous dissident rock band from The '70s
• Field Marshal Josef Radetzky, who distinguished himself in Austrian service and is known for the famous march composed by Strauss to most people
• Magdaléna Dobromila Rettigová, author of a popular old Czech cookbook and early National Revival writer. While she is probably not internationally known, her cookbook more or less codified what little you may know about the style of Czech cuisine.
• Karel Roden, an actor who's appeared in a number of big English-speaking productions.
• Libuše Šafránková, actress, well-loved in a number of countries for her 1973 portrayal of Cinderella. She also appeared in three Czech(oslovak) films nominated for an Academy award for best foreign film, and in one winner.
• Bedřich Smetana, composer (e.g. "Moldau")
• Jan Švankmajer, animator and film director
• Josef Švejk (fictional), from the famous novel The Good Soldier Švejk (pronounced roughly as "shveyk")
• Toyen, surrealist painter
• Jiří Trnka, artist, animator and film director
• Otto Wichterle, chemist and inventor of modern soft contact lenses
• Emil Zátopek, long-distance runner who won three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games (famously including gold in marathon, which he had never run before in his life)
• Dr. Radek Zelenka (fictional), from Stargate Atlantis. His actor, David Nykl, was born in Prague, but moved to Canada with his family when he was one year old after the Soviet invasion in 1968. Nykl nevertheless grew up speaking Czech as well as English, and it was his fluency in the language that convinced the production team to change his character from an unnamed Russian to a Czech.
• Karel Zeman, film director and animator
• Jan Žižka, one-eyed Hussite leader, undefeated military general, inventor of modern field artillery, and Czech folk hero.

The Czech Republic and its predecessors in fiction

• All (or nearly all) Czech films, literature and other media. Duh.
• For Czech animation, see Eastern European Animation.
• In the MacGyver (1985) episode "For Love and Money'', Mac must rescue someone from a Czech "mental hospital" (yep, they did what the KGB did).
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the most famous John le Carré novel, is partly set in Brno.
• Stripes.
• xXx
• Blade II
• Mission: Impossible is partly set in Prague.
• Casino Royale was filmed in Karlovy Vary, where it stood in for Montenegro.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel: While the country the film is set in is fictional, the eponymous hotel is based off the Bristol Palace in Karlovy Vary, and the ibex statue atop a rock is borrowed from a monument from the same city.
• The best-known version of the Golem legend is linked to Prague, as portrayed in the movie The Golem, The Emperor and the Golem and countless other works.
• Two of Contract J.A.C.K.'s missions take place in Czechoslovakia.
• The first mission of Soldier of Fortune II takes place in Prague.
• Forza Motorsport 5 has a racetrack in Prague. (Which would seem to be a typical case of Britain Is Only London, as the major racetracks in the Czech Republic are actually somewhere else.)
• Several films have been made about the infamous Munich Agreement in 1938 (which took place in Munich but very much concerned Czechoslovakia... without its representatives), including:
  • 'Days of Betrayal (Dny zrady), a nearly 4 hour 1973 Czechoslovak film in two parts. Covers everything from the Sudetenland crisis all the way to the start of World War II.
  • Munich - The Edge of War, 2022 British film.
• Roughly the first half of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay takes place in early-WWII Prague. The Czech version of the Golem legend is featured as a plot point and symbol.
• Several films about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague and its horrific aftermath for the locals during World War II, including Hangmen Also Die!, Hitler's Madman, Atentát, Operation Daybreak, Lidice, Anthropoid and The Man with the Iron Heart.
• Costa-Gavras's The Confession, depicting the Slánský trial of 1952.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers has the Czech Republic herself as a character, along with her close friend Slovakia. She's depicted as a Tiny Tyrannical Girl with a stubborn streak and rather... energetic behaviour.
• The majority of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes place in Prague.
• The second half of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness takes place in Prague.
• The "Eastern Europe" section of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is based on Prague; Snake rides across the Charles Bridge in a motorcycle chase, and the climax takes place on the Vltava river (known as the "Volta" in-game).
• The Contessa chapters in Sly 2: Band of Thieves take place in Prague.

Czech Popular Culture

The Czechoslovak New Wave is considered the golden age of Czech cinema. Films such as The Shop on Main Street and Closely Watched Trains are associated with this era.

As already mentioned, Jára Cimrman is a looming presence over Czech culture. Czechs love to quote idiosyncratic lines and everything Cimrman serves very well for that purpose, as well as other works by Zdeněk Svěrák and Ladislav Smoljak. Other favourites are e.g. Bohumil Hrabal, Saturnin or The Good Soldier Švejk.

The vast majority of foreign TV Shows and films are dubbed, and all that are shown on television are subbed. Most movie theatres have both subtitled and dubbed screenings. The channel ČT2 sometimes shows subbed shows and movies meant for a niche audience.

Regular & musical theatre is also widely popular, and even smaller cities often have their own theatre companies, thanks in part to state subsidies of the arts. This is, of course, always somewhat precarious with political changes, but it means that actors can find relatively stable work outside film, and like in the rest of Europe, most Czech actors therefore have some theatre experience.

Some video games have been developed in the Czech Republic, such as Hidden & Dangerous, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, Vietcong, Operation Flashpoint, Original War, ARMA, Euro Truck Simulator, Hero of Many, Kingdom Come: Deliverance (which actually draws on some of the medieval history described above), and Attentat 1942 (about the German occupation and the assassination of Heydrich — it hasn't been done to death only in films).

Music in the Czech Republic is infinite. The saying "Every Czech is a musician" appears to be true. This is in part thanks to a unique system of local art schools that offer far more substantial education in the arts than after-school leisure activities in other countries do; the majority of students in those schools pursue music. There are many classically trained Czech musicians, and even those who go on to produce popular music often have at least some basic classical training.

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The Czech flag

The flag's white and red colours allude to the arms of Bohemia, the dominant region in the nation and home to the national capital of Prague; due to its similarity to the flag of Poland, a blue triangle was added at the hoist side. The flag itself was used in Czechoslovakia and was retained by the Czechs after Slovakia's separation.

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Coat of arms of the Czech Republic

The coat of arms represents the country's three traditional regions (the first and fourth quarters contain a white lion representing Bohemia, the second quarter contains a red and white chequered eagle representing Moravia and the third quarter contains a black eagle representing Silesia).

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The Czech national anthem

Kde domov můj, kde domov můj,

Voda hučí po lučinách,

bory šumí po skalinách,

v sadě skví se jara květ,

zemský ráj to na pohled!

A to je ta krásná země,

země česká domov můj,

země česká domov můj!

—

Where my home is, where my home is,

Water roars across the meadows,

Pinewoods rustle on the rocks,

The orchard is glorious with spring blossom,

Paradise on earth it is to see.

And this is that beautiful land,

The Czech land, my home,

The Czech land, my home!

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Government

• Unitary parliamentary constitutional republic
  • President: Petr Pavel
  • Prime Minister: Petr Fiala

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Miscellaneous

• Capital and largest city: Prague
• Population: 10,707,839
• Area: 78,866 km² (30,450 sq mi) (115th)
• Currency: Czech koruna (Kč) (CZK)
• ISO-3166-1 Code: CZ
• Country calling code: 420
• Highest point: Sněžka (1603 m/5,259 ft) (140th)
• Lowest point: Elbe (115 m/377 ft) (57th)