A (very brief) history of the Czech Republic

This story begins not with a conquest or a hero, but with a mass migration.  Between 500 and 900 CE, after the Western Roman empire had collapsed, there were several great migrations -- the Huns moved from Asia into Europe; in Germany, the Franks moved to France, the Lombards went to Italy, while the Angles and Saxons moved to England; the Hungarians came out from Western Russia; the Turks spread across Central Asia; the Slavs came out from modern-day Ukraine; and the Vikings went practically everywhere.

Many of these cultures, such as the Huns, were little more than raiding parties, disrupting life and then disappearing -- or being absorbed -- as quickly as they came. The Slavs, by comparison, were relatively peaceful, often moving into land abandoned by people fleeing the Huns!  They had their own culture and language, but not a written alphabet, and so little is known about them before the 6th century.  They spread out to cover all of central and eastern Europe, including Russia, the Balklans, and parts of central Asia.  Today there are more than 400 million Slavs.

In the 9th century, they started forming their own city-states, including Greater Moravia, which was a vassal state to Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. They adopted Christianity and monks Cyril and Methodius adapted the Greek alphabet to the Slav language, creating the Cyrillic script which is now the basis for all Eastern European languages.

Not long after, Moravia was overrun by Hungary, but Bohemia rose in its place. (One of the dukes of Bohemia was immortalized in the song "Good King Wenceslas" even though he wasn't a king, and the song had no relation to his life whatsoever.)  Things continued quietly until 1346, when Charles IV of Bohemia was elected Holy Roman Emperor, and he made Prague the capital of the empire.

He founded Charles University, the 11th oldest university outside of Italy.  He also founded New Town (Nové Město), rebuilt Prague Castle, began construction of St. Vitus' Cathedral, and established a new bridge (now called Charles Bridge).  Charles' reign was the "golden age" of Prague, even though many of the building projects he begun were not completed until the 19th century!

Unfortunately for his son, in 1415 Czech priest Jon Hus was burned at the stake for protesting against the doctrines of the Catholic Church.  This was over 100 years before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints' Church, sparking the Reformation.  The Hussites, as his followers were called, began a 200-year war with the Catholics, each one throwing the other out of the country (and occasionally out of windows), and then being thrown out in turn.  The Catholics finally won in 1620, evicting all Protestants from the country.

Bohemia was still a vassal state, first to the Holy Roman Empire, then to its successor, the Austrio-Hungarian empire.  After World War One, Czechs and neighboring Slovaks joined forces to become a single, independent nation for the first time in its thousand year history. Unfortunately, that only lasted 20 years.

During the Hussite wars, the Holy Roman Emperors had invited Catholic Germans to settle in the Bohemian and Moravian border regions, which now constituted nearly 20% of the Czech population.  In 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded these areas ("Sudetenland"), be re-united with Germany and all Czech residents expelled.  Hoping to appease Hitler, Italy, France, and Britain signed the Munich Agreement, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously announced, "There will be peace for our time."  A year later, Hitler took the rest of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary took Slovakia.

After World War II, in 1945, Czechoslovakia became an independent state again but, disillusioned with the West and allied with the Soviets (who had told the American troops to wait for two days so the Soviets could be seen as the liberators), the Communist party was elected to power, and one of its first acts was to expel all Germans and confiscate their land.  Three years later, in a coup d'etat, the government suspended elections, creating a dictatorship.

In the early 1960s, the Czechoslovak economy stagnated. The industrial growth rate was the lowest in Eastern Europe and, in 1965, the party introduced free market elements into the economy.  The first secretary carried the reform movement a step further, lifting censorship and setting guidelines for a modern democracy that would guarantee freedom of religion, press, assembly, speech, and travel.  That was too much for the Soviets, and on the night of August 20, 1968, the first secretary was arrested and Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, driving tanks down Wenceslas Square.  The bullet holes in the National Museum are still visible.  The government was forced to sign an agreement allowing Soviet troops to remain, and all reforms were repealed.

A few months later, student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in protest.

In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev was advocating "Perestroika," which in many ways resembled the free market reforms of Czechoslovakia's 1965 plan.  Perhaps as a result, Czech leaders were reluctant to implement the changes, leading to widespread, but peaceful, protests.  On 17 November 1989, the police violently broke up a peaceful demonstration, brutally beating many students. Faced with an overwhelming popular repudiation, the Communist Party collapsed, its leaders resigned, and playwright Václav Havel, who had spent many years alternating between denouncing Communism and being in prison, became the new president. The "velvet revolution" was over in less than six weeks, without a shot being fired.

(Although Václav Havel was not a great politician, he was greatly loved for his steadfast opposition to communism.  When he passed away last week, he was given a state funeral, and in several of my photos you can see the candles placed all over the city by his loyal followers, especially on Wenceslas Square.)

Unfortunately, the past 40 years of Communist rule had heightened ethnic tensions between the Czechs and Slovaks, and on January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia was dissolved and the Czech Republic and Slovakia were founded. It has become known as the "velvet divorce."

Over the past 20 years, the Czech economy has done quite well, with a GDP per capita of 80% of the European Union average. It is one of the most stable and prosperous of the post-Communist states, and was the first former member of the Soviet States to achieve the status of "developed country."  (Russia is still considered a "developing country.")  The country has the highest human development index in Central and Eastern Europe, ranking #27.  (The UK is #28.)  The Czech Republic as a whole generally has a low crime rate, is ranked as the third most peaceful country in Europe, and is the most democratic.  Prague airport is the busiest airport in Central and Eastern Europe. They have completely opened their borders and in 2007 joined the World Trade Organisation. They have yet to adopt the Euro, but may do so in 2013.

The 2011 population is 10.5 million and is one of the least religious populations on the planet, with 70% identifying as atheist, less than 10% as Catholic, and 2.5% as Protestant.  In 1930, there were 118,000 Jews in the Czech Republic. In 1945, there were approximately 4,000.  The number has not increased appreciably in the past 65 years.

Czech has a rich tradition in music (including Antonín Dvořák), literature (including Franz Kafka), and theatre (especially marionettes).  Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was a Czech friar, and Czech scientists created contact lenses and the plastic explosive Semtex, popular with terrorist groups.  A Czech author gave us the word "robot" from the Old Church Slavonic rabota, meaning "servitude."

The Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita in the world. In 1840, a pale lager was developed in the Bohemian city of Plzeň, although in the States it is more popularly known by the nearby town of Budweis, or Budweiser Bier.

(Special thanks to Wikipedia, which is always a source of way too much information.  It took me nearly six hours to distill the history of the Slavs, the Roman empire, the Eastern Orthodox church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian and Austria-Hungary Empire, the Nazis, and the Communists into this "brief" history.  I did learn, however, that the "Rus" in Russia refers to Vikings who helped liberate the Eastern Slavs from the Khazars, a group of Turks who had converted to Judaism!)