Czechia

1 A glossary, assembled from a great distance

Jan Hus

Reformer, fifteenth century. The Hussites are perennial history heroes of mine, in that special way that long-dead people can be, where everything they did right was awesome and everything they did wrong was just them being of their time. Jan Hus got the project of redoing Christianity going about a hundred years before Luther; was rewarded for it by being duplicitously burned at the stake at Constance in 1415. The Hussite Wars that followed managed the impressive feat of inventing a folk-Protestant peasant army that beat back several Holy Roman crusades using armoured war-wagons and early handguns. The Protestant Reformation, ahead of its time, was a Czech thing. If they had waited for the printing press as well as handguns, they might be better known to Anglophones.

Karel IV

The Holy Roman Emperor we (Anglophones) call Charles IV. Made Prague the imperial capital in the fourteenth century, founded the university (1348) that still bears his name, commissioned the bridge, the new town, the cathedral.

Charles University

Founded by Karel IV in 1348 as the first university in central Europe, and possessed of a bonkers institutional biography ever since. I confess I did actually look this up when I was applying to work there, but that was in 2025, so I’ll put it on this page as received knowledge.

Originally the four student “nations” (Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon, Polish) each had one vote in university affairs. In 1409 Wenceslaus IV decreed that the Bohemian nation should have three votes and the rest one between them; the German masters and students promptly walked out and founded the University of Leipzig, which is also still going. Jan Hus had been rector shortly before he was burned in 1415, after which the Hussites took over and the theology faculty was effectively closed for the next two centuries.

After the Habsburgs won the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Jesuits were handed the keys; in 1654 they merged the Carolinum with the Jesuit Clementinum to form the Charles-Ferdinand University, and the place was Catholicised by force.

In 1882 the institution was split outright into a Czech-language university and a German-language university, both called Charles-Ferdinand, sharing some libraries and very little else. In 1939 the Nazis closed the Czech university and sent over a thousand of its students to concentration camps; in 1945 the German half was abolished in turn. The Communists purged the survivors in 1948. The students of Charles University were on the front line of 1989.

Language of instruction across seven hundred years runs, more or less: Latin, Latin (Hussite), Latin (Jesuit), German, Czech-and-German-in-parallel, Reich-German, Czech. The medieval-university brand has not been done many favours, but it has survived.

Various Wenceslases

Mostly as an English speaker I know Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia (907–935): the “Good King” of the Christmas carol, who was strictly a duke not a king (I did have to look that up) and whose hagiography is partly about being knifed by his brother. Then a confusing line-up of Kings Wenceslas (I to IV), all of whom had a difficult time of it. The largest square in Prague is named for them, more or less collectively. As patron-saint material goes, deeply pious bloke who got murdered by family appears to be on theme.

Defenestration

Throwing political opponents out of windows — the Czech contribution to constitutional procedure. The First Defenestration of Prague (1419) launched the Hussite Wars; the Second Defenestration (1618) launched the Thirty Years’ War. There is occasionally a middle defenestration, but this is not canon. The foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell out of a window in 1948 in a manner that was officially suicide and unofficially a third-or-fourth defenestration. I for one think it speaks to a strong progressive streak, that there was such a ready supply of tall buildings to throw people from at a time when the average peasant lived in a hovel in the dirt.

Sudetenland

The German-speaking border regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Most Anglophones (me included) know the word from WWII history class as the bit Hitler announced in 1938 he would invade in order to “protect” the Germans living there, which Britain and France then let him have at Munich, after which he promptly invaded the rest of the country anyway. What WWII history class did not tell me is what happened next: in 1945–1946 Czechoslovakia expelled around three million ethnic Germans from these same regions under the Beneš decrees, in one of the largest forced population transfers in European history. The Sudetenland was depopulated, partially resettled by Czechs and Slovaks, and the German-Bohemian and German-Moravian cultures, in place since the medieval Ostsiedlung, simply ended. One of those little weirdnesses, like South Tyrol, that I didn’t have in my mental map.

Milan Kundera

Novelist. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the famous one that I am vaguely annoyed how much I like. Defected to France in the 1970s, was stripped of citizenship by the Communist government, declined to come back after 1989, eventually wrote in French, fell out with the Czech literary scene, and got accused of having informed on a fellow citizen as a young man in 1950.

Václav Havel

Playwright, dissident, jailed, then president — first of Czechoslovakia, then of the new Czech Republic after the country split with Slovakia in 1993 (the “Velvet Divorce”, which is, as separations go, almost suspiciously polite). The model intellectual-as-statesman that the post-Soviet Eastern European liberal moment offered up before that moment ended.

Václav Smil

Polymath of energy, materials, agriculture. Czech-born, emigrated to Canada (Manitoba) and writes from there. Bill Gates says he reads everything Smil writes; given Smil’s output, this is a serious commitment. I have complicated feelings about Smil, whose books were a major part of my undergraduate studies but I did not at the time feel really nailed the human dimension of energy transition. Enough time has passed that I cannot recall why.

Viktor Koženy

“The Pirate of Prague”. Made off with several hundred million dollars of Czech voucher-privatization money in the 1990s, had disastrous adventures in Aspen and Azerbaijan, fled to the Bahamas, has since been wanted in several jurisdictions for variations on fraud. The other end of the post-1989 spectrum from Havel: every transition gets one of each.

Karel Čapek

Playwright and journalist. R.U.R. (1920) introduced the word robot to the world, and War with the Newts (1936) is on my to-read list as one of the better satires-with-amphibians ever written.¹

Franz Kafka

A German-speaking Jewish insurance clerk in Prague who happened also to be the writer who tells us how it feels to live inside a bureaucratic empire that has lost the thread. Published almost nothing in his lifetime; asked his executor to burn the manuscripts; the executor, Max Brod, did not. We are allowed to thank him.

Jan Švankmajer

Surrealist animator. The 1988 Alice (Něco z Alenky) is the version of Alice in Wonderland that stays with me years afterwards: tactile, dreadful, made of dust and meat. There is a tradition of Czech stop-motion that runs deep and dark. I still send people animated GIFs grabbed from this nightmare.

Karel Zeman

The other one. “The Czech Méliès” — live-action and animation hybrid films, particularly the Jules Verne adaptations.

Antonín Dvořák

Composer, nineteenth century. We played New World Symphony (1893) in my family home when I was a child. He wrote other music, but I do not know what, so I looked him up. I learned he spent three years running the National Conservatory of Music in New York, during which he told the Americans they should build a national music on Black spirituals and Native American melodies; this turned out to be unwelcome advice that the country eventually took.

Robots

From robota — drudgery, forced labour. Coined as a piece of fiction by Karel Čapek in 1920: one of the more durable contributions any play has made to industrial vocabulary. Robots are, by definition, things that do the work we do not want to do.

Pilsner

The pale lager style invented in Plzeň in 1842, when a Bavarian brewer named Josef Groll got the local brewery to combine bottom-fermenting yeast, very pale Moravian malt, and the local soft water. The result was a beer so popular it took over the world: every lager in a green or clear bottle anywhere is a descendant. Pilsner Urquell still exists; opinions on whether it has held up vary. I do not drink though, so I do not care either way.

Mendel’s pea garden

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar at the abbey in Brno, spent the 1850s and 1860s growing tens of thousands of pea plants and counting their offspring’s traits. He published a paper that was ignored for thirty years and then, around 1900, became the foundation of genetics. Except it was falsified (Fisher 1936), maybe (Ellis et al. 2019) The mathematics of inheritance was figured out, more or less correctly, in a monastery vegetable patch.

JetBrains

Developer-tools company originally headquartered in Prague since 2000. Makes IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and the rest of the IDE bestiary; created Kotlin, which Google eventually decided was the right way to write Android apps. I just looked them up and they are now domiciled in the Netherlands, not sure if this still counts.

2 Incoming

• TODO: actually go to Prague.
• TODO: get corrected on all of the above by someone who lives there.

3 References