Saints Cyril and Methodius, often revered as the Apostles to the Slavs, are celebrated each year on the 5th of July. This day is also a public holiday in both Czechia and Slovakia.

Jiří Mádl's new film Vlny (Waves) premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Monday night to a several-minute standing ovation. The film, set against the backdrop of the Prague Spring and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, tells the story of a group of journalists from Czechoslovak Radio’s foreign service section who…

Archaeologists from the Museum in Roudnice nad Labem have announced a rare discovery. While surveying a site in the small town of Budyně nad Ohří they came across a number of bronze artefacts, including pieces of jewellery, dating back over 3500 years.

A newly restored Jawa 750, which appeared at the start of the legendary 1930s race Thousand Miles of Czechoslovakia, was recently unveiled at the National Technical Museum in Prague. This Thursday, the fiery red sports car will take part in the race again, 90 years after its first appearance.

Czechs are paying tribute to the photographer Bohumil Dobrovolský, who died on Wednesday at the age of 89. He is best known for his photographs documenting the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day, otherwise known as "Operation Overlord," will remember the Allied soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy on 6 June, 1944. Czech President Petr Pavel will attend, along with 25 other world leaders, 43,000 officers, and more than a million visitors.

Have you ever wondered what a Baroque pharmacy looked like? The answer lies in a monastery called Zlatá Koruna, in southern Bohemia, which recently re-created such a pharmacy from authentic items dating back to the 18th century.

A new exhibition highlighting the Celtic history of South Bohemia is currently underway in the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice. It presents the latest archaeological findings, but also sheds light on the everyday life of people living in the region during the Iron Age.

If you’ve taken the metro to Prague’s Anděl station, you may have noticed a bronze sculpture that reads ‘Moskva-Praha’. Constructed in 1985, it was meant to symbolize friendship between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. After the fall of the regime, it remained, stirring debate amongst the public. Recently, Prague City Hall decided to add a plaq…

Ferdinand Porsche was a Liberec-born genius engineer, who designed the first-ever hybrid car. He also contributed to the development of Volkswagen Beetle, which remained in production for 65 years.

Thursday marks exactly 50 years since the opening of the first section of the Prague metro, running between Kačerov and Florenc on the C line. Today there are 61 stations and three lines. But did you know that there is also a secret metro station, known as Klárov? Classified as confidential, it was one of the best-kept secrets of the Communist era.…

One of the final two Czechoslovak RAF veterans still alive today celebrated his 100th birthday on Thursday. Jiří Pavel Kafka, also one of the “Winton children”, marked his centenary in the hangar of Prague’s Kbely military airport in the company of family and army representatives.

In today's episode of our series In Franz Kafka’s Footsteps we are back in Prague to visit places where the famous writer lived, worked and wrote, and also where he spent his free time.

Roma representatives, top officials and cultural figures attended the opening of a memorial to Romany and Sinti victims of the Holocaust in Lety, south Bohemia on Tuesday. Due to communist neglect, the site of a former concentration camp originally served as a pig farm and it took close to three decades for the state to buy out the property and ere…

A new monument honouring the courage of those who fought in the May 1945 Prague Uprising has been selected in a public competition and will be erected in the Bubeneč district. It will replace a statue of the Soviet Army commander Ivan Konev, which was removed in 2020.

The name Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti might not mean very much to you – even many Czechs have not heard of her. But the woman with the exotic-sounding name was decidedly one of the most fascinating figures of the First Republic and had an incredible life story that deserves to be more widely known. Not only a female surgeon at a time when this was extr…

Thursday is the 55th anniversary of a famous moment in the country’s modern history. On March 28, 1969 a Czechoslovak ice hockey win over the USSR – less than a year after the Soviet invasion – sparked celebrations that turned into riots in Prague and other parts of the country.

The discovery of a 7,000-year-old well in Czechia’s Pardubice region six years ago, thought to be the oldest surviving man-made wooden object in the world, thrilled excavators. Now experimental archaeologists from the Všestary Prehistoric Archaeology Park near Hradec Králové are making a copy of the well, using prehistoric tools and methods, that w…

The new book Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 takes a fresh look at radio broadcasting in, and to, the country between the end of the war and the immediate aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion. How “Communist” were staff at Czechoslovak Radio? How did reporters respond to the new freedoms that came with the Prague Spring? A…

The new Škoda 1000 MB was unveiled in Mladá Boleslav on March 21, 1964. Designed to be an inexpensive family car, it was Czechoslovakia’s answer to the Ford Model T: the first mass-affordable automobile, making car travel available to more people in the country than ever before.

The oldest known human settlement in Europe lies in western Ukraine. New findings by an international team of scientists have confirmed the oldest stone tools on the site date roughly 1.4 million years ago. The study , published in Nature, proves that the “first Europeans” entered the continent from the east. I discussed the findings with Roman Gar…

This month a monument was unveiled in Liberec entitled To Children Who Didn’t Get to Know the World. The memorial is specifically to Roma children who were born and died in WWII camps – and follows years of research by historian Ivan Rous and others.

Archaeologists from the central Moravian city of Přerov have announced a unique discovery. While carrying out excavations in the centre of the town, they came across an ice skate made of animal bone dating back some 1,000 years.

The Brady family, originally from Nové Město na Moravě, has an inspiring story that spans generations and continents. George Brady, immigrated to Toronto, Canada after surviving Auschwitz and fleeing communism. Having promised himself as a prisoner that he would never turn his back on people in need if he survived the war, he assisted expats and he…

She was the daughter of the founding father of Czechoslovakia, took on the role of First Lady after her mother died, and headed the Czechoslovak Red Cross for 20 years during the First Republic. And yet, surprisingly, Alice Masaryk has never had a Czech street named after her – until now.

Czech architect Juraj Lasovský has come up with a unique project reviving old military bunkers built in Czechoslovakia before the Second World War. His aim is to turn the concrete structures into liveable spaces that can be used for various purposes.

World War II, Cold War borders and more recently Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine – the “Czech hedgehog” has been common to all of them. The anti-tank obstacle made of metal beams is, as the name suggests, a Czech invention and dates back to the 1930s, when it was intended for border protection.

On Friday evening the Nicholas Winton biopic One Life gets its Czech premiere in Prague, where it is partly set. The film climaxes with Winton’s 1988 appearance on Esther Rantzen’s TV show That’s Life, when the discovery of how the Englishman saved 669 mostly Jewish children from the Holocaust allowed many of those survivors to connect with him for…

The names of three Czechoslovak ice hockey players will be used to mark the streets in a new housing development in Prague by real estate company Penta. The players, who were Olympic medal winners in the 1940’s in Czechoslovakia, were jailed without trial by the communist party in 1950.

Palach Week, which occurred 10 months before protests that toppled Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime, began 35 years ago, on January 15, 1989. The demonstrations were brutally suppressed – but still signaled a growing willingness to reject the regime.

A 7,000-year-old well found in Czechia’s Pardubice region six years ago will soon be on display as part of an archaeological exhibition at the Museum of East Bohemia. The wooden well, which has been in the care of restorers for the last few years, is, according to analyses, the oldest wooden man-made object in the world.…

Czech and Slovak archaeologists have announced a major discovery. An expedition to the Guatemalan jungle, which took place last summer, discovered the remains of a Mayan city, which is almost three thousand years old. I discussed the discovery, which could shed more light on the rise and fall of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with one of …

The L-610 was the largest transport aircraft constructed in Czechoslovakia. Due to a combination of developmental, economic and political factors, it never went into serial production. Today the plane is a rare museum piece.

One Life, a biopic that shows how Sir Nicholas Winton saved 669 mainly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, recently received its UK premiere. Meanwhile, some of the now elderly people that the Englishman rescued feature in a new photography exhibition in London. I discussed it, and the movie, with Sir Nicholas’s grandson…

Czech archaeologists have announced a unique discovery. A team of experts from Brno have unearthed a bronze belt buckle from the early Middle Ages, depicting a snake devouring a frog-like creature. The find could shed more light on people’s spiritual life in the pre-Christian era, of which we know very little.…

How should you teach children about the tumultuous events of 1989 in a way that conveys the enormous gravity of what happened without being too heavy-handed? And how much do kids nowadays actually know about it? Is it even still relevant? To find out, I spoke to some Czech teenagers and teachers about their thoughts, knowledge and experiences surro…

A dignified memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia is finally nearing completion. On Monday survivors, activists and politicians symbolically planted the first trees in a forest in Lety that will symbolize the lost Roma community. The memorial will open to the public on February 3, 2024.…

The 1989 Velvet Revolution, ending over four decades of Communist one-party rule, spelled seismic change for Czech society. Words like restitution and lustration became common parlance in the early 1990s, as the transition to democracy was accompanied by a legal reckoning with the past. But how effectively was justice served in that period? How suc…

A new documentary explores the story of the Mašín brothers group, three members of which shot their way from Communist Czechoslovakia to the West in 1953. Escape to Berlin, featuring extensive interviews with the now elderly Josef Mašín and his sister Zdena, is written and directed by Jan Novák. I spoke to him ahead of next week’s cinema release of…

Czech Egyptologists have made another important discovery in Abusir – the roughly 2,500-year-old tomb of a young royal scribe. Together with other recent archaeological finds in the area, this newly discovered tomb gives researchers a better understanding of the changes that took place in Egypt and the surrounding area in the 5th and 6th centuries …

A team of enthusiasts from Oslavany near Brno are building a replica of a Viking boat from the 12th century. The eight-metre boat is called Gislinge, after the Danish village where the original was discovered, and should be launched in the spring of next year.

Hundreds of thousands of Czechs were among the many millions of people, many from Eastern Europe, used by the Nazis as forced labour during World War II. Among them was trained mechanic Miroslav Jeřábek. Many decades later, his UK-born great-grandson Mirek Gosney has just made a documentary exploring Germany’s forced labour programme, Building Hitl…

The annual event Drumming for Bubny, commemorating the victims of the first Nazi transport of Jews from Prague on October 16, 1941, will take place at the site of the Bubny railway station on Monday evening. Organized by the Memorial of Silence, the drumming is a symbolic protest against public indifference to violence. To learn more about the even…

Academic articles are usually only read by a vanishingly small number of people, but a paper published in mid-May of this year in the journal Heritage Science has already become one of the world's most-read scientific papers, with 36,000 views. It is the work of an international team of scientists, including some Czechs, who deciphered a text hidde…

Czech Egyptologists working between the pyramid fields of Abusir and Saqqara have announced a major discovery. They have located and explored a lost tomb that belonged to an ancient Egyptian official called Ptahshepses, who lived during the 24th and 25th centuries BC.

Czech scientists, together with a small experimental brewer, have come up with the country’s first “Celtic beer”. Called TauriALE, the recreation of the ancient alcoholic beverage was achieved using laboratory analysis of pollen from an early Celtic burial site in Moravia.

The case of Leopold Hilsner, a Jewish vagrant convicted in 1899 for the ritual murder of a Christian girl, may be on the path to re-examination. It is the first time since 1900 that a review of the case has been ordered in an effort to reopen Hilsner’s infamous trial, which sparked a huge wave of anti-Semitism at the time.…

The Venus of Petřkovice, a statuette from the late Stone Age period believed to be 23,000 years old is currently being exhibited at the site where it was first discovered in the Ostrava district of Petřkovice 70 years ago. The unique item, which is the only “slender Venus” ever discovered in Europe, will be on display until Sunday.…

August 21 marks the 55th anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops. The crushing of the Prague Spring dashed people’s hopes of democracy and ushered in a long period of political and moral decline. More than 130 people died during the invasion and thousands fled the country in the years that followed.…

As Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on the night from 20 to 21 August 1968, Czechoslovak Radio played an important role in keeping people informed of what was happening. The radio building was an immediate focus for the invaders, but remarkably, during the days that followed, radio journalists and engineers managed to carry on broadcasting, …