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For the first time in the country’s history, Czechia is sending its own team to the ISA World Surfing Games – the sport’s world championships. Six contestants are traveling to the upcoming event, which is set to take place in in El Salvador...

Czech Radio’s youth and alternative station Radio Wave lost its FM frequency not long after its launch. But that didn’t stop the channel finding sustained success online, thanks to clever marketing and pioneering use of podcasts. The Czech...

A radio receiver used by the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk or the microphone into which the very first radio announcer spoke. These are just some of the rare exhibits that are currently on display at the National Technical...

The President of the Republic, Petr Pavel, spoke at the summit of the Council of Europe in Reykjavík, where he supported the establishment of a Register of Damages Caused by Russian Aggression. Its establishment also became the main output of...

The President of the Czech Republic Peter Pavel was received by Her Majesty Queen Margaret II at noon. & His Royal Highness The Crown Prince Frederik at Amalienborg Palace. The President was accompanied by the Minister of Immigration and...

Perhaps the most anticipated event of the 78th Prague Spring takes place on Wednesday night, with rising classical star Klaus Mäkelä making his debut appearance in Czechia, conducting the Czech Philharmonic and viola player Antoine Tamestit...

Ponrepo, the Prague cinema administered by the National Film Archive, will be screening a very special film this Tuesday evening. Arsenal is a revolutionary epic that depicts the January workers uprising in Kyiv in 1918. Directed by the famous...

Lasvit is Czechia’s leading exporter of high-end glass and light installations, producing often stunning creations for luxury hotels, residences and retail outlets around the globe. The company was co-founded in 2007 by Leon Jakimič, who was...

A very special exhibition of the Czechoslovak born painter Nicholas Egon was open today ( 18.11.2023 ) at GALERIE JAKUBSKA – Thunovská 183/18, 118 00 Malá Strana. The exhibition will be open for the public until 1.6 , every day from 11...

One of the first challenges foreign students in Czechia face after arriving in the country is finding accommodation. While most universities offer places in dormitories, many foreign students prefer to stay in private housing. How difficult is...

It was exactly a hundred years ago, on 18 May 1923, that listeners in Czechoslovakia were first able to tune in to regular radio broadcasts. Much has changed since then. Today Czech Radio has ten nationwide stations and fourteen regional...

Bass-baritone Boris Prýgl ranks among the most talented Czech young opera singers. One of the finalists of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, Prýgl has performed at the Slovak National Theatre and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He is now a guest...

When I left my office to watch the couple of hamerkops that were tirelessly carrying material to their already gigantic nest in the aviary under the cliff, Helena Růžičková’s replica from the well-known Czech comic film Sun, Hay and...

The Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in cooperation with the United Nations Office in Prague, National Museum of Agriculture in Prague and Apiculture Museum Radovljica, Slovenia organizes the commemoration of 6th World Bee Day (20 May) which...

Prague City Hall has commissioned a new copy of the Old Town Square astronomical clock calendar that will replace the heavily-criticised version that was created in 2018. The artist who created the copy was lambasted by art historians and...

In Czechia, as well as in most Central and Southern European EU states, still wines are not subject to consumption tax. However, with the ongoing need to balance the budget, government experts have suggested introducing precisely such a tax...

Some of the most beautiful views of the Vltava River are at the river’s turn near Úholičky, an area linked to the rulers of the Přemyslid dynasty – Prince Bořivoj and his wife Ludmila. This trail is ideal for day trip for cyclists and...

The annual international book fair and literary festival Book World Prague got underway on Thursday at the city’s Výstaviště grounds, featuring over 350 exhibitors from 30 countries. I spoke to Radovan Auer, the head of Book World Prague and...

The Czech opera singer and actress Soňa Červená, who gained worldwide fame for her rendition of Carmen in the world’s leading opera houses, has died at the age of 97. Červená started her career in the early 1950s but had to flee the country due...

Located just below Prague’s Vítkov Hill, the Czech Army Museum is one of the places to check out if you are into military history, thinking of honouring Victory Day, or just generally into great exhibitions. It features more than 7,000 exhibits...

Bohumil Pospíšil, a native of Přerov, was once a famous Czechoslovak traveller and adventure. The man, who spent five years on a journey around the world in the 1920s, was known as the Moravian Marco Polo. His estate, including thousands of...

The coronation of King Charles III is taking place at Westminster Abbey on Saturday. Although it has been 13 years since his last visit to Czechia, the former Prince Charles took a huge interest in the country during the 1990s and 2000s...

The organisers of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have announced that Hollywood star Russell Crowe will attend the 57th edition. A previous star guest, Johnny Depp, is set to appear in this year’s trailer. Antipodean movie star...

Prague music lovers can look forward to a treat on Wednesday. The US contemporary classical greats Kronos Quartet are set to celebrate half a century of existence alongside the Czech ambient artists the Havels, who are themselves marking 40...

The Czech University of Life Sciences is a place where an education rooted in science and agriculture is merged with other subjects like economics and business; a place where students from all over the world can get a truly unique and well...

Czechia is second on the crony capitalism index compiled by The Economist, after Russia and just ahead of Malaysia, Singapore and Mexico. According to the paper, the Czech share of crony capitalism wealth is over 15 percent of GDP. I asked...

The Fiala government has unveiled an austerity package aimed at reducing the country’s deepening state deficit and plans for a radical reform of old-age pensions. To understate the gravity of the situation the package titled “Czechia in Good...

The Czech-American community in Chicago will be marking 150 years since the birth of Anton Cermak, a Czech immigrant who became the mayor of Chicago and was assassinated in 1933, after only two years in office. Two such events are planned for...

“200 km straight, then a mild curve to the left, again 200 km straight, right turn and after another 50 km we will stop for the night,” I wrote home with only a little exaggeration when we were heading by cars to the “Golden Steppe” Altyn Dala...

Pilsner Urquell was created in Pilsen in the 1840s and is today the best known Czech beer around the world. Its producers Plzeňský Prazdroj run a fine museum in the West Bohemian city. Now, however, visitors to Prague can also learn a lot about...

Czechia was the place where the last shots of World War II were fired in Europe. The generally accepted narrative is that, with most of the country liberated by the Soviet Red Army, the former Czechoslovakia was inevitably headed for the...

This week marked the 50th birthday of one of Czechia’s best-known violinists. Pavel Šporcl, often recognised for his signature head-scarf, has had a rich career filled with both domestic and international successes. He has performed with...

Russia’s war against Ukraine has had widespread negative impacts outside the country’s borders. Among them is a drop in interest in Russian studies at Czech universities and a gradual loss of academic contacts. More than fourteen months after...

Czech President Petr Pavel arrived in Ukraine early on Friday morning, shortly after Kyiv and other cities were hit by Russian missiles. Accompanied by his Slovak counterpart, Zuzana Čaputová, Mr. Pavel visited the sites of atrocities and...

Archaeologists from the Moravian Museum in Brno have announced a unique discovery. During a survey near the city of Ostrava they discovered a stone with an engraving of a mammoth and a horse, which dates back about 15,000 years ago. According...

Mrs Palermo’s Cottage is a novel by AR Parker, inspired by the Czech borderlands. Vit Pohanka spoke to the author about what brought him to Czechia and what led him to set his latest novel in the town where he bought a house and settled. “The...

As of this week, commuters in some of Prague’s busiest metro stations are seeing photographs of war-stricken Ukrainians sheltering in their own underground. The images were captured by Ukrainian photo journalists and were first displayed in the...

Last year, the non-profit Centre for Civil Liberties was one of three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize – the first time ever that a Nobel Prize has been awarded to a Ukrainian citizen or organisation. Ukrainian human rights lawyer...

A new iRozhlas.cz report has found a sharp rise in the number of single-occupant homes in Czechia, from 32 percent in 2011 to 39 percent a decade later. The jump is attributed to an increase in single people in major cities and more seniors...

The Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský made it clear during his meeting with his American counterpart Antony Blinken in Washington on Tuesday that Czechia is aligned with the US on important issues such as support for Ukraine, mutual defence...

Good Soldier Švejk creator Jaroslav Hašek, who was born on 30 April 1883, is closely associated with the small town of Lipnice nad Sázavou in Moravia.The writer was allegedly brought to Lipnice by the painter Jaroslav Panuška, and the famous...

What was life like in the Gulag camps, how many of these camps were there in the Soviet Union, and how could a person end up in one? These are just some of the questions explored by a new educational project designed for primary and secondary...

Renowned for its technology focussed programs, CVUT gives students with a technical mindset the chance to learn from some of the best professors in the field, while gaining hands-on work experience in practical internships. Walking through the...

It was an unbelievable paradox. During my journey to Cameroon, I received news about the progress of the pangolin female Šiška and at the same time I was daily seeing pangolins in street stalls and on markets or cooked in local restaurants…...

In their hey-day Czechia’s many spas attracted royalty and celebrities from around Europe. To this day many of them have mementos of their famous visitors. The Teplice spa boasts the Beethoven Spa House where music lovers can book their stay in...

The annual Anifilm festival of animated films kicked off in the north Bohemian town of Liberec on Tuesday. Over the next six days, dozens of films, as well as music videos and computer games, will be screened in numerous venues all over the...

Brian Jakubec was born in South Africa and is a successful IT manager at Lenovo. But his life was shaped by events that took place in far-away Czechoslovakia when his father, still in his teens, joined the Bata shoe empire, where he would one...

85 years ago, on April 24, 1938, Konrad Henlein of the Sudeten German Party voiced a list of demands commonly known as the Carlsbad Programme. They opened the way for Hitler’s Third Reich to annex the Sudetenland and rob Czechoslovakia of its...

Czechia’s most important classical event, the Prague Spring International Music Festival, will kick off, as every year, on May 12. But this time out there will be a new director at the helm – 38-year-old Pavel Trojan. Ahead of the 78th edition...

Suicide themed phone calls among seniors rose twofold between the years 2021 and 2022, according to Czechia’s helpline for old age people Linka seniorů. I asked the head of the helpline, Dr Kateřina Bohatá, why this is the case. “Our helpline...

President Petr Pavel has repeatedly said this week that Petr Fiala’s coalition government is poor in communication with the public, echoing a commonly heard assertion. But is the head of state correct on this point? I spoke to political...

Palacký University located in the Moravian city of Olomouc is a multicultural hub for students from countries the world over. Of the university’s 23,000 students, over 4,500 are foreign nationals. Hugo Fonseca, from Colombia studies...

Czechia’s king of castles, Karlštejn, ceremonially opened new spaces for visitors this Friday after a major CZK 164 million reconstruction. They are the result of three years of work, which included the reconstruction of the imperial residence...

Two months before it kicks off, the organisers of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival have just revealed the first details of this year’s programme, including a retrospective of Japanese director Yasuzo Masamura and a restored version...

Sit-ups, push-ups, long jump and beep test run — these athletic disciplines were used by the Czech School Inspectorate to measure the physical fitness of schoolchildren across the country. Compared to the same tests carried out 30 years ago...

The European Space Agency (ESA) is looking for ways by which its future spaceships and probes could use nuclear-powered engines in order to travel across the extreme distances of outer space. Scientists at the Czech Technical University in...

Sloths, slugs, and starfish – those are some of the unlikely patterns that young textile designer Anna Šebestová draws as the basis for the prints on her clothes and accessories, which she markets and sells under her brand annanemone. Her bold...

The film festival in Cannes has revealed its La Cinef school film selection and two films from students at Prague’s FAMU film school have made the cut. The 2019 student Oscar winner Daria Kashcheeva will be competing with her master’s thesis...

The Czech cabinet recently approved drug policies that include introducing a strictly regulated cannabis market. The details of the plan, which its architects say will deliver major tax revenues, are still being fine-tuned – but there already...

For many years I had a wish, which I rather did not want to tell anybody about. It seemed so immodest and unrealistic to me. The wish was to get pangolins to our zoo, and also to live to see their baby and watch it how rides on its mother’s...

The small town of Vysoké Mýto, in north-east Bohemia, has been named Czech Historical Town of the year for 2022. The award, which comes with a one-million-crown cheque, honours those towns and cities that have excelled in preserving and...

Czech scientists are collaborating on an international project, SMELLODI, which aims to digitise human scent. At the moment it is not yet possible to record a smell, send it halfway around the world and then regenerate it, but SMELLODI is...

President Petr Pavel and the First Lady received a group of Romany high school and university students at Prague Castle on Thursday. In an unprecedented gesture of support for young members of the Roma minority, he encouraged them to follow...

Ploština was a small settlement in the Zlín region of Moravia. On April 19, 1945, close to the end of World War II, it was set on fire and many of its inhabitants were massacred by the Nazis for having supported the anti-Nazi resistance. A new...

Founded just a year after the birth of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Masaryk University bears the name of the country’s esteemed co-founder and its first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Over a century later, the university has established itself...

Harry Macourek, who would have turned 100 this month, was active in various musical genres and styles, scoring pop hits as well as working in the jazz, film score, classical and other fields. He was born Karel Macourek on 11 April 1923 in...

Kotěra was an internationally-recognised practitioner of modern architecture, straddling the boundaries between contemporary art nouveau and modern functionalism. He left an indelible mark on many towns and cities across Czechia. Born in Brno...

Russian journalist and politician Vladimir Kara-Murza received a 25-year jail term on Monday on charges linked to his criticism of the war in Ukraine. It is the longest sentence Russia has handed down to an opposition figure since it launched...

A portrait of a Jewish woman called Anna Wotzilkova, who was born in South Moravia and died in the Holocaust, has been donated to the newly planned Mehrin Moravian Jewish Museum by her descendants, who now live in the United States. The...

Roadside hotels, run-down gas stations and snack stands, second hand bookstores but also vast forests, volcanoes and indie rock music. That is the Pacific Northwest seen through the eyes of Czech illustrator Jindřich Janíček in his latest book...

Vojtěch Hynais is one of the lesser-known Czech artists, at least abroad. But recently a painting of his aroused the interest of the world-famous Pompidou Centre in Paris. The Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava isn’t used to international...

Czechia is sitting on the proverbial “roof” of Europe. All the rivers and streams flow out of the country, none into it. Thus, Czechs are literally losing the ground under their feet because erosion takes away tens of millions of...

On average, every Czech throws away roughly 70 kilograms of food a year. In an effort to get them to stop, economists have now calculated just how much money they are throwing away. Food banks are close to empty and surveys suggest that many...

For 85 years, a monument in Orlová to the fallen Czech soldiers of the 1919 Polish–Czechoslovak War has been a plain list of names on slabs of stone. But it used to be dominated by a huge statue of a Silesian eagle with soldiers at its feet...

‘Giving birth in Brno’, ‘Five easy tips for passing the A2 Czech test’, and ‘How to leave your lover but stay in the Czech Republic’ – those are some of the kinds of workshops you can expect at the Brno Expat Fair on Saturday 22 April, along...

Thirteen films, which found their way to us from the Austrian Film Museum, provided us with a great deal of information about the look and functioning of Prague Zoo in the 1930s. Even more exciting is the discovery that there probably were – or...

Czech military chiefs have moved to quell public alarm sparked by the fact civilian doctors will take part in an exercise call-up drive next month. Top brass say the conscription readiness test is in fact a routine matter. May 18 will see the...

The Czech and Slovak Leaders Magazine is wishing you Happy Thai New Year. In our summer edition (coming out June 2023), we will have an article about Thai Holiday. Attached are a few pictures from one of the most beautiful countries in the...

Abhejali Bernardová is only the tenth person in the world, and the first from a landlocked country to complete the so-called Oceans Seven, a marathon swimming challenge consisting of seven open water channel swims, including the English Channel...

While delicious, Czech food is heavily reliant on meat and animal products. But as society gains more and more awareness about the health and environmental impacts, more support for restaurants purveying locally sourced or vegetarian options is...

For 85 years, a monument in Orlová to the fallen Czech soldiers of the 1919 Polish–Czechoslovak War has been a plain list of names on slabs of stone. But it used to be dominated by a huge statue of a Silesian eagle with soldiers at its feet...

A recently published Time Out survey placed Prague second in the world, behind Berlin, when it comes to how convenient locals find its public transport system. But in reality how good are the city’s tram, underground and bus services? I jumped...

The “U Pinkasů” pub, founded by Jakub Pinkas in 1843, was the first Prague pub to serve the bottom-fermented lager Pilsner Urquell on tap. It has remained one of the city’s most popular establishments throughout its more than 180 years of...

Passion plays, in which people dramatically re-enact the trial, suffering and death of Jesus Christ at Easter, have a rich tradition in the South Bohemian town of Hořice na Šumave. The settlement was once the site of some of the largest passion...

In today’s Easter Sunday music program we’ll be listening to an excerpt from the only Italian oratorio by František Xaver Richter, an 18th century Czech composer, musician and teacher, and one of the main representatives of the so-called...

One of the foremost opponents of the former Czechoslovak communist regime, Dana Němcová, passed away early on Tuesday morning at the age of 89. Despite years of persecution by the secret police, she never let up in her quest for freedom. Dana...

Czechia has a vast number of cathedrals, churches and chapels from centuries past and it is only rarely that new houses of prayer are built. One such endeavor is close to completion. The small Moravian village of Nesvačilka, which lacked a...

Art can be expensive, but three expat artists who go by the pseudonyms Vinny Bonger, Big Kill, and Kilo Blimp, are partnering with local Prague businesses to make art more accessible for the city’s residents. The founders of the Fruit Juice...

The government has nodded to the planned closure of 300 post offices around the country. The state-owned company Czech Post is in the red, due to a marked drop in demand for its services, but critics argue that the state must continue to meet...

Czech military chiefs have moved to quell public alarm sparked by the fact civilian doctors will take part in an exercise call-up drive next month. Top brass say the conscription readiness test is in fact a routine matter. May 18 will see the...

Czechia is one of the last countries in the European Union which still lacks a Children’s Ombudsman. The respective amendment to the law is currently being finalized and the post should be established early next year. Children’s rights...

Established in 1348 by Emperor Charles IV, Charles University is the oldest university in Central and Eastern Europe. The university enjoys international prestige and 20 percent of its students are from abroad. The year was 1348, the monarch on...

Prague is currently home to one of Europe’s hottest real-estate markets. Real estate prices have soared, subsequently triggering higher rent prices for those who can no longer afford house ownership. An exhibition in the Centre for Architecture...

It was a bit of a provocation from me. I let people vote on Twitter on whether to release nephilas in the jungle in our new gorilla house – The Dja Reserve. What an idea! Although the voting ended in a tie, otherwise reasonable people were...

There have been a number of reports of wolf sightings in the Krkonoše Mountains over the past few weeks, either in small packs or lone individuals. As the wolf population has steadily grown and become more settled there since they first began...

Czechia’s main tourist season starts on April 1, with the country’s myriad castles and chateaux opening their doors to visitors. The National Heritage Institute which manages around 1,000 sites of cultural and historical interest in the Czech...

Seventy years ago, on 2 April 1953, the first Praga V3S multi-purpose, all-terrain truck rolled off the production line in Prague’s Vysočany. The military vehicle was one of Czechoslovakia’s best-known postwar products. The Praga V3S was...

Boston Bruins forward David Pastrňák scored a milestone hat-trick in the team’s 4:3 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins at the weekend. With a total of 56 goals and 47 assists Pastrňák thus became only the second Czech ice hockey player after...

A new exhibition marking 200 years since the birth of Josef Mánes, one of the pioneers of modern Czech art, is currently underway at Prague’s National Gallery. The retrospective, entitled Josef Mánes: Man – Artist – Legend, features more than...