History

For centuries war and imperial domination have swept through the ancient territories of Bohemia and Moravia. Events in Czech history have had a Europe-wide impact. Two Habsburg councillors were thrown from a window in a Castle in Prague in 1618 (known as the Defenestration of Prague), an act that sparked the Thirty Years War. Hitler’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland (the western borderlands of what was then Czechoslovakia) triggered the final slide towards the Second World War.

The two ‘Golden Ages’ of Czech history were Charles IV’s reign (1346-78), the monarch who founded Prague’s St Vitus Cathedral, built the famous Charles Bridge and established Charles University; and secondly the reign of Rudolf II (1576-1612), who established Prague as the capital of the Habsburg Empire and attracted many great artists, scholars and scientists to his court. Bohemia and Moravia was ruled by the Habsburg dynasty for four centuries.

Czechoslovakia, created after the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, was occupied by the Nazis in 1938 and fell to a communist coup in 1948, when Soviet-style political and economic systems were implemented and Czechoslovakia became a firm Soviet ally.

The ‘Prague Spring’ came when a series of liberalising reforms were introduced by the Dubcek government: censorship was relaxed and political prisoners released. Following the Soviet invasion of 1968, however, Dubcek and his allies were deposed in favour of Gustav Husak, and for the next two decades, Czechoslovakia barely deviated from the Soviet line.

The Velvet Revolution – the bloodless overthrow of the communist regime – finally occurred in 1989. This was followed by the so-called Velvet Divorce of 1993, when Czechoslovakia split into separate Czech and Slovak republics, the former led by playwright and former political prisoner Václav Havel, whose term in office lasted until 2003. The Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004.