Czech RepublicČesko

Slavic tribes settled the Bohemian basin in the 6th century. In the 9th century Great Moravia, centred on the Morava river, invited the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, who brought a Slavonic liturgy and an alphabet. The Přemyslid dukes of Bohemia soon turned west instead, to Latin Christianity and the German empire; Duke Wenceslas, killed by his brother around 935, became the country's patron saint.

Under the Přemyslids and then the Luxembourg dynasty, Bohemia became a kingdom and an elector of the Holy Roman Empire. Its silver mines, above all Kutná Hora, made it rich. Charles IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor from 1346, rebuilt Prague as an imperial capital: the New Town, the stone bridge that now carries his name, the first university north of the Alps in 1348, and the Gothic choir of St Vitus Cathedral.

Prague in the 14th century was one of the largest cities in Europe, mixing Czech and German speakers and a large Jewish community in the town that is now Josefov. That mix, and the wealth of the crown, shaped the city plan you walk today: the Old Town on the right bank, the Lesser Town and castle across the river, and Charles's New Town ringed around both.

Jan Hus, a Prague preacher and university rector, attacked church corruption a century before Luther. He was burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. His followers, the Hussites, fought off five crusades with peasant armies and wagon forts, and for two centuries much of Bohemia practised a reformed faith. The first defenestration of Prague, in 1419, started the wars; the second, in 1618, started the Thirty Years' War.

The Protestant Bohemian estates lost to the Habsburgs at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Twenty-seven leaders were executed on Old Town Square, much of the nobility went into exile and their estates passed to Catholic families loyal to Vienna. The Counter-Reformation filled the country with Baroque churches, pilgrimage sites and statues, including most of those on Charles Bridge. German became the language of government and education.

In the 19th century a national revival rebuilt Czech as a written, scholarly language. Josef Jungmann compiled a dictionary, František Palacký wrote a history that cast the Hussites as national heroes, and the National Theatre and National Museum were funded by public collections. Smetana's cycle Má vlast set the landscape to music. Politics followed culture: by 1900 Czechs dominated Prague's council, and German and Czech speakers increasingly lived parallel lives.

Czechoslovakia was declared on 28 October 1918 under Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The interwar republic was a democracy and an industrial power, but three million Germans in the border regions, the Sudetenland, were never reconciled to it. In September 1938 Britain and France agreed at Munich that Hitler could take those regions; in March 1939 the Germans occupied the rest and made it a protectorate.

The occupation destroyed Czech Jewry. Most of Bohemia's Jews were deported through the Terezín ghetto to death camps in the east. After Czech paratroopers killed Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, the Nazis razed the village of Lidice. When the war ended, about three million Germans were expelled from the country, emptying hundreds of border villages that are still thinly settled.

The Communist Party took power in February 1948. Show trials, collectivisation and the nationalisation of everything down to corner shops followed. In 1968 Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring tried to build 'socialism with a human face'; Warsaw Pact tanks ended it in August. In January 1969 the student Jan Palach burned himself to death on Wenceslas Square in protest. The following two decades, called 'normalisation', were grey, conformist and quiet on the surface.

On 17 November 1989 police beat students on Národní třída. Within days hundreds of thousands filled Wenceslas Square, a general strike followed, and by the end of December the dissident playwright Václav Havel was president. The Velvet Revolution was followed by the Velvet Divorce: Czechs and Slovaks separated peacefully on 1 January 1993.

Czechs drink more beer per head than any other nation, and they invented the style most of the world drinks. In 1842 the brewers of Plzeň hired a Bavarian, Josef Groll, who combined soft local water, pale malt and Saaz hops into a clear golden lager: Pilsner. The town of České Budějovice, Budweis in German, gave its name to Budweiser, and the Czech Budvar brewery has fought the American company over the name for more than a century.

The pub (hospoda) is a social institution rather than a bar. Tables are shared, the waiter brings a fresh half-litre as soon as yours is low and marks a line on your slip, and a coaster on top of the glass means stop. Tank beer, delivered unpasteurised to pub cellars, and the ritual of the foam — hladinka, šnyt, mlíko — are points of pride.

Moravia is wine country. The south-eastern slopes around Mikulov, Valtice and Znojmo grow dry whites such as Ryzlink, Grüner Veltliner and the local Pálava, and every village has its row of cellars. Autumn brings burčák, half-fermented new wine sold only for a few weeks.

The food is Central European and heavy: roast pork, duck, goose, sauerkraut, bread and potato dumplings, and cream sauces. Carp is the Christmas dish, kept alive in the bathtub in many homes until the 24th. Lunch menus, priced for workers, are the everyday way to eat; since the 2010s Prague's bistros and bakeries have added a lighter, modern layer.

Prague was spared heavy bombing in both world wars, so its centre is a catalogue of styles: Romanesque rotundas, Gothic churches, Renaissance sgraffito houses, Baroque domes, Art Nouveau cafés and the Municipal House, and a Czech experiment found almost nowhere else, Cubist architecture, with its angular façades and furniture. Functionalist villas followed in the 1920s and 1930s; Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno is on the UNESCO list.

Music is close to a national religion. Smetana and Dvořák wrote national music in the 19th century, Janáček set the rhythms of Moravian speech to opera, and Martinů worked in exile. The Prague Spring festival opens each 12 May with Má vlast. Mozart premiered Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in 1787.

Literature often turned on irony and absurdity: Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk, Kafka writing in German in the Old Town, Čapek inventing the word 'robot', Hrabal's pub-talk novels, Kundera and Havel under and after communism. Puppetry and animation, from marionette theatres to Jan Švankmajer's surreal films, carry the same dark humour.

Czechia is one of the richest and most equal of the post-communist states, with low unemployment and an economy built on car making, engineering and exports to Germany. Škoda, owned by Volkswagen, is the largest company. Prague's wages and prices now approach Western levels; the regions, especially the north-west and Moravian-Silesian coal belt, lag behind.

It is one of the least religious societies in the world: most people give no religion in the census, and churches serve as concert halls as often as parishes. Czechs describe themselves as sceptical, practical and allergic to grand rhetoric, traits visible in the country's political humour.

Politics since 1993 has swung between liberal and populist camps. The billionaire Andrej Babiš and his ANO movement won the October 2025 election and he returned as prime minister — check the current coalition. The country is a firm NATO member and hosts a large Ukrainian community, but it has kept the koruna and debates about adopting the euro rarely get far.