Czech Republic
,
landlocked country
located in central
Europe
. It
comprises
the historical
provinces
of
Bohemia
and
Moravia
along with the southern tip of
Silesia
, collectively often called the Czech Lands. In 2016 the
country
adopted the name “Czechia” as a shortened, informal name for the Czech Republic.
Despite its landlocked location, there were brief periods in the
Middle Ages
during which Bohemia had access to the
Baltic
and
Adriatic
seacoasts?which no doubt was on
William Shakespeare
’s mind when he set much of his play
The Winter’s Tale
there. A region of rolling hills and
mountains
, Bohemia is dominated by the national capital,
Prague
. Set on the
Vltava River
, this picturesque city of
bridges
and spires is the
unique
work of generations of artists brought in by the rulers of Bohemia. Perhaps only the French are as focused on their capital,
Paris
, as the Czechs are on theirs; of the two, Prague has a more magical quality for many. Called “the handsomest city of Europe” since the 18th century, it has intoxicated writers, poets, and musicians alike. While Prague was the birthplace of the writer
Franz Kafka
and the poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
,
Brno
, Moravia’s largest city, was the site of
Gregor Mendel
’s groundbreaking genetic experiments in the 19th century and the birthplace of contemporary novelist
Milan Kundera
. Moravians are as proud of their vineyards and wine as Bohemians are of their breweries and the Pilsner
beer
that originated in the town of
Plze?
(Pilsen), which is also noted as the site of the ?koda Works?a heavy industrial complex that originated with the Habsburg monarchy.
Moravia
was equally endowed with skilled
labour
, which helped make Brno into one of the leading industrial towns in textiles and engineering during the 19th century and
Ostrava
, in the north, into a major coal-mining region, thanks to the vast
fossil fuel
deposits stretching over from
Silesia
.
History is always close at hand in the Czech Republic, where stunning
castles
such as Karl?tejn (former keep of the royal crown of St. Wenceslas) and manor houses dot the landscape and
medieval
town centres abound. During its 1,000-year history, the country has changed shape and reshuffled its
population
. As the kingdom of Bohemia, it reached its zenith of wealth and power during the 13th and 14th centuries. Through a multitude of cultural, economic,
ecclesiastical
, and dynastic links, Bohemian kings became directly involved in the affairs of the German rulers of the
Holy Roman Empire
and opened the country to German colonization, which brought prosperity through silver mining and rapid urbanization. Prague, with the oldest university north of the
Alps
(
Charles University
, 1348), functioned as a royal and imperial capital. However, German colonization, which soon accounted for one-third of the total population and disadvantaged the majority Czechs, brought the seeds of discontent, resulting in an ugly, insolvable conflict in the 20th century. In the early 15th century Bohemia witnessed the Hussite revolution, a pre-
Reformation
movement named for
Jan Hus
, a follower of the English theologian and reformer
John Wycliffe
. Religious antagonism prevailed over ethnic tensions when Czechs and Germans jointly led the Protestant uprising that started the
Thirty Years’ War
(1618?48) against the Catholic
Habsburgs
, the Austro-German
dynasty
that ruled Bohemia from 1526 to 1918. After the Habsburg victory, the
German language
replaced Czech for almost two centuries?until the Czechs experienced an extraordinary linguistic and cultural revival that coincided with the revolutions of 1848 and the spread of
industrialization
. In historian
Franti?ek Palacky
and composers such as
Bed?ich Smetana
and
Antonin Dvo?ak
, Czech
nationalism
found its ideal spokesmen.
The collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire
at the end of
World War I
brought the Czechs and Slovaks together for the first time as “Czechoslovaks.” The Czechs became the ruling
ethnic group
in
Czechoslovakia
, a new
state
in which Germans and Hungarians lived as unwilling citizens, bound to become disloyal minorities bent on undermining the democratic constitution engendered by the country’s founders,
Toma? G. Masaryk
and
Edvard Bene?
. Many among this German population turned into
Nazi
sympathizers with the ascent to power of
Adolf Hitler
in
Germany
, whose design on the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia was appeased by
England
and
France
in the
Munich Agreement
of September 1938.
Emasculated
, Czechoslovakia
succumbed
to direct German invasion six months later. Bohemia and Moravia became a protectorate of the “Greater German Empire,” while Slovakia?whose Hungarian districts were ceded to Hungary?was induced by Hitler to proclaim its independence.
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After six years of brutal Nazi occupation (with its
legacy
of the
Holocaust
and the postwar mass expulsion of some three million Bohemian and Slovak [Carpathian] Germans), Czechoslovakia was reconstituted, this time without Ruthenia (Transcarpathian Ukraine), which was annexed by the
Soviet Union
. A communist coup in February 1948 sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate as a member of the
Soviet bloc
for the entire
Cold War
?though briefly, in the
Prague Spring
of 1968, a reform movement took over, only to be crushed by Soviet military invasion in August of that year. Still, that experience of freedom produced an underground dissident movement, later called Charter 77, whose leader, playwright
Vaclav Havel
, was
propelled
from prison to the royal castle, becoming the first president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia with the fall of the
Berlin Wall
in 1989.
The last modification of the modern Czech nation-state was inaugurated on January 1, 1993, when the union with
Slovakia
was dissolved. As the Czech Republic, the new country joined the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) in 1999 and the
European Union
(EU) in 2004.
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