How Czech culture was rebuilt around a language

Why the language had to be brought back

Czech is a West Slavic language of the Czech and Slovak group, written in the Latin alphabet, spoken by over twelve million people including second-language speakers, and closely enough related to Slovak that the two are largely mutually intelligible. It is also a language that came close to disappearing as a written medium.

Under Habsburg rule German was the language of administration, education and the educated classes in the Czech lands, and Czech survived mainly as a spoken rural language. The National Revival of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a deliberate project to rebuild it: to codify the grammar, to write a literature and a scholarship in it, and to attach a national identity to it. Almost everything in modern Czech culture is downstream of that effort, and it explains why cultural institutions here carry political weight that equivalents elsewhere do not.

The clearest instance is a building. The National Theatre in Prague opened in 1881, funded largely by public subscription, and its opening was treated as a national achievement rather than as an addition to the entertainment of a city. Czech theatrical tradition was one of the engines of the revival, and the theatre remained a political space for the next century.

What the country built and how it looks

The architectural record runs continuously from the Gothic to the present, which is unusual for a country in the middle of Europe with the twentieth century Czechia had. Peter Parler shaped Gothic Prague and Benedikt Rejt built the late Gothic. The Baroque arrived with the Dientzenhofer family and with Santini, and it is the style that gives most Czech towns their present appearance. Early twentieth-century Prague added Art Nouveau, then Cubist architecture, which existed almost nowhere else, then Functionalism between the wars.

Preservation was largely accidental. The medieval and Baroque town centres survived the twentieth century in part because the communist period had neither the money nor the interest to replace them, and the redevelopment that flattened comparable centres elsewhere in Europe mostly did not happen here. Castles such as Karlštejn, built as the keep of the royal crown, and manor houses are distributed across the country rather than concentrated in one region.

There are 17 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, sixteen of them cultural and one natural. Most lie outside Prague.

How a small country made a large cinema

Czech cinema starts with Jan Kříženecký, filming at the end of the nineteenth century, and acquires an industry with the founding of the Barrandov studios in 1933. Otakar Vávra was the most notable domestic director from the late 1930s onwards, and he also trained a generation through the Prague film school.

The Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s is what the country is known for. Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jiří Menzel made films that were funded by a state system and were quietly hostile to it, and the movement ran up to the Prague Spring of 1968 and stopped with the invasion that ended it. Forman left before the invasion and built a second career in the United States.

Animation is the other strand and it never depended on live action at all. Jiří Trnka worked from the 1940s to the 1960s and is known above all for stop-motion puppet films, which drew on a puppet theatre tradition that was already centuries old. Series such as The Little Mole and Pat & Mat came out of the same workshops and are still shown across Europe.

A newer industry has grown in the same idiom. Czech studios have produced internationally successful video games including Operation Flashpoint, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven and Euro Truck Simulator, from studios such as Bohemia Interactive, SCS Software, Amanita Design and Madfinger Games, and since 2010 there has been a national game award judged at the Anifilm festival.

What Czech writers gave away

The earliest written works from the Kingdom of Bohemia are Latin chronicles and hagiographies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What the country is read for now is much later and mostly comic.

Franz Kafka lived in Prague and wrote in German, his first language, and The Trial and The Castle came out of that city. Jaroslav Hašek's antiwar comedy The Good Soldier Švejk is the most translated Czech book there has been. Karel Čapek published the play R.U.R. in 1920 and introduced the word robot to English and to science fiction with it, which makes a Czech playwright responsible for a noun the following century could not do without.

The pattern continued under communism. Václav Havel, a playwright before he was anything else, wrote The Garden Party in 1963 as an attack on conformism in socialist Czechoslovakia. Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and Bohumil Hrabal are the names that carried Czech prose abroad in the second half of the century, two of them from exile. The Franz Kafka Prize is awarded in the country to this day.

Where the music comes from

The Baroque produced Adam Václav Michna of Otradovice, who lived in Jindřichův Hradec in the seventeenth century and wrote the oldest known Czech Christmas carol, and Jan Dismas Zelenka, who directed the Dresden court chapel in the eighteenth century. Bedřich Smetana, who is generally taken as the most influential Czech composer of the nineteenth century, was influenced in turn by Zelenka, which makes the line from the Baroque to the national school a direct one rather than a reconstruction.

The twentieth century produced a different kind of figure. Karel Gott won the national award for best male singer forty-two times and was one of very few musicians from the eastern bloc permitted to perform in the west during the Cold War, which is why he was known abroad as the golden voice of Prague. That permission was itself a political instrument, and the career it produced is inseparable from the system that granted it.

What people eat and drink

The traditional meal is two courses beginning with soup, and the main course is usually meat with a sauce or gravy and a side of dumplings or potatoes. The dishes most people would name are roast pork with dumplings and cabbage, svíčková na smetaně, Czech goulash, and schnitzel with potato salad. Compotes are still made at home. Mushroom and berry picking in late summer and early autumn is a general pastime rather than a specialist one.

Christmas is the most widely observed holiday and begins with dinner on 24 December, traditionally fried carp with potato salad, though a chicken or pork schnitzel now often replaces it. Easter carries its own set of practices, including elaborately decorated eggs and the pomlázka, a braided willow switch used in a ritual whipping of the legs that outsiders find harder to explain than Czechs do.

Beer is older than the state by a very long way. A brewery is recorded in 993, and the pale lager that most of the world now drinks was created in Plzeň in the nineteenth century, where Pilsner Urquell is still brewed. Bohemian glass, individually mouth-blown and decorated by hand, belongs to the same category of thing: a craft that became an export and then an identity. Both survived the twentieth century because they were profitable enough for a planned economy to keep running, which is the same reason a good deal of Czech craft tradition is continuous where its equivalents elsewhere were broken and later reconstructed.

Why so few people believe anything

Between 75 and 79% of residents report having no religion or faith in surveys, and around 30% describe themselves as convinced atheists. Few societies anywhere report less, and it is not the result of a single policy.

Czechs have been characterised historically as tolerant and even indifferent towards religion, and the indifference has deep roots: a Hussite reformation crushed and then reversed by force in the seventeenth century, a re-Catholicisation imposed by a foreign dynasty, a national revival that built its identity around language rather than faith, and forty years of a state that actively discouraged belief. Each stage removed a reason to identify with a church.

The practical result is a country where the Christmas dinner, the Easter eggs and the carol from the seventeenth century are all kept, and the religion they came from is not. The buildings remain, extremely well maintained, and are visited rather than attended.

How Bohemia and Moravia differ

The state is made up of three historic lands: Bohemia in the west, which is about two thirds of the territory and contains Prague, Moravia in the east, and a small piece of Silesia in the north-east. The distinction carries no administrative weight today, and it remains the first thing many Czechs will tell an outsider about themselves.

Moravians more commonly speak in regional dialect, keep folk traditions in active use rather than in festivals, and drink wine where Bohemia drinks beer, because the south-east has the climate for vineyards and the north-west does not. Moravian folk music, costume and pilgrimage survived the twentieth century better than their Bohemian equivalents, partly because the region was less industrialised and less disrupted.

The differences are audible before they are visible. A Moravian speaking at home does not sound like a Prague speaker, and the further south-east a visitor travels the wider the gap becomes. Czechia: travel works through where to find them on the ground.

What the country plays

Sport occupies a large part of ordinary Czech life, and two games take most of it. Ice hockey and football are the mass sports, played in every town of any size and followed nationally, and the fortunes of the national teams in both are one of the few things that reliably produce a shared public mood in a country that is otherwise sceptical of collective enthusiasm.

Behind them sits an unusually wide spread for a population of eleven million. Floorball and bandy, baseball, basketball, beach volleyball, cricket, lacrosse and rugby all have organised structures, and in individual sport the country has a long record in athletics, figure skating and tennis. The names that travelled furthest include the footballers Pavel Nedvěd, Antonín Panenka and Petr Čech, the fighter Jiří Procházka, and the tennis players Petra Kvitová and Martina Navratilova.

One of those names entered the language of the sport itself. Panenka gave his name to a penalty kick technique, a chipped shot down the middle taken while the goalkeeper commits to a dive, which is now called a Panenka in every football-playing country regardless of what language it is being played in.

The pattern is the same one that runs through Czech culture generally. A small country with a deep institutional base in a given field produces work out of proportion to its size, and the work is then absorbed elsewhere under a name most users never connect to its origin. The word robot and the Panenka penalty are the same phenomenon in two different fields.