Czech Republic Culture & Language

For a country of ten and a half million, Czechia’s cultural output is disproportionate, and much of it was made under conditions of censorship.

Music

Smetana’s Ma Vlast, Dvorak’s symphonies and Janacek’s operas are the core, and Czech musical literacy is old and deep — an eighteenth-century English visitor remarked that the country was the conservatoire of Europe. The Prague Spring festival opens every May with Ma Vlast on the anniversary of Smetana’s death.

Writing

Franz Kafka wrote in German in Prague; Jaroslav Hasek gave the country Svejk; Bohumil Hrabal wrote its pubs; Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel wrote from and about the communist decades. Havel, a playwright, then became president.

Film and animation

The Czechoslovak New Wave produced Closely Observed Trains and The Firemen’s Ball before the 1968 invasion closed it down. Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion and the puppet tradition behind it — UNESCO-listed, and once a vehicle for keeping the language alive under Germanisation — are a distinct national art form.

Science and invention

The word robot entered every language in the world from Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R., coined by his brother Josef from a Czech word for forced labour. Gregor Mendel worked out inheritance in an Augustinian garden in Brno; Jan Jansky classified blood groups; Otto Wichterle invented the soft contact lens and made the first ones on a rig built from his son’s construction set after the state took his laboratory away.

Glass and design

Bohemian crystal is a real industry with real craft behind it, and Czech interwar functionalist architecture and cubist buildings — a style that exists essentially only here — are worth looking up for.

Food

Roast pork, dumplings and cabbage; beef in cream sauce with bread dumplings and cranberries; goulash; and soups that are taken seriously. Heavy, and designed for the climate.

Czech is a West Slavic language and a difficult one: seven cases, consonant clusters that visitors find unpronounceable, and the letter r with a hacek, a sound that exists in no other language and that Czechs enjoy watching foreigners attempt.

English is widely spoken in Prague and among younger people everywhere, and is reliable in tourism and hospitality. German is common in the border regions and among older people in the south and west. Russian was compulsory until 1989 and is understood by that generation, but using it is a bad idea for obvious reasons.

Useful: dobry den for hello, dekuji for thank you, prosim for please and you’re welcome, na zdravi as a toast — said while looking the other person in the eye, which is taken seriously — and jedno pivo, prosim.

Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible; Czechs and Slovaks converse each in their own language.