The Czechs in a Nutshell

Obviously, to the communists, Jan Hus was a natural hero: a peasant’s son who fought for the common people (“proletariat”) against the wealthy clergy (“greedy capitalists”) and German professors (“vengeful nazis”) at the university, simply had to be abused. Even though nobody can accuse the communists of nourishing exaggerated sympathies towards religion, from 1948 to 1954 the totalitarian regime handed out millions of korunas to restore the derelict Bethlehem Chapel. Later in the 1950s, they willingly financed a lavish film trilogy about Master Hus.

Needless to say, the Bolsheviks’ clammy embrace of Jan Hus (curiously enough, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was also a great fan of him) backfired and made people either confused about his real historical importance, or even more indifferent to religion as such. And while the Bolshevik regime luckily belongs to history, the antagonism between Czech Catholics and Hussites is still alive and kicking, as a quite entertaining quarrel about the monuments on Prague’s Old Town Square demonstrates.

Ever since the Velvet Revolution, Czech Catholics have struggled to reinstall the magnificent Mary column that was torn down in 1918. Money has been raised through a collection campaign, a suitable stone has been transported all the way from India, and a copy of the column has even been finished. But the Catholics are still waiting. To a majority of Prague’s inhabitants, it’s simply unacceptable that a symbol of “Hus’ murderers” is erected next to the statue of the Martyr himself.

So, how may the Czech state pay respect to Hus’ historic importance without offending the country’s Catholics and their Svatý Václav (Saint Wenceslas), who for centuries has been the national patron?

The first Czech Parliament that emerged after Czechoslovakia split in 1993 found a truly Solomonic compromise: to honour the legacy of Jan Hus and please his contemporary followers, the 6th of July remained a national holiday. To please the Catholics, the 28th of September, Saint Wenceslas Day, was named a holiday as well. And just to be on the safe side, Parliament decided to tolerate Cyril and Methodius Day, the 5th of July, so the country’s Orthodox believers didn’t get mad.

Say what you want, but three days free from work every year thanks to saints and martyrs is not bad for a nation that can boast probably more atheists than any other country in Europe.

Ice Hockey

Take a look around you in any public place in this country, and you’ll immediately understand why the relatively small Czech Republic has become a superpower in fields such as beer drinking, beautiful models or heart diseases caused by obesity (see: Czech Cuisine). However, there is actually no logical reason why the country has also become a superpower in ice hockey.

The winters are usually so mild that the Bohemian and Moravian fishing ponds only freeze to ice for a week or two, and totally, this nation of 10 million people doesn’t contain more than some 150 ice hockey halls. Nevertheless, the Czechs have — bar Russia (who has an abundance of ice) and Canada (who invented the game) — won more world ice hockey championships than any other nation on the planet. In 2004, the Czech National Theatre even staged an opera — Nagano — about the national team’s smashing victory in the winter Olympics in 1998.

To an outsider, the Czech hockey miracle seems to be based on two pillars: the urge to make the nation visible on the international arena, and — today — money. The Czechs themselves will probably also add factors such as “natural talent for improvisation”, “good team players” and “typical Czech cleverness”, but these arguments seem to be more closely linked to the common perception of their national identity than to reality.

Hockey fever arrived in Bohemia from England at the end of the nineteenth century. As in all other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new game aroused great enthusiasm also among the Czechs, who already had discovered the delight of sports through the Sokol movement. However, to the Czechs, ice hockey soon became something more than a sweaty fight for a rubber puck. It was, according to Tomáš Čechtický, a writer and expert on Czech ice hockey, “a way in which they could beat their Austrian masters in public”.

The urge to humiliate Vienna was so strong that the Czechs even found it more important to be recognized by the International Ice Hockey Federation before the Austrians were (in November 1908) than to establish their own national hockey federation (in January 1909).