Velvet Republic
Post-1989: the Velvet Revolution, Havel, EU, modern Prague.
Part of Prague's story
19 moments in this segment.
- — The Founding of the Bishopric of Prague. Mlada hands the crosier to Dětmar, first bishop of Prague (c. 974); panel from the sarcophagus of Vratislav I. Place: Imperial diet at Quedlinburg; see at Prague Castle Figures: Boleslav II the Pious, duke of Bohemia · Emperor Otto I · Pope Benedict VI · Mlada, sister of Boleslav, who carries the petition to Rome · Dětmar (Thietmar), first bishop, Saxon Benedictine Since the baptism of Bořivoj, the Czech lands have been ecclesiastical territory of the bishop of Regensburg, four hundred kilometers south down the Danube. The arrangement is administratively absurd and politically dangerous: every Bohemian priest is a Bavarian appointment. Boleslav II, son of the brother-killer and grandnephew of the saint, wants his own bishop. He sends his sister Mlada to Rome around 967. She returns a nun and an abbess, with a papal letter of recommendation. The matter waits on imperial consent, which means Otto I, which means the diet at Quedlinburg at Easter 973. Otto agrees. The diocese is carved out of Regensburg. It is placed under the metropolitan of Mainz, three hundred kilometers west, an improvement of distance and a worsening of language: the Czechs will now answer to Germans speaking a different German.
- — Prague Becomes an Archbishopric. Charles IV kneels before the Virgin in the votive panel of Archbishop Jan Očko of Vlašim. Place: Avignon (bull issued); Prague Castle (proclamation) Figures: Pope Clement VI · Charles, margrave of Moravia · Arnošt of Pardubice, first archbishop of Prague · John of Luxembourg, attending the ceremony Since 973 the bishopric of Prague has been a suffragan of the archbishop of Mainz. For three and a half centuries the German metropolitan has confirmed Bohemian bishops, received Bohemian appeals, and taken Bohemian fees. Charles, who has been negotiating in Avignon throughout 1343 and into 1344, will not have it any longer. His tutor sits on the throne of Peter. The price is supportable. On April 30, 1344, Clement VI issues the bull Ex super eminenti. The bishopric of Prague is raised to a metropolitan see. The bishoprics of Olomouc and the newly erected Litomyšl are made its suffragans. The Bohemian church is, ecclesiastically, a province of its own. The archbishop is given the right to crown the kings of Bohemia, ending the politics by which a Mainz coronation could be withheld in a bad year.
- — Charles IV Crowned Emperor. Charles IV in the relic scenes of the Chapel of St Catherine at Karlštejn, painted within a decade of his Roman coronation. Place: St Peter's Basilica, Rome Figures: Charles IV · Cardinal Pierre de Colombier, papal legate (the Pope is at Avignon) · Anna of Schweidnitz, the new empress · Francesco Petrarca, observing Crécy was 26 August 1346 and the Bonn coronation was 26 November 1346 — that is three months after Crécy, not two., with the Aachen coronation following only in 1349 once he had the actual regalia in hand. By 1355 he is methodically completing the triple coronation tradition. He receives the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Milan on the way south in January, performed by the archbishop of Milan in Sant'Ambrogio, because he has not bothered to fight the Visconti for control of Pavia. Anna of Schweidnitz was Charles IV's THIRD wife, not his second. (1: Blanche of Valois m.1329 d.1348; 2: Anna of the Palatinate m.1349 d.1353; 3: Anna of Schweidnitz m.1353 d.1362; 4: Elizabeth of Pomerania m.1363). Pope Innocent VI is in Avignon and will not be moving. He sends Cardinal Pierre de Colombier with full authority. The agreement Charles has signed with the curia is severe: he will enter Rome on the morning of his coronation and leave by sundown of the same day. He is not to camp in the city; not to interfere in the Papal States; not to receive petitions; not to invest officials. He signs.
- — John Nepomuk Canonized. St John of Nepomuk, the seal of the confessional kept under torture. Baroque devotional image, the saint with his five-star halo, drowned in the Vltava in 1393, canonised by Benedict XIII in 1729. Place: St Peter's, Rome; the celebration at St Vitus, Prague Figures: Pope Benedict XIII · Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia · the relic of the tongue, enshrined in silver John Nepomuk's cause has run since 1715, urged by the Bohemian clergy, the Habsburg court, and the Jesuits, who supply the documents. The Roman Sacred Congregation requires proof of two miracles and, crucially, an incorrupt relic. The tomb in St Vitus is opened on 15 April 1719 in the presence of seven witnesses, including the imperial physician. A reddish, fibrous mass the size of a small fist is found in the position of the skull's mouth and identified as the saint's incorrupt tongue. Benedict XIII canonizes Nepomuk on 19 March 1729, the third Sunday in Lent. The mass at St Vitus that summer lasts five days. A new chapel is built around the tomb; a silver casket of two tons of bullion (donated by the empress Eleonora Magdalena's bequest) encloses the relic. Bohemia has its first native saint canonized in a century and a half.
- — Havel imprisoned. Václav Havel, playwright and VONS co-founder. He served almost four years in Hermanice and Plzeň-Bory after the 1979 trial. Place: Ruzyně remand prison · Heřmanice labor camp, Ostrava · Plzeň-Bory prison Figures: Václav Havel, playwright · Petr Uhl, Otta Bednářová, Václav Benda, the VONS co-defendants · Olga Havlová, his wife, recipient of the letters In April 1978, Havel and ten others found VONS, the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, an offshoot of Charter 77 that publishes case-by-case reports of political arrests. By 1979 the committee has issued 156 reports. The regime, having tolerated Charter 77 as a symbolic abstraction, will not tolerate a registry of named victims. On 29 May 1979 the StB arrest ten VONS members. Six are tried that October. Havel, charged with subversion of the Republic, draws four and a half years. He has just finished the essay Moc bezmocných, the power of the powerless, written in late 1978 in expectation of arrest. The essay describes a greengrocer who hangs the sign workers of the world, unite in his window without thought; the act of describing it accurately, Havel argues, is already the act of refusing the system. It will circulate in samizdat and translation through the 1980s, the central dissident text of the period.
- — The Velvet Revolution. Letná Plain, 25 November 1989. Half a million Czechs and Slovaks gather above the city. Dubček spoke; the crowd jingled their keys. Place: Národní třída, Wenceslas Square, Letná plain, Civic Forum (Laterna Magika theatre) Figures: Václav Havel, playwright and dissident · Alexander Dubček, returning · Marián Čalfa, prime minister · the student march of November 17 On the evening of November 17, 1989, an officially permitted student march commemorating the Nazi closure of Czech universities fifty years earlier turns, on Národní třída, against the regime. The white-helmeted riot police, the bílé přilby, beat the marchers against the shopfronts. Around two hundred students are injured. A rumor (false) circulates that a student has been killed. The rumor is enough. Within forty-eight hours, Civic Forum is founded in the dressing rooms of the Laterna Magika theatre. Václav Havel, just out of prison again, is its inevitable face. The dramatist who has written about the absurdity of regimes now finds himself writing the regime's exit.
- — The Czech Koruna Issued. A 500 Kčs note overstamped for provisional Czech use, 1993. Between 4 and 7 February the old federal currency was physically marked while the new koruna was prepared. Place: Czech National Bank, Na Příkopě · border crossings Figures: Josef Tošovský, governor of the Czech National Bank · Václav Klaus, prime minister · Alois Rašín (1919), invoked as precedent On the morning of February 8, 1993, the common Czechoslovak koruna ceases to be legal tender on both sides of the new border. The two governments have agreed to a monetary divorce after a brief and unhappy attempt at a currency union. The technique is taken straight from 1919, when Alois Rašín stamped Austro-Hungarian banknotes to give the new Czechoslovakia a currency overnight. Seventy-four years later, the procedure is repeated in reverse. Each Czech citizen exchanges up to four thousand koruna at face value at the bank counter; the rest is stamped, with a paper appliqué bearing a watermark and serial number, and continues to circulate while new banknotes are printed. The Slovaks do the same on their side with a different stamp. The exchange runs four days.
- — The Velvet Divorce. Czechoslovakia in its final form, before the 1 January 1993 split. Klaus and Mečiar negotiated the dissolution at Villa Tugendhat in Brno without a referendum. Place: Federal Assembly, Prague · National Council, Bratislava Figures: Václav Klaus, Czech prime minister · Vladimír Mečiar, Slovak prime minister · Václav Havel, federal president (resigned July 1992) The June 1992 elections produce two winners with incompatible programs. In the Czech lands, Václav Klaus's Civic Democratic Party runs on Thatcherite economics and a tight federation. In Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar's HZDS runs on Slovak sovereignty and slower reform. They meet at the Tugendhat villa in Brno on August 26 and sign there the agreement that the federation will not survive coalition; an earlier political agreement had been reached in Bratislava on July 23. Havel, who has campaigned against the split, resigns the federal presidency on July 20. No referendum is held. Polls in both republics run roughly sixty to forty against dissolution. The federal parliament passes the constitutional law on November 25, 1992, by a margin of three votes. The country has six weeks to divide itself.
- — NATO Accession. Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the president signing the Czech Republic into NATO on 12 March 1999, ten years after the keys on Wenceslas Square. Place: Truman Library, Independence, Missouri · Černín Palace, Prague Figures: Jan Kavan, Czech foreign minister · Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state (born Marie Jana Korbelová, Prague 1937) · Václav Havel, president The ceremony is held at Harry Truman's presidential library, a deliberate choice. Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949; in 1948 he had been told, by the same Jan Masaryk who would die from a Černín Palace window weeks later, that Prague was being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Half a century afterward, Madeleine Albright, born in Prague in 1937 and twice a refugee from it, accepts the instruments of accession from three foreign ministers. Jan Kavan signs for the Czech Republic. He had spent the years of normalization in exile in Britain, smuggling samizdat back through the Iron Curtain. Hungary and Poland sign alongside. It is the first eastward enlargement of NATO, and the formal closure of the security architecture left in pieces in 1989.
- — The Hundred-Year Flood. Prague underwater, August 2002. The Vltava broke its banks; Karlín drowned; Charles Bridge held for the third time in six and a half centuries. Place: Karlín, Holešovice, Malá Strana, the Zoo at Troja, the metro tunnels Figures: Jiří Paroubek, deputy mayor of Prague · Petr Bendl, regional governor · the elephant Kádir (euthanized) · the seal Gaston (reaches Hamburg) Rain falls on the Bohemian and Bavarian uplands for ten days. The Vltava, drained by a basin of eighteen thousand square kilometers, reaches Prague on August 13 at a flow of roughly five thousand four hundred cubic meters per second, more than ten times its normal volume. The Charles Bridge holds. Its medieval icebreakers, set by Parléř in red sandstone in the fourteenth century, do the work they were cut for. The modern foundations of the Old Town, the metro tunnels and the embankment streets, do not. Five metro stations on Line B flood: Florenc, Křižíkova, Invalidovna, Palmovka, Českomoravská. Karlín, the working-class quarter rebuilt after the floods of 1890, is again under water; Holešovice on the opposite bank likewise. The Zoo at Troja loses several enclosures. The elephant Kádir is euthanized when transport across the rising water fails. A sea lion (in fact a brown fur seal) named Gaston swims down the Vltava and into the Elbe and reaches Dresden, where he dies of exhaustion shortly after recapture.
- — EU Accession. The Athens ceremony, 16 April 2003. The accession treaty of the ten new member states is signed; the Czech Republic joins the European Union on 1 May 2004. Place: Dublin Castle · Old Town Square, Prague Figures: Vladimír Špidla, prime minister · Cyril Svoboda, foreign minister · Václav Klaus, president (absent in protest) · Bertie Ahern, Irish taoiseach and Council president On May 1, 2004, the European Union admits ten member states in a single act. Eight come from the former Soviet sphere: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia. Cyprus and Malta join from the Mediterranean. The treaty of accession had been signed in Athens a year earlier. The Czech referendum in June 2003 approved entry by seventy-seven percent on a fifty-five percent turnout. The central ceremony is held at Dublin Castle. Prime Minister Špidla and Foreign Minister Svoboda represent the Czech Republic. Václav Klaus, the Czech president and a longtime Euro-skeptic, declines to attend. He sends a written statement instead, expressing the position that the Czech Republic enters the Union as a sovereign state, not as a region of someone else's project.
- — The Plastic People trial. The Plastic People of the Universe in performance, 2010. Their 1976 trial was the spark that lit Charter 77. Place: Prague District Court · the village of Bojanovice, the festival that triggered the arrests Figures: Ivan Martin Jirous (Magor), artistic director of the Plastic People · Vratislav Brabenec, saxophonist · Pavel Zajíček, of DG 307 · Václav Havel, observer in court The Plastic People of the Universe form in September 1968, six weeks after the invasion, around the bassist Milan Hlavsa. They take their name from a Frank Zappa lyric. They play psychedelic rock with Czech and English lyrics, much of it set to the philosophical poetry of Egon Bondy. They lose their professional license in 1970, play in barns and cellars, record on borrowed equipment. They are not a political band. The regime treats them as one. In February 1976 the StB arrests nineteen people connected with the band's circle, mostly after a wedding-and-festival in Bojanovice. The charge, distilled, is organized disturbance of the peace, hooliganism elevated to felony. The trial is announced as a quiet local matter. It is not quiet. Four defendants are tried in September: Jirous, Brabenec, Zajíček, and the singer Svatopluk Karásek. Sentences range from eight to eighteen months. The subject dates from 1976; this photograph was taken in 2010.
- — Havel Dies at Hrádeček. Black flags hang over Prague on 18 December 2011, the day Havel died at his Hrádeček cottage at the age of 75. Place: Hrádeček, near Trutnov, northeast Bohemia Figures: Václav Havel, 75, former president · Dagmar Havlová, his wife · the cottage at Hrádeček, dissident weekend house since 1967 Hrádeček is a stone farmhouse in the foothills of the Krkonoše mountains, bought by Havel and his first wife Olga in 1967. It is where Charter 77 was drafted at the kitchen table in December 1976. It is where the secret police kept a permanent observation post in a caravan across the lane through the 1980s. It is where Havel returns, between presidencies and after, to write. On the morning of December 18, 2011, his respiratory illness, an inheritance of decades of cigarettes and the damp cells of Pankrác and Bory, finally closes. He is seventy-five. He has been out of public office for eight years.
- — The First Direct Presidential Election. Miloš Zeman in March 2013, weeks after winning the first direct presidential election. The runoff against Schwarzenberg turned bitter; the office turned populist. Place: polling stations across the Czech Republic · Hradčany Square, Prague Castle Figures: Miloš Zeman, former prime minister · Karel Schwarzenberg, foreign minister and runoff opponent · Václav Klaus, outgoing president Since 1918, the Czech (and Czechoslovak) presidency had been elected by parliament. Masaryk, Beneš, Gottwald, Novotný, Svoboda, Husák, Havel, Klaus, all chosen by deputies and senators in a joint session. A constitutional amendment in February 2012, passed by a broad coalition, transfers the choice to the voters. The first direct election is held in two rounds, January 11 and 12, then January 25 and 26. Nine candidates run in the first round. Miloš Zeman, founder of the Czech Social Democratic Party and prime minister 1998 to 2002, wins it with twenty-four percent. Karel Schwarzenberg, foreign minister, prince, eulogist of Havel a year before, comes second with twenty-three. The runoff is set.
- — Letná, Thirty Years On. Letná, 16 November 2019. A quarter-million gather on the same plain Dubček addressed in 1989, this time against Andrej Babiš. The crowd does not jingle keys. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava Figures: Mikuláš Minář, organizer (Million Moments for Democracy) · Andrej Babiš, prime minister (subject of the protest) · the surviving members of Civic Forum, present in front On November 24 and 25, 1989, half a million Czechs and Slovaks had gathered on the Letná plain, the wide grassy bluff above the Vltava where army parades had been held under the communists. Dubček spoke from the rostrum, his first Prague crowd in twenty-one years. The plain has carried the meaning ever since: when something has to be said in public and at scale, Letná is the room. On the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution, the citizens' initiative Million Moments for Democracy calls another rally. The organizer, Mikuláš Minář, is twenty-six, a theology student who was not born when the Wall fell. The proximate cause is Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, whose Agrofert holdings are the subject of European Commission investigations into conflict of interest and the misuse of structural funds.
- — The Faculty of Arts. of Charles University on Jan Palach Square, the site of the 21 December 2023 attack. Place: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Jan Palach Square Figures: David Kozák, 24, student and gunman (deceased) · fourteen named dead (twelve students, two staff) · twenty-five wounded At 14:59 on the last Thursday before the winter holidays, a 24-year-old philosophy student of the Faculty of Arts (FF UK) opens fire on the fourth floor of the building on Jan Palach Square. He kills twelve students and two staff and wounds twenty-five more before taking his own life on the roof. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Czech history. Police evacuate the building under live fire; a viral mobile-phone video shows students climbing onto the rooftop ledges of the neighboring buildings on Křižovnická to escape. The shooter, it later emerges, killed his father in their family home that morning and is suspected in two further killings (a father and infant daughter) in Klánovice forest eight days earlier.
- — Petr Pavel Elected. Petr Pavel on the Prague Castle balcony at his inauguration, 9 March 2023. The retired general had defeated Babiš in the runoff six weeks earlier. Place: polling stations across the Czech Republic · Hradčany Square, Prague Castle Figures: Petr Pavel, retired general, former chair of the NATO Military Committee · Andrej Babiš, former prime minister, runoff opponent · Miloš Zeman, outgoing president Petr Pavel was a paratrooper officer in the late communist army. After 1989 he served in UN peacekeeping in the Yugoslav wars, was decorated for the evacuation of French troops under fire near Knin in 1993, rose through the new Czech General Staff, and from 2015 to 2018 chaired the NATO Military Committee, the alliance's senior uniformed body. He retires in 2018 and announces a candidacy for the presidency in 2022. He runs as an independent on a platform of rule of law, EU and NATO alignment, support for Ukraine after the Russian invasion of February 2022, and what he calls the Havel-Schwarzenberg line in foreign policy. The first round on January 13 and 14, 2023, eliminates seven candidates. The runoff is set between Pavel and Andrej Babiš, the former prime minister who had lost office in October 2021.
- — Petr Pavel Takes the Oath. Petr Pavel, fourth President of the Czech Republic, official portrait. Place: Vladislav Hall, Prague Castle Figures: Petr Pavel, fourth president of the Czech Republic · Pavel Rychetský, Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court · Miloš Zeman, outgoing Petr Pavel, 61, retired four-star general and former chair of the NATO Military Committee, is sworn in as the fourth president of the Czech Republic in Vladislav Hall, the late-Gothic vault Benedikt Ried completed in 1502 (see [[vladislav-hall-completed]]). The oath is administered by Pavel Rychetský, Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. Outgoing president Miloš Zeman attends; the two men have not been on speaking terms since the campaign. Pavel is the first Czech president to come from the post-communist military and the first whose pre-political career sits entirely after 1989. His campaign slogan, *Vrátíme řád* (We will restore order), reads in office as continuity with the Havel-Schwarzenberg tradition more than restoration of anything new.
- — Babiš Returns. Andrej Babiš during the 2025 campaign, ahead of his return to the prime ministership. Place: Polling stations across the Czech Republic; Chamber of Deputies, Sněmovní street Figures: Andrej Babiš, ANO leader · Petr Fiala, outgoing Prime Minister · Petr Pavel, President In the legislative election of 3–4 October 2025, Andrej Babiš's ANO movement wins approximately 35% of the vote, taking 80 of the 200 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The SPOLU coalition of Prime Minister Petr Fiala collapses from its 2021 peak; the Pirates and STAN, junior partners of the outgoing coalition, lose seats. The far-right SPD and the new Motorists party take the remaining government-forming majority. Babiš, defeated by Pavel in the 2023 presidential runoff (see [[pavel-elected]]), returns to the Kramář Villa as Prime Minister, the office he held 2017–2021. The pro-Western coalition that built the ammunition initiative (see [[czech-ammunition-initiative]]) is out.
