Czech Republic History

The part of the Czech Republic and Austria where we cycle has historically been known as Moravia.  This region was beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, so while we know the names of some of the tribes that lived there during ancient times (ie. Boii, Quadi), no true history was written of the peoples of this region.  The Slavs arrived in the 6th century, again without much written fanfare.

The region’s true entrance onto the main stage of European history came in the 9th century when local ruler Mojmir I annexed the neighboring state of Nitra to create a large kingdom in Central Europe which historians refer to as ‘The Principality of Moravia’ or simply ‘Great Moravia’.  This regional super-state peaked and fell within the 9th century, reaching the height of cultural and territorial influence before falling to the invading Magyars as the century came to a close.  During this brief golden age, Byzantine missionaries, invited by Moravia’s rulers, created the Glagolitic script, an alphabet based on the Slavic language that greatly contributed to the literacy of Slavic Europe for centuries to come.  It was during this period that the Czech language differentiated itself from other Slavic tongues, creating the basis for the modern state. 

Magyar domination of the region ended in 995 with the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I’s victory at the battle of Lechfeld.  Thus, the Magyars were replaced by Germanic rulers whose fate would so thoroughly affect the region into the 20th century.  Nevertheless, Moravia often enjoyed limited or complete autonomy during the later middle ages.  In the late 14th century, Englishman John Huss started the first Protestant movement here and despite harsh persecution from the Vatican, his Moravian church still survives, with nearly one million members worldwide.  Despite this strong independent streak, the ascendancy of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire could not be ignored.  With Vienna, the seat of the Hapsburg family (whose head was nearly always Holy Roman Emperor from 1440-1806) so close by, it was inevitable that the family’s rise to power would necessarily draw Moravia into its orbit.  The Hapsburg ruler Albert II inherited the region in 1437 and it would remain under Hapsburg rule until the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. 

With dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, diplomats created the new states of Czechoslovakia and Austria in this region.  Czechoslovakia’s borders were drawn roughly based on linguistic lines as Czech and Slovak are mutually comprehensible while Austria was to contain the Empire’s core German-speaking regions.  Of course, it was impossible to draw true linguistic borders through a region that had so long been united.  A certain amount of “Germanization” of the “Czech” parts of the Empire had occurred over the centuries leaving large populations of German speakers within Czech borders.  Hitler played on this fact to demand German annexation of the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland in 1938. Following Neville Chamberlain’s accession to this demand in the infamous Munich Agreement, Hitler proceeded to invade the rest of the country in 1939.  The region would remain under the harsh occupation of Nazi forces until the arrival of the Russians at the end of WWII. 

The defeat of Hitler’s Germany gave nationalist Czechs the opportunity to ‘deport’ all German speakers within Czechoslovakian borders, and over 2 million German-speakers were sent away.  The arrival of Russians proved to be a mixed blessing for this region as Nazi rule was replaced by the velvet glove of Russian domination.  The so-called “Iron Curtain”, the heavily guarded border separating Europe’s eastern bloc from the western democracies divided Moravia along the Czech-Austrian border.  During the Cold War, a communist puppet government ruled the revived country of Czechoslovakia, its lack of autonomy displayed on the world stage in 1968 when Russian tanks rolled into Prague to put a halt to the government’s liberalization policies.  Following this crackdown, a growing number of dissidents kept these liberal sentiments alive until 1989 when the non-violent, Velvet Revolution, forced the communist government to give up its power.

Following the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia adopted a democratic form of government and reopened the Iron Curtain border with Germany and Austria.  In 1993 the arranged marriage between the Czechs and Slovaks ended peacefully as both peoples agreed to partition the country into its respective ethnic zones.  The last two decades have seen the Czech Republic turn from communism to capitalism and join both the EU and NATO all while experiencing a rapid growth in tourism.