In high school, I used to watch the Travel Channel a lot and my favorite show was Passport to Europe. As the name of the show indicates, the hostess traveled all over Europe, but only one city she went to stayed with me and that was Prague. That city alone is the only place I remember her show talking about, probably because by that time I already had a list of cities in France and the United Kingdom that I wanted to go to and already knew about. However, that episode was my first introduction to Prague and it seemed so different than the cities, and countries, that I knew about, which is why I believed it stayed with me.

Having now experienced Prague myself, I can say that it is different than Western Europe in some aspects. However, being the capital city of the Czech Republic, formerly Bohemia, it has many similarities with other European cities. Also, the city obviously shares characteristics that other cities in the area have. Having visited these cities made Prague seem much more familiar than it may have otherwise.

Even though we were only in Prague for a day, I have a lot that I want to say about what we saw. As I research the places we went, I am learning  so many interesting things that I cannot condense into one blog post. Therefore, I have decided to do a series of blog posts so I can share everything that I discovered. I find it all to be intriguing, so I hope that you all will too!

Prague is the capital city of the Czech Republic and it is about 2 hours away from Dresden. 

The founding of Prague has been immortalized by a fanciful legend that dates back to the early medieval period. In this legend, a Slavic princess named Libuše had a prophecy as she overlooked the Vltava River.   Facing a forested area, she declared that she saw a great city whose glory would touch the stars. She proceeded to tell her people that they would find a man in this forested area where a steep cliff rises from the Vltava. He would be building a threshold, which is 'prah' in Czech, and she instructed her people to find him and build a castle named Praha there. Her dynasty, the Přemyslids, thus founded the city of Prague when they built Prague Castle on the cliff. 

During the Middle Ages, Prague, and Bohemia, was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire. Being a constituent member of the Holy Roman Empire gave Bohemian rulers the privilege to vote for the Holy Roman Emperor. Before the title became exclusively Hapsburg, other dynastic houses held this title, including the Bohemian House of Luxembourg. This helped raise Prague's prestige within the Empire and helped Prague flourish. This trend continued throughout the Middle Ages, even when the city was not the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. 

During the Renaissance period, Bohemia's nobles chose to elect Ferdinand I, a Hapsburg married to a Bohemian princess, to be their king. This led to the Bohemian crown being a part of the Hapsburg Empire, which included the personal kingdoms of Austria and Hungary as well as the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Prague, at various times, was used as the capital city of this empire by some of the Hapsburg emperors, but following the Thirty Years War the capital of the empire was permanently based in Vienna.

Even so, Prague was still an important city within the empire and it was from Prague that Czech nationalism began to take root. As you may have noticed, the Hapsburg's ruled a multinational empire that was centered in Vienna. Vienna is culturally and ethnically German and as nationalism spread in the 19th century other areas of the empire resented being ruled by a German emperor and elite based in a German city. The Czechs were but one ethnic group that wanted greater autonomy from Vienna at this time, which they were not given. The only country that was successful in gaining greater autonomy was Hungary, which changed the name of the Austrian Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this agreement, Hungary kept Franz Joseph as their king, but they were no longer part of or subject to the Austrian Empire. Thus, they were a sovereign nation that shared their monarch with the Austrian Empire. This meant that areas like foreign policy mirrored Austria's policies, but otherwise they controlled their government. 

The creation of this Dual Monarchy attempted to relieve Franz Joseph's difficulties in ruling a multinational empire; however, these tensions were exacerbated as other minorities within the empire, such as the Czechs, wanted to receive the same autonomy that Hungary received. Franz Joseph did nothing to relieve these tensions, which prompted his heir, Franz Ferdinand, to think about he would solve this problem once he became emperor. 

Had he become emperor, Franz Ferdinand's solution would have been to allow greater autonomy to all the ethnic groups within the Austrian Empire and he may have wanted to create a Triple Monarchy that included Bohemia as well as Austria and Hungary. He believed that giving greater autonomy to these ethnic groups would relive the tensions that nationalism had wrought on the empire. Whether or not his views were correct (greater autonomy could have either led to the desire for more autonomy which would have eventually broken up the empire or he could have successfully engineered a way to save the empire in spite of nationalism), Franz Ferdinand never enacted them because in 1914 he and his wife were assassinated, which sparked World War I.  

 Austria-Hungary was dissolved following World War I. This dissolution came about both internally, as national groups took advantage of Austria's weak position, and externally, with people like Woodrow Wilson denouncing multinational empires. Thus, with the backing of the United States, the empire was dissolved and ethnic groups that had previously been a part of the empire were free to create their own states.  This backing was, in part, derived from the fact that Czechoslovakia  had supported the Allies during the war thus fighting against their government. 

The new state of Czechoslovakia choose Prague to be its capital, which propelled the city to become, once again, a capital city. This new country was still multicultural as it was the home of ethnic Czechs, Slovaks, and Germans. Even though Czech domination created tensions between the Slovaks, Germans, and Czechs, Czechoslovakia was the only country in this area that maintained a democracy until it was subsumed by Germany in the Second World War. 

During World War II, Hitler, in his quest to eradicate nationalities, attempted to either assimilate or exterminate the native Czech population since the Czechs are a Slavic ethnic group, which was one of the 'lesser' nationalities according to Hitler. To this end, Czechs, especially the Czech intelligentsia, were sent to concentration camps, deported, or violently repressed in order to make the area more German. This ended in May of 1945, when citizens of Prague, with the help of the Russians, were successful in overthrowing the German government that operated from Prague. 

Czechoslovakia was reformed following the war and came under the the political influence of the USSR. The Czechs, who felt betrayed by the West in the lead up to World War II, were grateful to the Soviets for liberating their country. Therefore, Czechoslovakia, and Prague, fell under the Iron Curtain and although there were attempts to break free from Communist influence, notably the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia remained Communist until 1989.

   

In 1989, Czechoslovakia underwent the Velvet Revolution which returned Czechoslovakia to a democracy. Four years later, the country underwent another political change when it split into two countries. The tensions between the Czechs and the Slovaks did not dissipate during the Communist regime and in 1993 the Czech Republic and Slovakia peacefully, in contrast to Yugoslavia, devolved into two separate countries. Prague thus became the capital of the Czech Republic and today is a popular tourist destination. Even in February, the city had a lot of tourists walking around, and Dr. Gommlich says that in the summer months the city is hard to navigate due to all the tourists. 

Even with all the people, I still really enjoyed visiting Prague. As the most important city in Bohemia, it is home to beautiful sites and has a rich history, both culturally and politically. Over the next few days, I will expand upon my visit to Prague because there is no way I could do the city justice in just one post (even if I was only there for one day!). I look forward to visiting the city again, and hopefully I will be able to visit other areas of Bohemia as well.