Brian Jakubec was born in South Africa, but his life was shaped by events that took place in far-away Czechoslovakia when his father joined the Bata shoe empire.
Czech and Slovak are generally considered to be mutually intelligible, but is this still the case? And were they considered separate languages prior to the Velvet Divorce?
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 is poetically known as the Velvet Divorce. This belies the fact that there are still many real-life Czech-Slovak couples.
The lower house of Parliament on Wednesday approved a proposal to compensate victims of state violence that occurred during demonstrations marking the first anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The move highlights the fact that even 30 years after the fall of the communist regime the country has still not settled with the past.
Exactly a year after the Prague Spring was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968, thousands of people took to the streets to protest against their country’s occupation by Soviet troops. The subsequent brutal crackdown on demonstrators, this time by their own countrymen, resulted in hundreds of arrests, many injuries and even five deaths.