The Czechs in a Nutshell

As a foreigner, you might mistake the knedlík for a soft-boiled ice hockey puck that moves through your intestines with the speed of a plasticine ball, but the locals treat it with sacred respect. Actually, no classic Czech dish can go without the knedlík.

To achieve the total Czech culinary experience, you should therefore find any ordinary hospoda and try the following combination: go for a glass of Becherovka, the traditional herbal liquor, as an aperitif, and then continue with one of the soups that are on the day’s menu (if the dršťková is the only one left, consider whether you really wish to eat ground cow stomach). As for the main dish, there is no alternative other than the vepřo-knedlo-zelo (pork meat with dumplings and sauerkraut), which must be swallowed down by large quantities of beer.

The dessert can be a palačinka (a pancake) accompanied by a cup of what the Czechs dare to call Turkish coffee. If you’re not used to filtering the coffee through your teeth to avoid swallowing the grounds, order a glass of grog (tea with rum) instead.

Finally, control that the waiter hasn’t doctored your bill too heavily, leave a small tip — and be sure not to check your weight or measure your cholesterol for a couple of days. Dobrou chuť!

Czech Language

Let’s start with the unambiguous verdict: Czech is the Rolls Royce of the Slavonic languages, and a star player in the Indo-European linguistic league. Czech is so rich, precise and, unfortunately, also complicated that a foreigner trying to learn the language may be driven to suicide. Either because he or she never manages to learn it, or because of the utter depression that follows when the foreigner realizes how primitive his or her own mother tongue is.

Linguistically speaking, Czech is — as are Slovak, Polish and the now nearly extinct Lusatian (Wendish) — a Western Slavonic language. Eastern Slavonic languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian, or members of the South Slavonic branch, as Serbian and Croatian, all belong to the same linguistic family. But because Czech, thanks in part to the unique vowel mutation it has undergone, is the most distinctive of all the Slavonic languages, its spoken version can be hard to understand even for other Slav peoples, bar the Slovaks.

The Czechs have traditionally been known as a book-loving people. Today, this can indeed be questioned (see: TV Nova), but one fact remains undisputed: no Slav people started to produce literature in their own language earlier than the Czechs. Within two centuries after the Macedonian missionary Cyril (ca. 827-869) and his brother Methodius arrived from Salonika to convert them to Christianity (see: Religion), the Czechs could boast an array of hymns, chronicles and ballads in their mother tongue.

Czech literature reached its first zenith under the reign of Charles IV (1346-1378), who made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire (see: Central Europe). Among Charles’ many bright ideas was the foundation of a university in Prague in 1348. Here, another Czech giant, Jan Hus, started to teach his students a version of Czech based not on literature, but on the language as it was actually spoken in Prague’s streets at that time.

Hus not only chucked out tons of German and Latin loanwords, but he also introduced a “phonetic” spelling, which rendered every sound with a single letter. For those sounds that didn’t exist in Latin, he invented diacritical signs (ě, š, á, ř). As a result, Czech school children have rejoiced ever since at an orthography that is extremely logical and perspicuous, at least compared to what their poor colleagues in Poland still must endure.

Some other landmarks should also be mentioned. When the German Johannes Gutenberg invented the “black magic” of printing books in 1445, the Czechs followed suit only 23 year later, when the Trojan Chronicle (Kronika trojanská) was published. In addition, the importance of the Bible kralická, a reformed translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew published in the Moravian town Kralice, should not be underestimated. The translation was finished in 1594, and the six volumes were completed with linguistic as well as factual and theological explanations.

The Battle of White Mountain in 1620 is often excessively portrayed as a national catastrophe of immense dimensions, but when it comes to the Czech language, it really was quite a disaster.