Czech Republic
The landlocked Central European nation of Bohemia and Moravia, a land of fairytale Prague, the world's greatest beer drinkers, weekend cottages and mushroom-picking, and a clever, secular, dark-humoured people who kept reinventing their nation. The complete guide.
The Czech Republic, also called Czechia, is a landlocked country in the heart of Central Europe, made up of the historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia, with about ten and a half million people and a capital at the beautiful old city of Prague. It is a country of rolling forested hills, of fairytale castles and towns, and of one of the most stunning capital cities in the world. The Czechs are famous as the greatest beer drinkers on earth, as a clever, well-educated, and inventive people with a dark and ready sense of humour, and as one of the least religious populations anywhere. Their history is one of repeated loss and revival, from medieval glory to centuries under foreign rule to the peaceful Velvet Revolution that won back their freedom in 1989. A member of the European Union and NATO, the Czech Republic blends old-world charm with a modern, industrial economy. This guide walks through the land, Prague, beer, the faith, the food, the festivals, and the customs in turn.
Overview
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe, bordered by Germany to the west, Poland to the north, Slovakia to the east, and Austria to the south. It is made up of three historic lands: Bohemia, the larger western part, which holds the capital, Prague; Moravia in the east; and a small slice of Silesia in the northeast. About ten and a half million people live there, most of them Czechs, in a country of forested hills, river valleys, old towns, and the great city of Prague. The country is also known by the short name Czechia.
The Czech Republic is a parliamentary democracy, with a president as head of state, currently Petr Pavel, and a prime minister who leads the government, currently Andrej Babis. The country came into being in its present form in 1993, when Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It joined the NATO alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, though it keeps its own currency, the Czech koruna, rather than the euro. The people speak Czech, a Slavic language, and the country is one of the most secular in the world, with a Roman Catholic heritage but few active believers.
A few deep forces shape life in the Czech Republic. There is the landlocked heart-of-Europe setting of Bohemia and Moravia. There is the beauty of Prague and a deep love of fine architecture. There is the famous passion for beer and the weekend escape to the country cottage. There is a long history of loss and revival, and a rich heritage of music, letters, and film. And there is the clever, reserved, secular, dark-humoured Czech character. The sections that follow trace these and walk through the customs.
The heart of Europe
The Czech Republic lies in the very middle of Europe, a landlocked country far from any sea, ringed by mountains and hills and made up of the two great historic lands of Bohemia in the west and Moravia in the east, along with a small part of Silesia in the northeast. Bohemia, the larger, is a broad basin rimmed by wooded mountains, with Prague at its heart on the Vltava River, while Moravia, to the east, is a gentler land of valleys, fields, and vineyards.
It is a green and pleasant country of rolling hills, deep forests, fertile farmland, and winding rivers, dotted with castles, chateaux, and red-roofed towns, the kind of landscape that looks like the setting of a fairy tale. Woodlands are everywhere, and the Czechs are devoted to their forests, which they roam for walks and for the mushrooms and berries they love to gather. The highest mountains rise along the borders, in ranges such as the Giant Mountains in the north, while the rivers flow out toward the seas of three countries.
There are real differences between the lands. Bohemia, with Prague, is the larger, more industrial, more famous part, the land of beer; Moravia, in the east, is more rural and traditional, a little more religious, and the land of wine rather than beer, with its own dialects, folk costumes, and customs. The country is one of small cities and towns and countless villages, often only a few miles apart. This landlocked, forested, castle-strewn land in the heart of Europe is the setting of Czech life.
Prague and the architecture
Prague, the capital, is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and the jewel of the Czech Republic, a city of a hundred spires that has survived the centuries almost untouched, so that its old heart is a breathtaking treasury of architecture from every age, from Gothic and Baroque to Art Nouveau and beyond. Spared the destruction that flattened so many European cities, Prague preserves a fairytale skyline of towers, domes, and spires above the Vltava River, and its historic centre is protected as a World Heritage Site.
The famous sights of Prague are known the world over: the great Prague Castle on its hill, the largest ancient castle complex in the world, crowned by the soaring Gothic Saint Vitus Cathedral; the medieval Charles Bridge, lined with statues, crossing the Vltava; the Old Town Square with its astronomical clock, which puts on its show of moving figures each hour; and the winding cobbled lanes of the old quarters. Much of this glory dates from the fourteenth century and the reign of Charles the Fourth, the Bohemian king and Holy Roman Emperor who made Prague a grand imperial capital and founded Charles University, the oldest in Central Europe.
The Czechs have a deep love of fine architecture, and the country is a living museum of building styles, from Romanesque and Gothic churches to the rich Baroque of the Counter-Reformation, the elegant Art Nouveau of the early twentieth century, and the rare and distinctive Czech Cubist style found nowhere else. Beyond Prague, the country is studded with beautifully preserved historic towns, castles, and chateaux. This wealth of architecture, and the love of it, is one of the great glories of Czech culture.
A nation of beer
The Czechs are the greatest beer drinkers in the world, drinking more beer per person than any other nation on earth, year after year, and beer, pivo, is woven so deeply into Czech life and culture that it is almost a national symbol. This is a country with a brewing tradition going back many centuries, and beer here is not a luxury but a cheap, everyday, and beloved part of daily life, often costing less than water in the pubs.
Czech beer is famous for its quality as well as its quantity, above all the golden lager known as pilsner, which was invented in the Bohemian city of Pilsen and gave its name to a style of beer now brewed and drunk around the entire world. The Czechs are proud of their great beers, brewed from fine local hops, and the country is dotted with breweries large and small, from world-famous names to tiny local brewers.
At the centre of Czech beer culture is the pub, the hospoda, the cosy, smoky tavern that is the heart of social life in town and village alike, where friends gather over half-litre glasses to talk, argue, and relax for hours, and where the beer flows freely and cheaply. To share a beer in the hospoda, raising a glass with the toast Na zdravi, to your health, is one of the most Czech of all pastimes. The love of good beer, drunk in good company, is one of the defining pleasures of Czech life.
The weekend cottage
One of the most beloved features of Czech life is the country cottage, the chata or chalupa, the simple weekend and holiday home in the countryside that a great many Czech families own or share, and to which they escape from the towns at every chance, above all in the warm months. So strong is this custom that on summer weekends the cities, even Prague, can empty out as families head for the country, na chate, to their cottages.
The cottage tradition runs deep, with roots in the years of communist rule, when the country cottage offered ordinary people a private place of their own, a patch of freedom, garden, and nature away from the grey life of the towns. At the cottage, Czechs tend their gardens, grow fruit and vegetables, do their own building and repairs, relax, and reconnect with the countryside and the seasons, in a simple, hands-on way of life much loved across the nation.
Bound up with the cottage and the love of the outdoors is a national passion for roaming the forests and for gathering their bounty, above all the picking of wild mushrooms, which is almost a national sport, sending whole families into the woods in autumn with baskets and a deep knowledge of which mushrooms to take. Hiking and walking in the countryside are hugely popular, and the bond with nature, the forest, and the country cottage is a cherished part of Czech life and a counterweight to the bustle of the city.
A land that kept reinventing itself
Czech history is a long story of greatness, loss, and revival, of a proud nation that rose to brilliance, was repeatedly conquered and suppressed, yet again and again recovered its language, culture, and freedom, a history that has given the Czechs a deep resilience and a strong sense of national identity. The Czech lands rose to medieval glory under their own kings, reaching a height in the fourteenth century under Charles the Fourth, when Prague was an imperial capital.
In the fifteenth century the Czech lands were shaken by the Hussite movement, an early religious reformation led by the preacher Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake and became a national martyr. Later the Czechs fell under the rule of the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria for nearly three hundred years, a long period when the Czech language and identity were pushed down, until a great national revival in the nineteenth century brought back the Czech tongue, literature, and pride. After the First World War, in 1918, the Czechs and Slovaks won independence as Czechoslovakia, a prosperous democracy led by its founding president, Tomas Masaryk.
The twentieth century brought fresh ordeals: betrayal and occupation by Nazi Germany, and then more than forty years of communist rule after the Second World War, including the crushing of the hopeful reforms of the Prague Spring of 1968 by Soviet tanks. Freedom returned at last in 1989 in the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful uprising that swept away communism and made the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel president. In 1993, Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two countries in what is called the Velvet Divorce. This history of loss and renewal lies at the heart of how the Czechs see themselves.
Dvorak, Kafka, and the robot
For a small nation, the Czech lands have given the world an astonishing wealth of music, literature, film, and ideas, and the Czechs are rightly proud of a cultural heritage far larger than their size would suggest. In music, the country is famous above all for its great composers, Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, whose works, drawing on Czech folk tunes and the Czech landscape, are loved around the world and stand among the treasures of classical music.
In literature, the Czech lands produced one of the most influential writers of the modern age in Franz Kafka, the Prague author whose strange, haunting tales of people trapped in baffling situations gave the world the word Kafkaesque. The dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, who became the first president of free Czechoslovakia, was a major writer; and it was a Czech writer, Karel Capek, who gave the world the word robot, coined in his science-fiction play of the 1920s. The good soldier Svejk, hero of a famous comic novel, remains a beloved Czech everyman.
The Czechs have also excelled in film, winning international acclaim and Oscars, above all in the Czech New Wave of the 1960s and through the director Milos Forman, who left for Hollywood and made celebrated films there. The country has a rich and distinctive tradition of puppetry and marionettes, of animated film, and of theatre, and its beloved popular singers, such as the golden-voiced Karel Gott, are national institutions. This deep heritage of music, letters, and film is a great source of Czech pride.
The least religious land
The Czech Republic is one of the least religious countries in the world, with around two-thirds to three-quarters of people saying they belong to no religion at all, and active religious faith and churchgoing among the lowest anywhere, so that for most Czechs religion plays little part in daily life. This deep secularity is a striking and defining feature of Czech society, unusual even in an increasingly secular Europe.
The country was historically Roman Catholic, and Catholicism remains the largest faith and the heritage behind the many beautiful churches that fill Prague and the countryside, with smaller numbers of Protestants, a legacy of the Hussite reformation, and others. But several forces over the centuries, the bitter memory of the Catholic Habsburgs forcing their faith on a once partly Protestant people, and above all the decades of communist rule that actively pushed against religion, helped to drain the country of active belief, leaving a deeply secular society in their wake.
Today, though many Czechs are baptised, married, or buried in the church, and though the great Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter are kept with enthusiasm, they are observed by most as cultural and family traditions rather than acts of faith, and even committed atheists keep them gladly. Many Czechs hold a private, sceptical, or spiritual-but-not-religious outlook rather than belonging to any church. Moravia, in the east, is somewhat more religious and traditional than Bohemia. This deep secularity sets the Czech Republic apart and shapes the easy, worldly tone of its culture.
Dumplings, pork, and svickova
Czech food is hearty, rich, and warming, the comforting cooking of a Central European land of cold winters, built on meat, above all pork, on potatoes, on rich sauces and gravies, and, above all, on the dumplings that anchor the Czech table. These dumplings, the knedliky, are not small but come as soft, sliced loaves of bread or potato dough, served to soak up the sauce alongside almost every main dish.
The classic Czech meal is roast pork with bread dumplings and stewed cabbage, a dish so beloved it is almost the national plate. The true national dish, though, is svickova, a special-occasion favourite of tender beef in a rich, smooth, creamy vegetable sauce, served with bread dumplings and a spoon of cranberry and a swirl of cream. Other staples include goulash, the hearty meat stew shared with the region; fried breaded cutlets of pork or chicken, the schnitzel; thick soups; and roast duck or goose. Meals often begin with soup, and mushrooms gathered in the forest find their way into many dishes.
The Czechs have a sweet tooth too, with a love of cakes, pastries, and fruit-filled dumplings, and the spit-roasted, sugar-dusted pastry called trdelnik is a popular treat, especially among visitors. All of this is washed down, of course, with the country's superb beer. Rich, filling, and built around pork, dumplings, and sauce, Czech food is the warming, satisfying heart of home and the pub alike.
A dark and clever humour
The Czechs are often described as a reserved, private, and somewhat formal people, not given to showing emotion or to easy friendliness with strangers, who can seem cool or reserved at first but who are warm, loyal, and genuine once a real friendship has been formed. They value privacy, education, cleverness, and good manners, and tend to be down-to-earth, practical, and sceptical, suspicious of grand claims and easy enthusiasm.
A defining Czech trait is the sense of humour, which is famously dry, dark, clever, and self-deprecating, a wry, ironic wit that delights in mocking themselves, their leaders, and the absurdities of life, honed over centuries of living under powers they could not control. The Czechs laugh at authority and at their own misfortunes, and this clever, sceptical, often gloomy humour, found in their books and films, is one of the most appealing parts of the national character.
In manners, the Czechs are polite and a little formal. They greet others, even strangers and shopkeepers, with a courteous Dobry den, good day, a greeting children are taught early and visitors are wise to learn. They tend to be formal until a friendship is established, waiting to be invited before using first names, and they value quiet, good behaviour, and consideration, such as giving up a seat on the tram to the elderly. A small tip rounds off a restaurant bill. For a visitor, the keys to the Czech Republic are courtesy, a little formality, patience, and an appreciation of the dry Czech wit. Behind the reserve lies a clever, warm, and humorous people.
Christmas carp and the Easter whip
The Czech year is marked by a cycle of festivals, mostly rooted in the Christian calendar and old folk custom but kept by nearly everyone, believer or not, as cherished seasonal and family traditions. The greatest is Christmas, celebrated above all on Christmas Eve, the twenty-fourth of December, when families gather for a festive meal whose centrepiece is, by tradition, fried carp with potato salad, the carp often bought live from great tubs set up in the streets and squares in the days before.
On Christmas Eve the tree is decorated, the special meal is eaten, and presents, brought by the baby Jesus rather than Father Christmas in Czech tradition, are opened in the evening, in a warm and cosy family celebration. Easter brings one of the most distinctive and surprising of Czech customs: on Easter Monday, boys and men gently whip girls and women with a braided willow rod, the pomlazka, decorated with ribbons, in an old fertility custom said to bring health and youth, while the women give painted eggs in return.
Other customs fill the year. On the last evening of April, the night of the Burning of the Witches, great bonfires are lit across the country to drive away winter and evil. Each day of the Czech calendar carries a name, and people celebrate their name day, their svatek, with small gifts and good wishes. National holidays mark the great days of Czech history, from Jan Hus and Czech statehood to the founding of the republic and the Velvet Revolution. These festivals, and the family gatherings they bring, are warm threads of Czech life, and the close family, with grandparents often near, remains at its centre.
Hockey and football
The Czechs are a sporting nation, passionate about their games, and two sports above all command the national heart: ice hockey and football. Ice hockey is perhaps the truest national passion, a sport at which the Czechs have long been among the best in the world, and the fortunes of the national team, especially at the world championships and the Olympics, are followed with fierce devotion, with great victories celebrated across the whole country.
Football, too, is hugely popular, played in every town and village and followed keenly, and the country has produced fine players and teams admired across Europe. The Czechs take real pride in punching above their weight in sport for so small a nation, and their hockey and football heroes are national figures.
Beyond these two great games, the Czechs love the outdoors and an active life, taking eagerly to hiking, cycling, skiing in the mountains in winter, tennis, in which the country has produced world champions, and many other pursuits. Sport, like the country cottage and the forest walk, reflects the Czech love of activity, the outdoors, and friendly competition, and it is a source of national pride and a great shared pleasure.
The nation today
The Czech Republic today is a prosperous, modern, developed nation of about ten and a half million people, a parliamentary democracy governed from Prague, with a president, Petr Pavel, a retired army general, as head of state, and a prime minister, Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman, leading the government after his party won the election of 2025. It has one of the more advanced and stable economies of Central Europe, built on industry, above all the making of cars and machines, on engineering, and on a strong tradition of skilled manufacturing, and it enjoys a high standard of living, low unemployment, and the draw of a vast tourist trade centred on Prague. A member of the European Union and NATO, it keeps its own currency, the koruna.
The nation faces the questions of a modern European state. Its politics have grown more divided, and the present government, more sceptical of the European Union and of support for neighbouring Ukraine, has come into open friction with the pro-Western president over the country's direction, with large crowds rallying in Prague over the disputes. The Czechs weigh the cost of living, the future of their industry, their place in Europe, and the pull between East and West that has marked their whole history.
Through it all, the Czech Republic holds firmly to the identity built over its long and turbulent past. The forested, castle-strewn lands of Bohemia and Moravia still shape its life; the beauty of Prague and the love of fine things endure; the passion for beer, the escape to the country cottage, and the walk in the forest still mark the rhythm of life; and the clever, reserved, secular, dark-humoured Czech spirit, tempered by a history of loss and revival, remains as strong as ever. Proud, resilient, and quietly confident, the Czech Republic carries its rich traditions into the future at the heart of Europe.