Some time before 1720, an inn was built, south of Pankrác (then a village) and near the road that led from Prague to České Budějovice. It had a green fox – a zelená liška – painted on its gable.
The fox then gave its name to the inn, which was a popular stopover for travellers (and their horses). Apparently, in the 19th century, bands and theatre groups played here, and it was much frequented by famous personalities. This cartoon is from 1860.
Around the turn of the century, it was bought by a company called Saxl, who turned it into a shoe factory; this ad proves it was still functioning as a restaurant in 1899.
In 1922, it was purchased by František Janeček, an engineer and entrepreneur.
He used it as a factory for the production of machine guns and hand grenades (pictured in 1930).
In 1929, Janeček would found the motorcycle producer JAWA (JA = Janeček; WA = Wanderer, the German bike producer that Janeček purchased in the same year).
In 1953, the JAWA factory was given the decidedly more communist name of Závody 9. května (‘9th of May Enterprises’) and became a semiconductor plant.
In the 1930s, a housing estate was built round here; it too was called Zelená liška – and all our recent posts have dealt with this area. It didn’t have to undergo any 9th May renaming nonsense under the Communists.
Senožaty (German: Heumahd) is another village in the Vysočina Region, located about ten kilometres from Humpolec.
It was probably founded by Želiv Monastery (yes, also nearby) around 1300, and the earliest written mention we have is from 1352.
In 1678, an abbott called Strobl, together with an apothecary from Jihlava called Kauzmann, discovered a local spring whose water had healing properties. Baths were set up, and, a year later, Bohuslav Balbín (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/01/26/prague-2-day-12-balbinova/) wrote very positively about them.
The good times didn’t last – Senožaty suffered major fires in 1749, 1772 and 1814 (the last two both destroyed more than 40 residences and both managed to ruin the local church and rectory).
In the 1960s, the Švihov Dam was built, submerging the scenic local valley into a reservoir (opened in 1976). A garrison also existed in the village from 1952 to 1994. And the water from the spring is now used solely for irrigation.
Dudín is a village near Humpolec (which will probably be the subject of tomorrow’s post) in the Vysočina Region. It has a population of 198.
The oldest written mention we have is from 1226; the name means that it belonged to someone named Duda, a surname in several Slavic languages, believed to be derived from ‘duda’ (bagpipes).
Stallichova was named in 1952, but built before then.
Antonín Stallich was born in Vinohrady in 1887. In 1921, he married Anna Hronová, the younger sister of Antonín Hron, a World War I veteran who was active in the anti-Nazi Resistance and ultimately died of exhaustion at Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.
Antonín (Stallich) and Anna had probably met while teaching at a school in Hostivař – what purports to be a yearbook with his name in it from 1915/1916 is available online – and also taught together at a school in Nusle, where they lived.
In 1934, Antonín S was best man at Antonín H’s wedding. The Stallichs, with their daughter, Bohumila, moved to Pod rovinou in Krč (post coming up).
As well as his teaching career, Stallich published textbooks and children’s books in a variety of languages – some, dated between 1935 and 1941, are on sale on https://www.antikavion.cz/autor/antonin-stallich.
So, I’m going to complete the series I’ve been doing these last few days where I tell the story of the Prague Uprising, day by day. Today, we’re on May 9.
The larger German left in the very early hours of the morning; then, at about 04:00, the first Soviet tanks arrived in the city. The only German forces remaining in Prague were those who refused to leave, or who somehow hadn’t been given the order to do so.
Facing minimal resistance, Marshal Konev reported that Prague had been completely liberated by about 09:00. Of course, the Soviets would take all the credit for this, despite having been around for approximately 4% of the entire Prague Uprising.
They had also lost about 30 men. The other death tolls have never been agreed on, but go up to 2,898 for Czech insurgents, 2,000 for Czech civilians, and maybe about 3,000 Germans.
Whoever got the credit at the time, it’s not surprising that there are several streets whose names commemorate the Prague Uprising.
There are others, of course, and, now that I’m actively looking for someone who is better at web design than me and can show me how to add search bars and the like without ruining the look of the site, you will hopefully find it easier to search for them very soon.
The day started with an announcement from Moscow Radio that the Red Army had broken through German lines, was near Dresden, and would soon be arriving in Bohemia, although no ETA was given for when it would reach Prague.
In the meantime, the Czech insurgents were low on supplies, and the Germans took advantage of this, occupying Libeň, Holešovice and Karlín and using tanks, aircraft and artillery to attack Prague.
Up to 67 Czechs were murdered, including people who had been waiting at the station since 5 May, and two 16-year-old apprentices working in the station’s restaurant.
Around 12:30, Karl Dönitz – who had succeeded Hitler as President of Germany after the latter’s death – announced the surrender and the end of the Nazi Party’s role in the government.
Meanwhile, Hermann Göring gave himself up to the Americans near Radstadt, Austria.
Military commander Schöner ordered Rudolf Toussaint, commissioner of the German army in the office of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, to destroy Prague; he refused, and went to the headquarters of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Republic to negotiate a ceasefire.
As a result of this meeting, a protocol was drawn up at 16:00, announcing a ceasefire which would come into effect two hours later. In exchange for ceasing their fight, the Germans would be allowed to leave Prague (and their equipment) to go and surrender to the Americans.
Around the same time the protocol was signed, Winston Churchill was announcing Germany’s unconditional surrender (hence 8 May being Victory in Europe Day in many countries).
German troops started leaving, via Beroun and Plzeň, at 23:00 that night; some Nazis ignored the surrender and continued to fight. Almost at the same time that they started leaving, the German Instrument of Surrender – conceding the defeat of Germany – was signed in Berlin.
Two hours earlier, around 21:00, Red Army troops had entered Terezín concentration camp and liberated it; news of this reached Prague by midnight, where the local population was still wondering when somebody was going to come and liberate them (and who that would be).
So this seems like a good opportunity to talk about the days that followed. Today, we start with 7 May, the Uprising’s third day.
Before we start, we should briefly mention the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). Primarily formed of Soviet defectors, it fought under German command from 1943 onwards (although this wasn’t made official until November 1944).
It was led by Andrey Vlasov, a former Red Army general; for this reason, they are often known as the Vlasovci. On 5 May, Vlasov had agreed that his men could support the Czech insurgents, not the Nazis, in Prague (hoping they could surrender to the Allies on ‘favourable’ terms which wouldn’t involve being sent back to Stalin’s USSR).
Back to 7 May: at 02:41 in Reims, France, at President Eisenhower’s headquarters, German general Jodl (executed in Nuremberg in 1946) and admiral von Friedeburg (who would take his own life before May was out) signed unconditional surrender documents.
Field Marshal Schöner, who was in charge of the Nazi forces in Prague, declared that the truce wasn’t relevant, as it didn’t concern the fight against the Red Army, or Czech insurgents.
Therefore, on this day when Germany technically had a 48-hour grace period to stop its aggression, it upped the ante in Prague, using tanks to push through the barricades.
The ROA – aiming for a good deal for itself, not for the Czechs, and noticing how many Communists there were in the new Czech council – left Prague in the afternoon in order to surrender to the US army.
The Western Allies didn’t want to annoy Stalin, and the vlasovci would end up being send back the Soviet Union, where many of them, including Vlasov, would be hanged in 1946.
Back to 7 May: the ROA’s departure meant that most of the Czechs were unarmed, undefended and unable to hold onto what they had gained in the last few days. By midnight, all that remained in their hands on the east bank of the Vltava was an area in Vinohrady-Strašnice.
A few of the sources I’ve been using to write about the uprising are slightly contradictory – not jumbled on their own, but put them together and you end up with something quite jumbled instead. I just hope I’ve left a reasonably faithful account.
The earliest written mention that we know of is from a Papal document dated 1226. It had fortresses – probably three – and one of these was used by Teutonic Knights.
Somebody involved with the village – possibly a Teutonic knight, given the name – was called Herhart, and Herhálec is therefore his place.
Also, in 1882, one Antonín Bláha was born here. A violinist, he emigrated to the US and joined the Philadelphia Orchestra, and later the San Francisco Symphony. His grandson, John E. Blaha, would become a NASA astronaut who took part in five space missions.
The ‘I’ in the street name indicates the news I/you might have been dreading: we also have Herálecká II, III and IV round here. I’ve thought of a way of getting round this, and which also solves a question I’d been asking myself about these posts for about a year. More on that tomorrow.
On the night of the 5th and 6th of May, almost 1,600 barricades were erected in Prague after a radio broadcast by the Czech National Council warned that a German attack was imminent.
On the 6th, German aircraft started to bomb Prague; however, the fact that they were also fighting the Russian Liberation Army (who had largely blocked the Germans from entering Prague West) meant that planned carpet bombing couldn’t take place.
It was also on 6 May that General George S. Patton’s Third American Army liberated Plzeň, leading to rumours that they would soon do the same for Prague.
Those ‘political reasons’ being the fact that the Americans needed the Russians’ help in the ongoing war against Japan in the Pacific.
The Red Army set out for Prague on the 6th, but met with heavy German resistance around Dresden and the Ore Mountains (Krušné hory). The First Battalion entered Prague around midday.
Meanwhile, the Germans committed atrocities in the neighbourhoods that they occupied – including Krč, and including indiscriminate attacks against people who weren’t even involved in the uprising or at the barricades.
In the evening, a group of drunk German soldiers went to a residential building in Úsobská street; its residents hid in the basement, thinking this would keep them safe. However, the Germans found them and shot 35 of them dead.
Those killed included a heavily pregnant German mother of two. 12 people played dead, but survived and would later provide eyewitness accounts of the killings.
Then, the Germans went through the cellars, finding the residents of the neighbouring building, and murdered a further 16 of them. Six of them were children; one of them was three years old. Five were women, one of whom was also heavily pregnant.
Úsobská was renamed to ‘Obětí 6. května’ (Victims of 6 May) in 1948. Nobody was ever caught or convicted for the killing of 51 innocent people.
This shouldn’t really need saying, but: if we could get rid of everyone who commits war crimes, get rid of everyone who is OK with war crimes taking place, and then wipe the rest of our minds so we had no recollection of any of those people every having existed, it would solve so much.
The town got a fresh lease of life in the mid-1800s, thanks to its food and leather industries, as well as the development of the railways.
After World War I, the town did well out of the development of carpentry, and also became known as the birthplace (and ultimate resting place) of Antonín Sova (1864-1928), a poet and the founder of Prague Municipal Library.
Pacov had a relatively large Jewish population, although most of its Jewish inhabitants did not survive WW2. They are commemorated through a Jewish cemetery and the former synagogue.
Noteable locals include Jiří Němec, who made a combined total of 84 appearances for the Czechoslovak and Czech football teams.
Olbrachtova was built in 1962. Welcome to the Krč era!
Karel Zeman (bear with me) was born in Semily, near Liberec, in 1882. His father, Antonín, was a lawyer who also wrote novels under the name of Antal Stašek (this will be relevant in a future post).
Even while studying at the gymasium in Dvůr Králové (he finished in 1900), Karel started to write, already using the pseudonym Ivan Olbracht. Ivan was his confirmation name; Olbracht was a variant on his middle name, Albrecht.
After his school years, Zeman (who I’ll call Olbracht for the remainder of this post) studied law in Berlin and Prague, and then transferred to the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Prague, studying geography and history.
He left, without completing the state exams, in 1909. He had also done military service in 1903, but was demoted in 1906 because of his participation in social democratic activities.
Olbracht decided to become a journalist; he initially worked for Dělnické listy (‘The Worker’s Sheets’), a Czech-language newspaper which, at that time, was published in Vienna. While at this job, he met Helena Malířová, who would be his partner until 1935.
From 1916, Olbracht worked for the Prague-based Právo lidu; he joined the Social Democratic party and, in 1920, spent several months in Soviet Russia.
Perhaps predictably, he left the Social Democrats in 1921, joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and became editor of Rudé právo.
After serving two prison stints for his views (one in 1926, one in Pankrác in 1928), the Manifesto of the Seven was published on his initiative in 1929 (Helena was one of the Seven). It condemned the Bolshevization of the Communist Party – and also got Olbracht expelled.
Taking a break from politics, Olbracht spent a large part of the years from 1931 to 1936 in Transcarpathia (then in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine), campaigning for the rights of local workers and setting up a school.
These stays also inspired multiple novels, including Nikola Šuhaj loupežník (1933).
Olbracht broke up with Helena Malířová in the mid-1930s and married Jaroslava Kellerová, with whom he had a daughter, Ivana, in 1938.
During World War II, Olbracht moved to Stříbřec, a village in the Třeboň Region, to avoid being harrassed by the Nazis. He rejoined the (now-underground) Communist Party in 1943.
Once the war was over, he became a member of the Central Committee and, after the 1946 elections, an MP. Until he retired from politics in 1949, he was heavily involved in the Ministry of Information (i.e. the Ministry of Censorship and Banning Books).
One of his novels, Anna Proletářka (Anna the Proletarian), was made into a film in 1953.
I mainly mention this because, if you’re ever taking the 9 or the 11 up or down Jana Želivského in Žižkov, and you see a statue, it’s of her: https://www.drobnepamatky.cz/node/25158.
The earliest known written mention is from 1254, by which time it was already a royal town.
Also in common with Čimelice, Mirotice was marked by events occurring in the final days of (the European part of) World War II.
On 28 April 1945, a German military contingent, along with some civilian refugees, arrived here. On the next day, American fighter planes discovered them.
Air raids, shelling and bombing ensued; eleven local residents were killed in the crossfire.
The family’s 19th century residence was one of the buildings destroyed by the fighting in April 1945.
Going back a bit, the leading Czech puppeteer, Matěj Kopecký, was not born in Mirotice (in 1775), but did get married there in 1795.
Rounding this post off perfectly, here is Kopecký as drawn by Aleš.
And that’s us done with Lhotka! Our walk around Krč – which will probably take us through to late August, even if I don’t miss a day in that time – starts tomorrow.
The earliest written mention we have is from the 1400s; it is literally the village of Čmel’s people, although we’re not sure who this Čmel was. The area is proven to have been settled by 10,000 BC, so he could be very ancient indeed (and very mythological).
Jumping a long way forward to May 1945 – actually, to 11 May, so, three days after the Germans officially surrendered and WW2 officially ended in Europe – some German units had refused to lay down their arms.
He and 6,000 men withdrew to a spot between Čimelice and Slivice, about 20 km to the north. They treated the local population with about as much respect as the last six years had suggested they would.
However, they were ultimately surounded by the Red Army, American troops and Czechoslovak resistance units. On May 12, von Pückler apparently signed a surrender document at a mill in Čimelice. He shot himself, and some of his staff, later that day.
Before the town existed, there was a hillfort of the same name, associated with the Slavník dynasty (circa 981) if we believe Kosmas and his Chroncicle (circa over 120 years later).
It was an important administrative centre until 1250, when King Wenceslas I sold it to Mikuláš z Újezda, the 23rd Bishop of Prague.
By 1289, Chýnov the town existed; however, after 1413, the Bishops of Prague rented it out and never paid a great deal of attention to it.
Chýnov’s most famous sons include the Art Nouveau and Symbolist sculptor, František Bílek (1872-1941); his brother, Antonín (1881-1936), was also a sculptor (and painter).
As well as actor František Němec, born in 1943, a member of the National Theatre’s drama company, winner of a Thalia award in 1988, and star of several classics of Czech cinema: Ucho, Adéla ještě nevečeřela, Samotáři and Rebelové.
Until 1995, the street was called Dolejšího, after Vojtěch Dolejší (1903-1972), a Communist journalist who worked for Rudé právo, among other publications, and was chairman of the Czechoslovak Union of Journalists from 1957 to 1963.
He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Prague in 1913; having studied on a military scholarship, he ended up serving as a military doctor in Galicia during World War One.
He started a private practice after the war, but soon returned to the army, serving as a military doctor in Uzhhorod (then in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine) before becoming head of the military hospital in Hradisko, near Olomouc, in 1923, where he stayed until 1930.
Parallel to this military career (he ultimately reached the rank of colonel), Durych built on his career as a writer, although this was not new: he had had poems published in 1908, wrote his first play in 1915, and had his first prose piece published in 1916.
Durych’s works were largely based around his Christianity, and he took a particular interest in the post-Bílá Hora (i.e. (post-1620) period of Czech history.
When the Nazis occupied the Czech Lands, Durych lived in isolation and his works were no longer published. The communist era would leave him in much the same situation.
Durych died in 1962 and is buried in Bubeneč. Some more of his works would be published posthumously. These included Služebníci neužiteční, written between 1940 and 1961, but not published until 1969.
That novel – translating as ‘Useless servants’ – concerned a Jesuit mission to Japan, culminating in the execution of 55 Christians in Nagasaki in September 1622.
We start this story in Chocerady, a town of about 1,400 people, 27 kilometres southeast of Prague.
Chocerady has five municipal parts; the second-largest of these is called Vlkovec (with 169 inhabitants, it’s a lot smaller than the largest, also called Chocerady, and which has 863 inhabitants).
Vlkovec was once known for its glass industry, with the first known glassworks dating from 1855. This passed through several owners, until, in the early 20th century, it was purchased by one Arnošt Pryl.
As the glassworks was dilapidated, Pryl renovated and expanded it. He also had it named ‘Rosahütte’, (or, in Czech, Růženín, also meaning for ‘rose quartz’) after his wife, Růžena, who would also be the co-owner.
The renovations did the trick; Růženín made glass that was exported to Britain, France, Spain and the US. The number of employees peaked at almost 300 in 1929.
The settlement – where employees of the glassworks lived – developed around it, and shared its name.
A ‘bor’ is a pine; ‘borový’ is therefore the adjective, and a ‘borový les’ is a pine forest. There was once one round here, eventually replaced by the Krč housing estate.
The forest was generally known as ‘Borový’ (no les), hence the street name.
Obviously, that forest is long gone, meaning I don’t have photos of it, but I did have a work trip to eastern Serbia in 2018 which required a night staying by Bor Lake (Borsko jezero), and it was delightful:
This went on for a while. Posts became repetitive. Followers were lost. Thankfully, there are no other streets round here named after cooperatives, so that three-week phase of monotony shouldn’t be repeated.
What's in a Prague street name 
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