Czechia

The Czech lands were united under the Přemyslid dukes and kings from the ninth century as the Kingdom of Bohemia, which reached its height in the fourteenth century under Charles IV, who made Prague an imperial capital and founded its university, the oldest in Central Europe. In the fifteenth century the reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake, triggering the Hussite Wars and a long tradition of religious dissent.

From 1526 Bohemia and Moravia came under the Catholic Habsburgs, and the defeat of a Protestant Bohemian revolt in 1620 began three centuries of rule from Vienna and a strong Germanising pressure, resisted by a nineteenth-century Czech national revival. In 1918, out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks formed Czechoslovakia, the most stable democracy in interwar Central Europe.

The 1938 Munich Agreement handed the German-speaking borderlands to Hitler, and Nazi occupation followed, along with the destruction of the Jewish community. After the war the German population was expelled, and a 1948 coup brought Communist rule. The 1968 "Prague Spring" reform movement was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion. The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" ended Communism peacefully, and in 1993 Czechoslovakia split amicably into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Czechia joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.

Czech identity is bound up with language, music, and a wry, sceptical humour — Švejk, Kafka, Hašek, Havel, and the absurdist streak in Czech film and animation. The country is among the least religious in Europe; the great churches are visited as monuments more than as places of worship.

Beer is close to a national institution. Czechs drink more of it per head than any other nation, the pilsner style was invented in Plzeň in 1842, and the pivnice (pub) is the core of social life. Puppet theatre, Bohemian glass and garnets, brass and folk music in Moravia, and a strong classical tradition — Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček — are other threads.

Weekends are often spent at a chata or chalupa, a modest country cottage, and mushroom foraging in autumn is a widely shared pastime. Moravia, in the east, is more rural, more Catholic, and wine- rather than beer-oriented, with its own folk costume and festivals.

About 1.3 million people live in Prague, a compact city of Gothic, Baroque, and Art Nouveau architecture that escaped wartime bombing. Brno, the Moravian capital, is a lively university and tech city; Ostrava in the northeast is a former coal-and-steel centre reinventing itself; and much of the country is small towns, farmland, and forested hills.

The economy is industrial and export-driven — cars above all, plus machinery, electronics, and engineering — tightly integrated with Germany, and unemployment is consistently among the lowest in the EU. Housing costs in Prague and Brno are the main pressure point.

Daily life is orderly and home-centred, with an early start to the working day, a hot lunch as the main meal for many, and the pub or the cottage for downtime.

Czech cooking is hearty, meat-and-dumpling food built for cold weather. The archetypal meal is vepřo-knedlo-zelo — roast pork with bread dumplings and sauerkraut — or svíčková, beef sirloin in a creamy root-vegetable sauce with cranberry and a dumpling. Guláš, řízek (schnitzel), and roast duck with red cabbage are pub and Sunday staples.

Starters and snacks include utopenec (a pickled sausage), nakládaný hermelín (marinated soft cheese), bramboráky (potato pancakes), and open sandwiches (chlebíčky). Sweet dishes such as fruit dumplings and palačinky can be a main course.

Beer is the national drink, ordered by the half-litre and often "on tap" from the famous breweries; Becherovka, a herbal liqueur from Karlovy Vary, and Moravian wines round out the drinks, along with slivovice plum brandy.

Prague is the centrepiece: the hilltop Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral, the statue-lined Charles Bridge, the Old Town Square with its astronomical clock, the Jewish Quarter's synagogues and cemetery, and the Art Nouveau of the Municipal House — a compact historic core that is itself a World Heritage Site.

Beyond the capital, Český Krumlov is a tiny, near-perfectly preserved medieval town wrapped in a bend of the Vltava beneath a large castle; Kutná Hora has a soaring Gothic cathedral built on silver-mining wealth and the bone-decorated Sedlec ossuary. The western "spa triangle" of Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně, and Františkovy Lázně, a UNESCO listing, keeps its colonnades and grand hotels.

Moravia offers the wine country and folk villages of the south, the caves and gorges of the Moravian Karst, and the châteaux of Lednice and Valtice. The border mountains — the Krkonoše, Šumava, and the sandstone "rock towns" of Bohemian Switzerland and Český ráj — provide the hiking and skiing.