Famous People and Czech and Prague patriots
The Czech Republic, regardless of its small size, is surprisingly rich in interesting characters. Czechs are all around the world, bringing ideas, scoring goals, or distributing beauty.
This part of our web doesn’t try to be an encyclopedia of famous people, it just brings in some selected characters, who somehow got into world consciousness for something they did. Czech are always outnumbered, but never defeated.
Who are the people the world talks about?
Let us start with the Miss World of 2006, Tatana Kucharova. But there are many other beauties, like Eva Herzigova, Petra Nemcova, Tereza Maxova, Ivana Trump. But beauty is not a privilege of top-models in the Czech Republic; the country is sometimes said to have the most beautiful girls in the world.
Musicians; one Czech saying, roughly translated, goes: every Czech is a musician. Americans have a good consciousness of the Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), the author of Slavonic Dances and of the symphony From the New World. The others would be Bedrich Smetana, Leos Janacek or Zdenek Fibich.
Czech writers are no less renown. The famous Jewish writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), even when wrote in German, spent most of his life in Prague. Famous if for his works Metamorphosis, The Trial or The Castle. The Czech writer Josef Capek invented the word robot, in his play RUR. Living in France, one of the best contemporary authors Milan Kundera (1929) gained his renown by his novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality.
Sportsmen from the Czech republic excel especially in football and ice hockey teams. The best hockey players are Jaromir Jagr (1972), playing attack in the NHL and goalkeeper Dominik Hasek (1965) who helped the Czech team to get the Olympic Gold in Nagano. The football player Petr Cech was two times awarded the Best Goalkeeper of the UEFA Champions League.
There are many others, we also like to take pride we had Vaclav Havel (1936) as our president – Vaclav Havel used to be a spiritual leader of the dissidents during the communist regime, after the Velvet Revolution he became the leader of the nation for 13 years. He stays a well known dramatist, essayist, philosopher, and overall humanist person, who is popular in the Czech Republic and abroad as well.