30 Most Famous Czechs: Artists, Scientists and Inventors

Czechia has produced people whose work you use without knowing where it came from. Soft contact lenses, the word “robot”, the four blood groups, the laws of inheritance, the ship’s propeller and the printing process behind every colour magazine of the 20th century all came out of the Czech lands, from a country that has never had more than eleven million people in it.

The 30 below are grouped by what they did rather than by fame, and every date, birthplace and claim has been checked individually. Where a name is commonly attached to the wrong achievement, and several of these are, the correction is stated. Five of the best known are summarised first.

Five of the most famous Czechs are listed below.

1. Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939). Alphonse Mucha was the painter whose Paris posters defined Art Nouveau, and who spent his last years on the Slav Epic, 20 monumental canvases of Slavic history.
2. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Gregor Mendel was the Augustinian friar in Brno whose pea experiments established the laws of inheritance and founded genetics.
3. Otto Wichterle (1913-1998). Otto Wichterle was the chemist who made the first soft contact lenses at home on Christmas 1961, using a children’s construction set.
4. Jan Amos Komenský (1592-1670). Jan Amos Komenský, known in English as Comenius, was the exiled teacher and philosopher who argued for universal schooling and wrote the first illustrated textbook for children.
5. Karel Čapek (1890-1938). Karel Čapek was the writer whose 1920 play R.U.R. gave every language on earth the word “robot”.

1. Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was the Czech painter and designer who gave Art Nouveau its visual language. He was born in Ivančice in Moravia and made his name overnight in Paris on 1 January 1895, when a poster he had produced at short notice for the actress Sarah Bernhardt’s play Gismonda appeared on the city’s walls. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract.

What followed was a decade of posters, decorative panels, jewellery and advertising in the style everyone now calls Mucha: elongated women, flowing hair, ornamental borders and flat, muted colour. He came to resent being known for it. From 1912 to 1926 he worked on the Slav Epic, 20 canvases on the history and mythology of the Slavic peoples, some of them over six metres across, and he gave the cycle to the city of Prague in 1928. In 1939 the Gestapo arrested and interrogated him among the first Czechs detained after the German occupation; he died in Prague weeks later, aged 78.

![Alphonse Mucha]()

2. František Kupka

František Kupka (1871-1957) was one of the first painters anywhere to abandon the visible world altogether. He was born in Opočno in eastern Bohemia, trained in Prague and Vienna, and settled in Puteaux outside Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Around 1910 he began working out how colour and rhythm alone could carry a painting, taking his cues from music and from his interest in astronomy and spiritualism. Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours, shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1912, and Disks of Newton are among the earliest completely non-representational paintings in European art. He helped organise the Section d’Or group the same year. His long-standing patron was the Prague industrialist Jindřich Waldes, who built the largest collection of his work.

![František Kupka]()

3. Josef Mánes

Josef Mánes (1820-1871) was the painter of the Czech National Revival and the artist whose work most Czechs see most often without noticing. He was born in Prague into a family of painters and travelled through Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia recording rural costume, custom and landscape in thousands of drawings.

His most widely seen work is the calendar dial he painted for Prague’s astronomical clock in 1866, with its twelve roundels of the agricultural year; the original is in the Prague City Museum and a copy hangs on the Old Town Hall. He also designed banners, book decoration and the Cycles of the Year. He struggled with mental illness in his last years and died in Prague in 1871 at 51.

![Josef Mánes]()

4. Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) founded the science of genetics from a monastery garden in Brno. He was born Johann Mendel to a German-speaking farming family at Heinzendorf in Austrian Silesia, now Hynčice in Czechia, took the name Gregor when he entered the Augustinian abbey of St Thomas in Brno in 1843, and studied physics in Vienna under Christian Doppler.

Between 1856 and 1863 he grew and recorded some 28,000 pea plants, tracking seven traits through successive generations: plant height, seed shape, seed colour, pod shape, pod colour, flower colour and flower position. From the ratios he derived what are now the laws of segregation and independent assortment. He published in 1866 in the proceedings of the Brno natural history society, and almost nobody read it. The paper was rediscovered independently in 1900 by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, 34 years after publication and 16 years after Mendel’s death at 61.

![Gregor Mendel]()

5. Václav Brožík

Václav Brožík (1851-1901) was the Czech history painter of the late 19th century, working at a scale meant for national galleries and world exhibitions. He was born at Železný Hamr near Třemošná in western Bohemia, trained at the Prague Academy and then in Dresden, Munich and Paris, and married into a wealthy French art-dealing family, which gave him the studio and the connections to work on canvases of that size.

His subjects were the turning points of Czech history painted for a Czech audience under Austrian rule, which made them political as well as historical. Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, finished in 1883, is the best known, and it hangs in the Old Town Hall in Prague. He was also commissioned for The Opening of the Estates General by Louis XVI. He died in Paris in 1901 at 49.

![Václav Brožík]()

6. Toyen

Toyen (1902-1980) was the pseudonym of Marie Čermínová, the most important Czech surrealist and one of the few women at the centre of the movement rather than at its edge. Born in Prague, Toyen used the masculine grammatical gender in Czech, dressed in men’s clothes and refused feminine forms of address throughout adult life.

With the painter Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen developed Artificialism in the 1920s, joined the avant-garde group Devětsil in 1923 and lived in Paris from 1925 to 1928. Back in Prague, Toyen was a founding member of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 and worked closely with André Breton. Toyen produced anti-fascist cycles in the late 1930s, spent the occupation hiding the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler in the flat, and left for Paris in 1947, staying after the communist takeover of February 1948 and working there until death in 1980.

![Toyen]()

7. Jan Evangelista Purkyně

Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787-1869) was the physiologist whose name is attached to structures inside your own body. He was born in Libochovice in northern Bohemia, spent years as a private tutor before qualifying in medicine at Prague in 1818, and in 1823 was appointed professor of physiology at the University of Breslau in Prussian Silesia, now Wrocław in Poland.

He stayed at Breslau for 27 years and did most of his important work there, founding the world’s first independent department of physiology in 1839. He described the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum and the Purkinje fibres that conduct the heartbeat, discovered the Purkinje effect in vision, and was the first person to propose fingerprints as a means of identification. He returned to Prague in 1850 to take the chair of physiology at the Czech university and held it until his death in 1869, campaigning for Czech-language science the whole time.

![Jan Evangelista Purkyně]()

8. Josef Lada

Josef Lada (1887-1957) drew the pictures that Czechs still use to imagine their own countryside. He was born in Hrusice, a village in central Bohemia, the son of a cobbler, and was largely self-taught after a brief spell at the Prague school of applied arts.

His style is instantly recognisable: thick black outline, flat colour, snow, village pubs, cats, water sprites and a permanently amused expression on every face. He illustrated more than 100 books, wrote and illustrated his own children’s stories including Mikeš the talking cat, and is known worldwide as the original illustrator of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk. His winter village scenes are on Czech Christmas cards every year. He died in Prague in 1957 at 70.

![Josef Lada]()

9. Mikoláš Aleš

Mikoláš Aleš (1852-1913) was the illustrator of the Czech national story, and his drawings decorate buildings across the country. He was born in Mirotice in South Bohemia and studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts.

Aleš worked in outline and sgraffito rather than oil, which is why you meet him on walls: he designed the sgraffito decoration on the Old Town Hall in Plzeň, on the Wiehl House on Wenceslas Square and on the National Theatre foyer, where his lunettes on the theme of My Country were painted up by others. He drew Jan Žižka and the Hussites, Czech fairy tales, folk songs and thousands of vignettes for magazines and schoolbooks. The Aleš South Bohemian Gallery at Hluboká nad Vltavou is named after him.

![Mikoláš Aleš]()

10. Otto Wichterle

Otto Wichterle (1913-1998) invented the soft contact lens, and he made the first working ones on his kitchen table. He was born in Prostějov in Moravia, trained as a chemist at the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, and worked during the war at the Baťa research institute in Zlín, where he developed the Czechoslovak nylon fibre silon.

In 1953 he and Drahoslav Lím synthesised the hydrogel that made soft lenses possible, a crosslinked HEMA polymer that holds water and lets oxygen through. When his institute took his laboratory equipment away, he built a spin-casting rig at home at Christmas 1961 out of a Merkur children’s construction set, powered it with a bicycle dynamo, and produced the first four lenses on it. The patent was sold abroad and made a fortune for others. Wichterle was removed from his post after 1968 for signing the Two Thousand Words manifesto, and was elected president of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1990, aged 76.

![Otto Wichterle]()

11. Max Švabinský

Max Švabinský (1873-1962) was the great Czech draughtsman and printmaker of the first half of the 20th century, and the artist whose work Czechs handled every day. He was born in Kroměříž in Moravia, studied at the Prague Academy under Maxmilián Pirner and taught there himself for nearly 30 years.

He worked in almost every graphic technique there is, and his portrait drawings of Czech writers and scientists are the standard likenesses of those people. He designed postage stamps and banknotes for Czechoslovakia over decades, which is how his line became familiar to everyone in the country, and he made the great south window of the Last Judgement in St Vitus Cathedral. The Max Švabinský memorial in his native Kroměříž holds a large part of his output.

![Max Švabinský]()

12. Emil Filla

Emil Filla (1882-1953) brought Cubism to the Czech lands and paid for it twice over. He was born in Chropyně in Moravia, studied in Prague, and in 1907 painted Reader of Dostoyevsky, the picture usually taken as the start of Czech modernism. He was a founding member of the Group of Plastic Artists in 1911 and spent long periods in Paris in close contact with Braque and Picasso.

Filla spent the First World War in the Netherlands working for the Czechoslovak resistance abroad. On the first day of the Second World War he was arrested by the Gestapo and spent the next six years in Dachau and Buchenwald. He survived, returned, taught at the applied arts academy in Prague and painted the landscapes of the České středohoří hills that occupied his last years, while the new communist cultural authorities condemned his earlier work as formalist. He died in 1953 at 71.

![Emil Filla]()

13. Jaroslav Heyrovský

Jaroslav Heyrovský (1890-1967) is the only Czech to have won a Nobel Prize in a science. He was born in Prague, studied there and at University College London, and invented polarography in Prague in 1922.

Polarography measures the current flowing through a solution as mercury drips from an electrode, and the resulting curve identifies and quantifies what is dissolved in the liquid. It made rapid chemical analysis possible in laboratories that had no other way of doing it, and it spread through chemistry, metallurgy, medicine and industry. Heyrovský built the first automatic polarograph with Masuzo Shikata in 1924, founded the Polarographic Institute in Prague, and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1959.

![Jaroslav Heyrovský]()

14. Jan Zrzavý

Jan Zrzavý (1890-1977) painted a private world that never quite belonged to any movement. He was born in Okrouhlice in the Vysočina region, was refused entry to the Prague Academy, and studied at the school of applied arts instead.

His paintings are quiet, simplified and lit from nowhere in particular: Cleopatra, Melancholy, Christ figures, and above all the Breton coast at Île de Sein, which he painted repeatedly over 40 years after first going there in the 1920s. He was a member of the Sursum group and later of the Mánes association, worked in illustration and stage design, and lived long enough to be rediscovered by successive generations. He died in Prague in 1977 at 87.

![Jan Zrzavý]()

15. Josef Čapek

Josef Čapek (1887-1945) was a painter, writer and the man who actually coined the word “robot”. He was born in Hronov in north-eastern Bohemia, the elder brother of the writer Karel Čapek, and the two worked together for years.

Čapek was a founder of the Group of Plastic Artists and one of the first Czech Cubists, though his later painting moved towards flat, near-naive figures and the children’s book pictures he is loved for at home. When Karel was struggling to name the artificial workers in his play R.U.R., Josef suggested “roboti”, from robota, the forced labour a serf owed a landlord; Karel published the credit himself. Josef was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 September 1939, the first day of the war, and died at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weeks before liberation. His grave is unknown.

![Josef Čapek]()

16. Antonín Holý

Antonín Holý (1936-2012) designed the antiviral compounds that turned HIV from a death sentence into a managed condition. He was born in Prague and spent his whole career at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Working with the Belgian virologist Erik De Clercq from 1976, Holý developed a class of molecules called acyclic nucleoside phosphonates. Three of them became drugs: cidofovir, adefovir and, above all, tenofovir, which is the backbone of HIV treatment and prevention worldwide and is also used against hepatitis B. The royalties on them funded the institute he worked at for decades. He died in Prague in 2012 at 75.

![Antonín Holý]()

17. František Křižík

František Křižík (1847-1941) electrified Bohemia. He was born in Plánice in western Bohemia to a shoemaker and a servant, trained in Prague, and made his name in 1881 at the Paris International Exposition of Electricity, where his improved arc lamp regulator won a gold medal against Edison and Siemens.

He built the first electric tram line in Bohemia, running in Prague from 1891, electrified railway lines, ran his own factory in Karlín and registered more than a hundred patents. His best-known surviving work is the Křižík Fountain at the Prague exhibition grounds, built for the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition, which still runs light and water shows. He lost most of his fortune in the 1920s and died at 94 in 1941, during the German occupation.

![František Křižík]()

18. Antonín Slavíček

Antonín Slavíček (1870-1910) was the leading Czech impressionist landscape painter and had the shortest career on this list. He was born in Prague, studied under Julius Mařák at the Academy of Fine Arts, and belonged to the Mánes Union of Fine Arts.

His subject was the Czech countryside seen in specific weather at a specific hour, and the roughly 70 canvases he painted at Kameničky in the Vysočina uplands are regarded as his best work. He also painted Prague itself in a series of views from 1907 onwards. On 10 August 1909 a stroke while bathing in the Zdobnice river paralysed his right side; unable to work as he wanted to with his left hand, he took his own life on 1 February 1910, aged 39.

![Antonín Slavíček]()

19. Jakub Schikaneder

Jakub Schikaneder (1855-1924) painted Prague at dusk, and did it so distinctively that the mood is now named after him. He was born in Prague, studied at the Academy under Antonín Lhota and in Munich, and taught at the school of applied arts in Prague for decades.

His subject was the old city in fog, snow and lamplight, its courtyards and quays emptied of everyone but a single figure. The best known painting is Murder in the House from 1890, a woman’s body on a tenement floor and a neighbour standing over it, which caused a scandal at the time and is now in the National Gallery. He was a relative of Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto for Mozart’s Magic Flute.

![Jakub Schikaneder]()

20. Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek (1890-1938) was the most important Czech writer of the 20th century and the man whose play put the word “robot” into every language. He was born in Malé Svatoňovice in north-eastern Bohemia and worked as a journalist for Lidové noviny most of his life.

R.U.R., written in 1920 and premiered in Prague in January 1921, is set in a factory making artificial people, and it ends with them destroying humanity. Čapek always credited the word itself to his brother Josef. His other work is more varied than the robot story suggests: War with the Newts, a satire on fascism; The Absolute at Large; Dashenka, a book about his puppy; and a set of interviews with President Masaryk that remain the standard portrait of him. He was named the most dangerous man in Czechoslovakia by the Gestapo, but he had already died, of pneumonia on 25 December 1938, three months before the German occupation.

21. Oldřich Sahajdák

Oldřich Sahajdák is the chef of La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise in Prague, and the person most responsible for the idea that Czech food can be fine dining. The restaurant, on Haštalská in the Old Town, has held a Michelin star continuously since 2012, which makes it the longest-standing starred restaurant in the country.

His method is research as much as cooking: the menus are built from Czech and Bohemian recipes going back to the 19th century and earlier, rebuilt with modern technique and sourced from named producers he has worked with for years. It is the opposite of the international fine-dining template, and it is why the restaurant is on every serious list of where to eat in Prague.

![Oldřich Sahajdák]()

22. Petr Brandl

Petr Brandl (1668-1735) was the outstanding Baroque painter of the Czech lands and a byword for a life lived badly. He was born in Prague, trained in the imperial gallery at Prague Castle, and by his thirties was the most sought-after altarpiece painter in Bohemia.

His work is dark, thickly painted and psychologically direct, especially in the heads: the altarpieces at the Břevnov monastery church, the Hospital at Kuks, and the great Simeon with the Infant Jesus. He earned enormous sums and lost all of it, was imprisoned for debt more than once, separated from his wife and died in poverty in Kutná Hora in 1735. The town paid for his funeral.

![Petr Brandl]()

23. Jan Janský

Jan Janský (1873-1921) was the first person to describe all four human blood groups. He was born in Prague, qualified in medicine at Charles University, and worked as a psychiatrist rather than a haematologist; the blood work began as an attempt to find a link between blood and mental illness, which he never found.

In 1907 he published a classification of human blood into four groups, which he numbered I, II, III and IV, and which correspond to the modern O, A, B and AB. Karl Landsteiner had described three groups in Vienna in 1901 and won the Nobel Prize for it in 1930, but Janský’s four-group system was the complete one, and an American commission recognised his priority for it in 1921. He volunteered as a front-line doctor in the First World War despite a diagnosed heart condition and died at Černošice near Prague in September 1921, aged 48. Czech blood donors are still awarded the Jan Janský medal.

![Jan Janský]()

24. Josef Ressel

Josef Ressel (1793-1857) designed the screw propeller that replaced the paddle wheel. He was born in Chrudim in eastern Bohemia, trained as a forester at Mariabrunn near Vienna, and spent his working life managing the Austrian coastal forests that supplied timber to the imperial navy, which is how a forester came to think about ships.

He patented his propeller in 1827 and tested it in 1829 on the steamer Civetta in the harbour at Trieste, reaching about six knots before a boiler pipe burst and the police stopped the trial. He never got the backing to try again, and the propeller was patented separately in Britain a decade later by others. He died of typhoid at Ljubljana in 1857, unrecognised. Essentially every powered vessel afloat now uses the principle.

![Josef Ressel]()

25. Karel Václav Klíč

Karel Václav Klíč (1841-1926) invented photogravure and then rotogravure, the processes that let the 20th century print photographs and colour at scale. He was born in Hostinné in north-eastern Bohemia, worked as a painter, caricaturist and photographer in Brno and Vienna, and had no formal training in printing.

He worked out photogravure in 1878, transferring a photographic image through a carbon tissue onto a copper plate dusted with resin so that the etched cells hold varying depths of ink. In the 1890s, working in Lancashire, he combined the idea with a rotary press and a doctor blade to create rotogravure, and kept the method secret for years. Every colour magazine, catalogue and packaging run printed by gravure since descends from it. He died in Vienna in 1926.

![Karel Václav Klíč]()

26. Zdeněk Pohlreich

Zdeněk Pohlreich is the Czech chef who changed what ordinary Czechs expect from a restaurant, largely by shouting at people on television. He was born in Prague in 1961, trained in the hotel schools and then in kitchens in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Australia, and came back to open his own restaurants in Prague.

His television programme Ano, šéfe!, the Czech equivalent of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, ran for years and made him a household name; he has also fronted the Czech versions of MasterChef and Hell’s Kitchen. His argument has been consistent for two decades: that Czech restaurant cooking was coasting on low expectations, and that the fix is fresh ingredients and honest prices rather than anything elaborate. Whether or not you like the format, the standard of a mid-range Prague restaurant is measurably better than it was.

![Zdeněk Pohlreich]()

27. Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) is the most performed Czech composer in the world. He was born at Nelahozeves on the Vltava, the son of a butcher and innkeeper, played viola in the orchestra of the Provisional Theatre in Prague under Smetana for a decade, and was pulled out of obscurity by a state stipend whose jury included Brahms.

From 1892 to 1895 he directed the National Conservatory of Music in New York, and it was there that he wrote the Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, the Cello Concerto in B minor and the American string quartet, arguing publicly that American composers should build on the music of Black Americans and Native Americans rather than on Europe. At home he wrote the Slavonic Dances, the Stabat Mater and the opera Rusalka, whose Song to the Moon is the best-known aria in the Czech repertoire. He died in Prague in 1904 at 62.

28. John Amos Comenius

Jan Amos Komenský (1592-1670), known in English as Comenius, is called the teacher of nations and is the founder of modern pedagogy. He was born in Moravia, probably at Nivnice near Uherský Brod, was orphaned at 12, and studied at Herborn and Heidelberg before becoming a minister of the Unity of the Brethren.

The Habsburg Counter-Reformation destroyed his life twice: he lost his first wife and both children to plague, his library and manuscripts to fire, and in 1628 he went into exile in Leszno in Poland and never returned home. From exile he wrote The Great Didactic, arguing for schooling for all children including girls and the poor, teaching in the mother tongue rather than Latin, and matching lessons to the age of the child. Orbis Sensualium Pictus, published in 1658, paired pictures with words and was the first illustrated textbook for children; it stayed in use across Europe for two centuries. He died in Amsterdam in 1670 and is buried at Naarden.

![John Amos Comenius]()

29. Roman Paulus

Roman Paulus is one of the chefs who established that Czech kitchens could work at international level. Born in 1975, he led the kitchen at the Alcron restaurant in Prague’s Radisson Blu Alcron Hotel, a 24-seat dining room, from 2008.

The Michelin Guide awarded Alcron a star in 2012, in the same year as La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise, and the restaurant held it until the end of the 2010s. Prague’s first star had gone to Allegro at the Four Seasons under the Italian chef Andrea Accordi in 2008, the first Michelin star anywhere in the former Eastern Bloc; the claim, repeated in a great many articles, that Alcron won Prague’s first star is wrong. Paulus has since written cookbooks and worked in consultancy and teaching, and the Alcron restaurant itself has closed.

![Roman Paulus]()

30. Věra Čáslavská

Věra Čáslavská (1942-2016) won seven Olympic gold medals in gymnastics and is the only gymnast, of either sex, to have won an individual Olympic title on every apparatus. She was born in Prague, took four golds at Mexico City in 1968 and three at Tokyo in 1964, and was twice world champion.

The Mexico City games came weeks after Warsaw Pact tanks entered Czechoslovakia. Čáslavská had signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto that summer and had trained in hiding in the mountains, swinging from tree branches and lifting sacks of coal, because she could not get to a gymnasium. When the judges revised the scores to give a Soviet gymnast a share of two of her titles, she looked away and down during the Soviet anthem on the podium, twice. She was barred from competition, coaching and travel for the next twenty years, and was rehabilitated only after 1989, when she chaired the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee.

Who are the most famous Czech scientists and inventors?

The most famous Czech scientists and inventors are the four whose work is in daily use worldwide: Mendel in genetics, Wichterle in materials, Heyrovský in analytical chemistry and Holý in antiviral medicine. They are listed below.

• Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Gregor Mendel established the laws of inheritance from 28,000 pea plants in a monastery garden in Brno, published the result in 1866, and was ignored until three separate researchers rediscovered the paper in 1900.
• Otto Wichterle (1913-1998). Otto Wichterle synthesised the HEMA hydrogel in 1953 and spun the first soft contact lenses at home at Christmas 1961 on a rig built from a Merkur children’s construction set and a bicycle dynamo.
• Jaroslav Heyrovský (1890-1967). Jaroslav Heyrovský invented polarography in Prague in 1922, built the first automatic polarograph in 1924, and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1959, the only Czech to win a science Nobel.
• Antonín Holý (1936-2012). Antonín Holý developed the acyclic nucleoside phosphonates behind cidofovir, adefovir and tenofovir, working with Erik De Clercq, and tenofovir remains the backbone of HIV treatment and prevention worldwide.

Who are the most famous Czechs who hold a special record?

Four Czechs hold records that have never been equalled, in distance running, gymnastics, tennis and ice hockey. They are listed below.

• Emil Zátopek (1922-2000). Emil Zátopek is the only athlete to have won the 5,000 metres (3.1 mi), the 10,000 metres (6.2 mi) and the marathon at a single Olympic Games, at Helsinki in 1952, and the marathon was the first he had ever run.
• Věra Čáslavská (1942-2016). Věra Čáslavská is the only gymnast of either sex to have won an individual Olympic gold on every apparatus, and she took seven Olympic titles in all.
• Martina Navrátilová (born 1956). Martina Navrátilová holds the record for Wimbledon singles titles in the open era with nine, won between 1978 and 1990, and 20 Wimbledon titles across singles, doubles and mixed doubles.
• Jaromír Jágr (born 1972). Jaromír Jágr holds the NHL career records for points and goals by a European-born player, with 1,921 points and 766 goals across 24 NHL seasons, and was still playing professionally for his home club in Kladno in his fifties.

Who are the most famous Czech artists?

The most famous Czech artists internationally are Mucha, Kupka and Toyen, each of whom worked mainly in Paris and each of whom is in major museum collections worldwide. They are listed below.

• Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939). Alphonse Mucha created the poster style that became Art Nouveau, from the 1895 Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt onwards, and spent his last 14 working years on the 20 canvases of the Slav Epic.
• František Kupka (1871-1957). František Kupka painted some of the first completely non-representational pictures in Europe, including Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours in 1912, working from music, colour theory and astronomy rather than from any visible subject.
• Toyen (1902-1980). Toyen was the leading Czech surrealist, a founder of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 and a close collaborator of André Breton in Paris after 1947.
• Josef Lada (1887-1957). Josef Lada illustrated The Good Soldier Švejk and drew the black-outlined village winters that are still the standard Czech image of Christmas.

Who are the most famous Czech singers and musicians?

The most famous Czech musicians are the three composers whose work is in the standard international repertoire, plus the singer who sold records for six decades at home. They are listed below.

• Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904). Antonín Dvořák wrote the New World Symphony, the Cello Concerto in B minor and Rusalka, and is the most performed Czech composer in the world.
• Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Bedřich Smetana is the founder of Czech national music, best known for the opera The Bartered Bride and for Má vlast, whose second movement Vltava is played to open the Prague Spring festival every year. He wrote most of it after going completely deaf in 1874.
• Leoš Janáček (1854-1928). Leoš Janáček built his music out of the rhythms of spoken Czech, wrote the operas Jenůfa, Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, and did nearly all of his major work after the age of 60.
• Karel Gott (1939-2019). Karel Gott was the country’s dominant popular singer for six decades, won the domestic Golden Nightingale poll dozens of times, and sang the German theme song for the Maya the Bee cartoon that a generation in Central Europe grew up with.

Who are the most famous Czech actors and film-makers?

The best-known Czech names in film are directors rather than actors, because the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s exported abroad in a way individual performers did not.

Miloš Forman (1932-2018) made Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde in Prague, left after 1968 and won the Academy Award for Best Director twice in the United States, for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and Amadeus in 1984; Amadeus was filmed in Prague. Jiří Menzel (1938-2020) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968 for Closely Watched Trains, adapted from Bohumil Hrabal, and kept working in Czech film and theatre for another fifty years. Jan Švankmajer (born 1934) is the surrealist animator whose stop-motion work, including Alice and Faust, has influenced film-makers from the Brothers Quay to Tim Burton.

Among actors, Jan Werich (1905-1980) and Jiří Voskovec (1905-1981) were the comic duo of the interwar Liberated Theatre in Prague, whose satirical revues and films made them national figures; Voskovec later played Juror 11 in Twelve Angry Men in the United States. Rudolf Hrušínský (1920-1994) played Švejk in the 1956 film and the crematorium manager in The Cremator, which is the great Czech horror film of the 1960s.

Who are the most famous Czech sportsmen?

The most famous Czech athletes are a runner, a hockey player, a javelin thrower and a goalkeeper, and three of the four hold records that still stand. They are listed below.

• Emil Zátopek (1922-2000). Emil Zátopek won the 5,000 metres (3.1 mi), the 10,000 metres (6.2 mi) and the marathon at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, set 18 world records, and was voted the greatest Czech athlete of the 20th century.
• Jaromír Jágr (born 1972). Jaromír Jágr scored 766 goals and 1,921 points across 24 NHL seasons, both records for a European-born player, and went on playing for Kladno in the Czech league long after his contemporaries retired.
• Jan Železný (born 1966). Jan Železný holds the javelin world record at 98.48 m (323.1 ft), set at Jena in 1996 and unbeaten since, and won Olympic gold in 1992, 1996 and 2000 and three world titles.
• Petr Čech (born 1982). Petr Čech reached 100 Premier League clean sheets in 180 games, the fastest anyone has, kept 24 clean sheets in the 2004-05 season, another record, and won four league titles, the Champions League and the Europa League with Chelsea.

Who are the most famous Czech chefs?

The most famous Czech chefs are the two who put Prague on the Michelin map and the one who changed what ordinary Czechs expect from a restaurant. They are listed below.

• Oldřich Sahajdák. Oldřich Sahajdák has held a Michelin star at La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise in Prague continuously since 2012, the longest run in the country, cooking Czech and Bohemian recipes from the 19th century and earlier with modern technique.
• Zdeněk Pohlreich (born 1961). Zdeněk Pohlreich is the country’s best-known chef and television presenter, whose programme Ano, šéfe! spent years telling Czech restaurateurs what was wrong with their kitchens.
• Roman Paulus (born 1975). Roman Paulus led the Alcron restaurant in Prague to a Michelin star in 2012 and held it until the end of the decade, though Prague’s first star had gone to Allegro under Andrea Accordi four years earlier.

Prague now has several starred restaurants and, since the Michelin Guide gave Czechia its own national edition, a two-star restaurant as well. Check the current guide before booking, because the list changes every year.

What are the most fun facts about Czechia?

The facts most worth knowing about Czechia are the ones that are usually quoted wrong. Our full guide covers more fun facts about Czechs; five are listed below.

• Czechia ranks 13th on the Global Peace Index. Czechia placed 13th of 163 countries in the 2026 Global Peace Index with a score of 1.517, ahead of Canada and Hungary. Older articles putting it 7th are quoting an earlier edition.
• Czechs drink more beer per head than anyone else. Domestic consumption fell to 121 litres per person in 2025, a record low that still leaves Czechia first in the world for the 32nd year running.
• The country has more than 2,000 castles and chateaux. That is the highest density of castles per square kilometre anywhere, and about 300 of them are open to the public.
• Prague has the oldest working astronomical clock in the world. The Old Town Hall clock was installed in 1410 and is the third-oldest ever built, after Padua in 1344 and Strasbourg in 1354, but the only one of the three still running.
• The word “robot” is Czech. It comes from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., built on robota, the forced labour a serf owed a landowner, and Josef Čapek suggested it.

Where can you see their work in Czechia?

You can see most of the work on this page in three cities, and Prague holds the majority of it. The Mucha Museum in Prague covers the posters, and the Slav Epic is shown periodically rather than permanently, so check where it is before you plan a trip around it. The National Gallery holds Kupka, Filla, Toyen, Zrzavý, Schikaneder’s Murder in the House and Slavíček; the Prague City Museum has Mánes’s original astronomical clock calendar dial.

Brno is where Mendel worked, and the Mendel Museum sits in the Augustinian abbey at Old Brno with the garden he used. Kroměříž holds the Švabinský memorial, Hluboká nad Vltavou the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, and Hrusice near Prague the Josef Lada memorial in the house he was born in. Prague and Brno are a little over two hours apart by train, and you can compare trains and buses across Europe in a single search rather than working through the operator sites in Czech.

The smaller memorials, at Kameničky for Slavíček and Hynčice for Mendel, are village museums with short opening hours and are far easier to reach by car; DiscoverCars compares the Prague and Brno desks in one go. For a base in either city, apartments are usually better value than hotels for a few nights, and Vrbo lists more of them centrally. Read our Prague guide before you plan the city days.

Is it expensive to visit Czechia?

No, Czechia is one of the cheaper countries in the European Union to visit, and the museums and galleries holding this work are notably cheap. Entry to a national gallery building or a memorial house costs a fraction of the equivalent in Vienna or Munich, and several have free days.

Prague has become more expensive over the last decade, but the increase is concentrated in restaurants and hotels in the historic centre rather than in culture and transport. Brno, Olomouc, Plzeň and the smaller towns remain markedly cheaper than the capital for everything. Our guide to costs and prices in Czech Republic sets out what to budget.

What are the most popular holiday dates in Czechia?

Four dates matter most in the Czech calendar: Christmas Eve on 24 December, the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day on 17 November, Easter Monday, and New Year’s Day on 1 January. Museums and galleries close on several of them, which matters if you are travelling to see specific work.

Christmas happens on the evening of 24 December in Czechia, not on the 25th: families eat fried carp and potato salad, presents are brought by Ježíšek, the Baby Jesus, and midnight mass follows the meal. Almost everything closes that day. The 17th of November marks both the Nazi closure of Czech universities in 1939 and the student march that began the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Easter Monday keeps the pomlázka tradition of braided willow switches. New Year’s Day is also the anniversary of the founding of the Czech state in 1993. Our guide to the popular holiday dates has the full calendar.

What are the top places to visit in Czechia?

The four places that carry most first trips to Czechia are Prague, Český Krumlov, Karlovy Vary and Kutná Hora, and all four are within a day of the capital. They are listed below.

• Prague. Prague holds Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle complex in the world at about 70,000 square metres (17 acres), Charles Bridge, the astronomical clock, the Jewish Quarter, Vyšehrad and most of the art named on this page. It is one of the best places to visit in Czechia and the base almost everyone uses.
• Český Krumlov. Český Krumlov is a UNESCO-listed medieval town looped by the Vltava in South Bohemia, built around the second largest castle complex in the country, with a Baroque theatre still in its original building and the Egon Schiele Art Centrum in the old town.
• Karlovy Vary. Karlovy Vary is the grandest of the Czech spa towns, one of the three inscribed by UNESCO as Great Spa Towns of Europe in 2021, with colonnades built over hot mineral springs, the Vřídlo geyser and Belle Époque hotels along a wooded river valley.
• Kutná Hora. Kutná Hora was the silver-mining town that funded the Bohemian crown, and it holds St Barbara’s Cathedral, the Italian Court where the royal mint stood, the medieval silver mine you can walk through, and the Sedlec Ossuary decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team covers Czechia for independent travellers, from Prague’s galleries and the Mendel abbey in Brno to the memorial houses in the villages these people came from, including the tours, trains, rental cars and apartments worth booking. Every name, date and birthplace on this page has been checked individually against a primary or reference source, and we correct it when the record does.