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This year’s Czech Lion film awards were dominated by The Painted Bird by Václav Marhoul, which triumphed with no fewer than nine prizes. Two of the other main contenders, Owners and Old-Timers, shared the best acting gongs. I spoke to several of the winners at Saturday’s ceremony.

Veteran diplomat Jiří Šedivý, a former ambassador to NATO and minister of defence, was elected chief executive of the European Defence Agency on Thursday by EU Ministers of Defence. As such, he will be tasked with developing the bloc’s strategic autonomy in defence.

Photographer Marie Tomanová, who has been living in the US for the past decade, won many accolades for Young Americans, a series of striking portraits that came out in book form 12 months ago. Now Tomanová has a new exhibition in Prague – based on photographs she took on a rare visit to her hometown in south Moravia in late 2018. I spoke to her just ahead of the opening of It Was Once My Universe.

The Czech state railways administration has been quietly developing a new, uniform audio announcement system that will do away with unique station jingles, beloved by train-spotters and many a nostalgic commuter. Over the past two months, such jingles – directly associated with specific destinations – have disappeared from Frýdek-Místek, Pardubice, Hradec Králové, Valašské Meziříčí and even Brno. But a petition is afoot to stop the move in its tracks.

Curators at the National Museum have discovered a previously unknown recording of a speech given by the first Czechoslovak president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, on March 7th 1930 – on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The recording made on a phonographic roller contains part of what was a “state of the republic” address at a time when the country stood on the brink of recession.

Archaeologists are busy excavating massive walls of a Moravian castle dating back to the early Slavonic Age of nearly a millennium ago. The extraordinary find, made near the Comenius Museum in the town of Přerov, sheds lights on how royals sought to guard a medieval trade route in the Moravian Gate valley.

Amidst growing fears of the spread of coronavirus, the National Security Council on Wednesday moved to bring the situation under greater control announcing that respirators will be centrally purchased and distributed to those most in need. The prime minister said the council would issue directives which must be respected in all regions and appealed to the public to help the effort by limiting travel, the Airbnb business and not taking unnecessary risks.

The opening up of the archives of Pope Pius XII by the Vatican is seen worldwide as an opportunity to find answers to long-term questions about the secretive pontiff who was in charge of the Holy See between 1939 and the early stages of the Cold War. There are also hopes that the documents could shed light on the Vatican’s position towards Czechoslovakia in many of the key moments of the country’s history.

The National Gallery in Prague has received a major donation of Japanese Zen art, which includes over 500 hanging scrolls with ink paintings. The scrolls are part of the so-called Kaeru-An collection, put together by private art collector Felix Hess, and their value is estimated at 35 million crowns. They will become part of the gallery’s permanent Collection of Asian and African Art.

There were tens of thousands of telephone booths in the Czech Republic at the turn of the millennium. Today there are only 1,500, with more and more being removed by the day. While few seem to be shedding tears of nostalgia, some municipalities have found new uses for them.