In Focus | All stories

The guerrilla art group Ztohoven, known for their controversial projects and often operating in anonymity, have made a somewhat surprising move. This weekend, they opened an official institution, a so-called institute of crypto-anarchy. Situated in a former factory building in Holešovice, the Paralelní Polis or parallel world will serve as a hacker space, a hub and a bitcoin café. According to its founders, it will offer the public a possibility to “step out of the system”.

This week Prague is hosting its biggest annual design festival, Designblok, with dozens of presentations, exhibitions and fashion shows taking place in the city. Unlike in the previous years, when it occupied various industrial spaces, Designblok has now moved to the centre of Prague. The festival’s main exhibition space – the so-called Superstudio – is located right on Wenceslas Square. When I spoke to Jana Zielienski, the director of Designblok, I first asked her why they decided to make this move:

This summer, an off-Broadway theatre in New York put on a play about the actress Hana Pravda and the athlete Miloš Dobrý, two extraordinary Czech Jews living in Prague before WWII. The documentary drama “The Good and the True”, which has run for two months, follows the life of the protagonists who however never met in real life. Originally written and directed by Daniel Hrbek for Prague’s Švandovo Theatre, the intimate play conveys the courage and determination which helped the two people survive the horrors of Terezín and Auschwitz.

In 1870, Antonín Dvořák, who was yet to become one of the world’s finest composers, wrote his first opera called Alfred. The piece was only performed once, in 1938, long after Dvořák’s death, and then fell into oblivion. Now, nearly seventy years after its first staging, Alfred lived to see its second premiere, this time with the original German libretto, as part of the Dvořák Prague festival.

Czech expats from around the world gathered in Prague last week for a conference on maintaining their native language skills abroad. Czechoslovak exiles who fled the country after the war or after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, descendants of the old Czech settlers, as well as members of the younger community of Czechs who went abroad to study or work met for a two-day event held in the National Museum building in the centre of Prague to discuss their cultural and linguistic heritage.

Detergents, painkillers and contraceptives are things we use daily. What most of us don’t realize is that all of them contribute to the presence of toxins in our rivers and even drinking water. A special research team at Brno’s Masaryk University is now working to ascertain what toxins pass through water treatment plants and how they could be more effectively eliminated. I spoke to the head of the team prof. Luděk Bláha about the problems involved.

This year the whole of Europe is commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The Jewish Museum in Prague is marking the anniversary with an exhibition focused on the fate of the Jewish refugees, a chapter in history that has been largely forgotten. The exhibition entitled “The Orient in Bohemia” displays photographs that document the life of refugees but it also explores the response of the local population to the wave of migrants. I visited the Jewish Museum’s Robert Guttman Gallery to see the exhibition and talk to its

A one-of-a-kind instrument called raketon made its first public appearance three years ago in a museum exhibit, but this week it had its debut in a contemporary classical music concert, together with Prague’s Berg Orchestra. I had a chance to speak to Raketon’s inventor Michal Cimala and to composer Jakub Rataj who mastered this simple and elegant instrument and wrote the first orchestral piece that includes it. Both of them perform on the raketon as well by plucking, striking and touching its two strings with bows, mallets and even milk

Czech students are sought after not just by local universities and colleges, but also by their European counterparts as student numbers dwindle across the continent. But while they are faced with more choice, Czech students also face a more difficult jobs market and the need to mark themselves out from the rest. Chris Johnstone looks at the evolving higher education market.

Almost eighty years after her ordination, the world’s first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, has been honoured at the former Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. Several of her successors, including the first American female rabbi Sally Priesand, attended the ceremony in Terezín. Since Jonas’ times, women have been serving the religious needs of hundreds of congregations around the world – but for the largely secular Czech Jewish community, there are no women rabbis in sight.