In Focus | All stories

More than eleven centuries after the fall of the Great Moravian Empire, there are still direct descendants from the Slavic noblemen living among us. A study of DNA samples, carried out recently by the Moravian Museum in Brno, found eleven men from the region of Uherské Hradiště who definitely have Great Moravian ancestors in their bloodlines.

Twenty years ago history was made in Independence, Missouri. Three post-communist countries officially entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were the first former members of the Warsaws Pact to join NATO. Why was the small US Midwestern city selected as the best place for the main official event on that significant day?

Over 25,000 books were looted from the Czech lands by the Swedes at the end of the Thirty Years War. Today these valuable prints and manuscripts are scattered in libraries all around Sweden, but also elsewhere in Europe. A new project by the Czech Academy of Sciences attempts to trace all the books that have survived and create a digital catalogue accessible both to researchers and the general public.

Just this month, Warhorse Studios, one of the country’s most successful videogame studios, was bought by a foreign investor in a CZK 1.1 billion deal. It is the successful conclusion to a project that just five years ago had to resort to Kickstarter to fund its first game. But Warhorse’s game Kingdom Come: Deliverance is not the only accomplished title to be made in the Czech Republic, where pen and paper games, rather than videogames were the hit just a quarter of a century ago.

Nearly four years ago, in April 2015, Czech adventurer Jiří Oliva set off on a journey to fulfil his dream: travelling around Europe in a kayak. Originally, he planned to cover over 20,000 kilometres, but after three and a half years "on the road" he decided to make a shortcut and return back home.

A free global network for poets and poetry lovers, developed in the Czech Republic, has recently been launched in the United States. Called Poetizer, it allows its users to publish and share their poems and aims to serve as an alternative to the existing social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. The site was originally founded in 2017 as a mobile app and currently covers some 120 countries with over 65,000 poems written by its users.

Professor Jiří Neužil is one of the Czech Republic’s leading specialists in cancer research. His research teams at the Biotechnological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Griffith University in Australia have focused on a novel approach in the fight against incurable forms of breast cancer: eradicating cancer cells by targeting mitochondria. Should the resulting new drug, now being tested on patients in Prague, prove effective it could lead to a major breakthrough in cancer therapy.

A giant dragon, a knight in armour or a beautiful princess - these are just some of the monumental ice sculptures currently on display at the annual Ice Sculpting Festival in Pustevny in the Beskydy Mountains in the northeast of the Czech Republic.

Today, nine out of 10 Czech children are learning English at school. It seems strange that for decades English was considered the language of the enemy – first by Nazi Germany, which occupied present-day Czechia; and later by the communist totalitarian regime. This is the story of an extraordinary man for whom English was a lifelong passion no matter who was in power.

The Czech society has traditionally been quite homogenous. Of course, there have always been regional differences in dialect, culture, folk music. But people understand each other no matter which part of the country they come from, consider themselves to be of one nationality. And that has started changing.