Letter from Prague | All stories

Over the last few weeks the Czech papers have been full of a man called Robert Rosenberg, and a rather unusual film project. Rosenberg is a porn star turned producer, and two weeks ago the Czech tabloid Super claimed he was planning to make a hard-core sex film in the former Terezin concentration camp. The paper even superimposed images of people indulging in graphic sex acts over pictures of the fortress's grim red-brick walls, to help those readers with little or no imagination. Unsurprisingly the report caused uproar - around 140,000 Jews from across Europe were herded into the Terezin ghetto, thousands died there, and almost 90,000 were later sent to Auschwitz.

Easter is observed by the Western Christian churches on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. Easter is a movable feast and can occur as early as March 22nd or as late as April 25th. This year the Sun was at the first point of Aries already at quarter past 8 pm on March 20th. So the Roman Catholic and Protestant Easter falls on the 31st of March. Eastern rite churches calculate Easter according the Julian calendar and so the Western and Orthodox Easters can be up to five weeks apart - as is the case in

Last Sunday I attended the first ever Czech international oyster opening competition, which was held on Prague's Old Town Square, where the square meets Dlouha street. While that event was going on, most of the people on the beautiful old square were much more interested in the Easter market which has been open there for the last few weeks. There is also an Easter market at the bottom of Wenceslas Square at the moment.

The terrible fate of a 7 year old boy who was mauled to death by a German Shepherd late last week has evoked a new storm of controversy over whether so called "dangerous breeds" should be banned. TV crews arrived at the boy's home town to bring their viewers a picture of the monster responsible for this tragedy and each brought back a different story.

The general election is fast approaching and all the political parties have already begun jostling for voters. Better economic conditions and lower taxes are being promised, and one of the promises each party seems to have is combating crime in the Czech Republic. The crime rate has been rising steeply since the early 1990s while the number of resolved cases seems to be only slightly higher. While in 1996 the police caught every fourth burglar, last year it was 26.9 percent. Burglaries seem to be losing 'popularity' - while six years ago, there were 110,000 break-ins, last year there were 'only' 63,000 burglaries.

Around one hundred kilometres to the north-west of Prague, there's a little town called Dubi. Dubi's known for two things - it's home to the Czech Republic's famous blue and white onion-pattern porcelain, known as "cibulak", and it's also famous, or rather infamous, for the E55, the "Highway of Love" - a stretch of road leading up to the German border that boasts one of the highest concentrations of prostitutes in Europe. But a few weeks ago, Dubi made the news for a completely different reason.

Klaus, Gross, Kuehnl, Klestil, Daublebsky, Sichrovski - names that are no doubt familiar to Radio Prague listeners. The first three are surnames of current Czech politicians and the rest belong respectively to the Austrian President, Austrian ambassador to the Czech Republic and the general secretary of the Austrian Freedom Party. The point I'm trying to make here is that the first three are typical German names while the rest sound distinctly Slavic...