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The writer Jan Stavinoha was born in Prague in May 1945, a couple of weeks after the Soviet Red Army freed the Czechoslovak capital from Nazi control. In 1968, the Soviet Army returned to Prague not as liberators but as oppressors. Stavinoha, then a young student of classical music, forged paperwork saying he was a "reliable person" worthy of a passport — and promptly fled to the West. Today, nearly forty years later, he is a popular 'Dutch' novelist, and, he says, a "tourist" in the land of his birth.

Fried carp and potato salad is today the 'bread and butter' of any traditional Czech Christmas meal. But this was not always so. Pious Czechs once used to fast at Christmas; they then took to cooking meatless dishes, such as sweet porridge with dried fruits. Slowly, fish - and finally, carp -- became the most common fasting meal. In this week's Panorama, however, we go along to a tasting of Advent and Christmas dishes that predate - by centuries - the carp and potato salad tradition. Some recipes date back to the Middle Ages and are long forgotten;

This weekend saw the largest re-enactment of a Napoleonic battle in the history of central Europe. Tens of thousands of people braved the bitter cold on Saturday for the bicentennial staging of the 'Battle of the Three Emperors' of 2 December 1805 - Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest victory. On the rolling hills and fields outside Austerlitz, now Slavkov in South Moravia, the young French emperor outwitted a much larger Russo-Austrian force -- a feat of which he would be proud to his dying day. Taking part in the re-enactment on Saturday were some four

Political prisoners had been forced to work the mines of Czechoslovakia long before the Communists seized power in the "bloodless" coup of February 1948. Under the direction of the hard-line Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald, however, securing workers to unearth weapons-grade uranium became policy; a top priority. The camps served two purposes: a way to purge the land of "class enemies" and to build up the atomic arsenal of the Soviet Union, when few could have guessed the ideological war with the West would remain a "cold" one.

On the 28th of October, 1939, Czechoslovak Independence day, Czech students took to the streets to demonstrate against the Nazi occupation. The protest was brutally suppressed - with shots fired at random into the crowd. One student leader, Jan Opletal, was seriously wounded, and later succumbed to his injuries. Thousands turned out for his funeral procession, and protests again turned violent. Hitler ordered a swift and brutal clampdown. On the 17th of November, nine students, seen as the ringleaders, were executed and over a thousand were sent

Milos Forman of "Amadeus" fame is without question the most famous of directors to have emerged from the Czech New Wave movement of the early 1960s. Along with Jiri Menzel, Ivan Passer and others, he produced internationally acclaimed work throughout the decade, known as the golden age of Czech film, and enjoyed success in the West. Lesser known is the documentary film work of such Czech feature filmmakers, while documentaries made by Czechs in exile - those who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, after the communist takeover in 1948,

If you've ever set foot in a Prague souvenir shop, then you know the work of Jiri Votruba. An architect by training, a painter and illustrator out of love, and a celebrated -- yet somewhat reluctant -- graphic designer by providence, Votruba's work is seemingly everywhere. His often humorous images depicting the sights of the Czech capital and its famous sons, in particular Franz Kafka, adorn countless postcards, tee-shirts, and coffee mugs. We caught up with the artist in his studio this week to hear about his latest projects, and began by asking

The Czech construction boom of the nineties was an exciting time to be alive for people whose business it is to make sense of the past. There have been more large-scale archaeological digs in Prague over the past decade than ever before in the city's history. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a far larger and wealthier early medieval city than historians had long believed.

Czechoslovakia was one of the few states in Europe between the wars with a genuine parliamentary democracy. The First Republic, as it became known, was a multiethnic one: apart from Czechs and Slovaks, nearly a quarter of its people were ethnic Germans; the Tesin region in the north had a large Polish minority, while South Slovakia and Ruthenia were home to some three-quarters of a million Hungarians. Up until the Munich Pact of 1938 and subsequent Nazi occupation, Czechoslovakia was a magnet for refugees from Hitler's Germany, communist Russia,

Dutchman Edgar de Bruin first came to Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s to play basketball. That high school excursion led to university studies in Prague and developed into a life-long interest in Czech culture - especially in the literature. Mr de Bruin, a translator of Czech works since the Velvet Revolution, is now a literary agent; his agency Pluh ("plough") - represents nearly a dozen Czech authors, selling their rights to Dutch and other mainly European publishers. I caught up with him in an Amsterdam café for a frank discussion about the