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Czechs are marking the fourth anniversary of the death of Václav Havel, the country’s first post-communist president, with commemorative events taking place around the country. Throughout the day people have been lighing candles and laying flowers at spots associated with the late president.Cardinal Dominik Duka will celebrate a mass in Václav Havel's memory at the Prague Crossroads Culural Centre and the Václav Havel Library will host a staging of his play Audience. Fans of the ex-president will join a march from Wenceslas Square to the Prague Castle, carrying hand-made hearts created in memory of the late president.

Czechs on Friday are marking the fourth anniversary of the death of the country’s first post-communist president, Václav Havel. One thing that many people are doing in fond memory of Mr Havel is rolling up their pant legs – a reference to Havel’s inauguration, when he famously wore trousers which were too short.

One-time dissident Bishop Jiří Paďour has died at the age of 72. Padour studied acting in Prague in the 1960s, when he got to know Václav Havel, and directing in France, where he decided to join the church and returned to Czechoslovakia. After coming into conflict with the Communist authorities he was stripped of his license to minister and forced to work as a cleaner, though he secretly joined the Capuchin order. He became a leading figure in the Czech Roman Catholic Church following the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

Prisons and prisoners’ letters under the Communist era ‘Normalisation’ of the 1970s and 1980s is the subject of this edition of Czech History. For the political prisoners that resulted from the Communist crackdown following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, those letters were a vital link with the outside world, not just to family and friends but also their supporters worldwide.

An exhibition called “Václav Havel through the lens of Jiří Jírů” has just opened at the Czech centre in Prague. It offers a selection of photographs of Václav Havel taken by his personal photographer during his first term in office as Czech president. At the exhibition I talked to Jiří Jírů about some of the photographs on display and how he had come to work for Vaclav Havel.

Former South African president Frederik de Klerk, co-founder of Doctors without Borders Bernard Kouchner, philosopher Roger Scruton and women’s rights activist Manal al-Sharif are due to attend this year’s Forum 2000 conference in Prague next month, organisers of the annual event announced on Wednesday. The theme of this year’s conference, the 19th, will be Democracy and Education. Forum 2000 was co-founded by the late president Václav Havel as a platform for debate on issues facing the world.

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the VIZE 97 foundation linked to former president Václav Havel have come to an agreement on use of the iconic president-playwright’s name. The agreement on Monday follows controversy after the foundation indirectly sought a payment of around 30,000 crowns from the ministry after the Israeli city of Haifa named a square after Václav Havel. In future, embassies will inform the ministry of such projects abroad and approval will then be sought from the chairwoman of the foundation Dagmar Havlová. Many foreign cities and institutions have sought to honour Havel by naming benches or places after him. The foundation said it was not warned about Haifa’s intentions. The ministry protested that it was just a go between in the affair.

The internationally acclaimed Czech concert pianist Ivan Moravec has died at the age of 84. Moravec who studied at the Prague Academy of Music and later with Italian masters captivated audiences in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Prague and Milan. In October 2000 President Vaclav Havel awarded the pianist the Medal of Merit for Outstanding Artistic Achievement. In January 2002 he was honored with a Cannes Classical Award for Lifetime Achievement, an award given by several international music magazines, and appears on a CD of the piano greats of the 20th century.

The work of playwright president Václav Havel is believed to being performed for the first time, albeit indirectly, in China during a tour by the Prague-based experimental theatre and dance ensemble, the Spitfire Company. One of the performances by the Czech group will be Antiwords, a work which draws heavily on Havel’s play Audience. The work is to be performed in the city of Tianjin with the group later moving on to the capital, Beijing. The invitation to tour China stemmed from a meeting with the director of a Chinese theatre at the Edinburgh Festival.

James Ragan is a US poet, screenwriter, playwright and teacher with extremely strong Czechoslovak ties. Indeed some of his siblings were born in Eastern Slovakia before his parents decided during the Depression to build new lives in Pittsburgh. Ragan began visiting Communist Czechoslovakia as a teenager and in recent decades – inspired by a meeting with Václav Havel – the writer has been a visiting professor at Prague’s Charles University every summer.