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Czechia has a rich history of cinema and that heritage is carefully administered by the National Film Archive in Prague, which is currently celebrating 80 years of existence. I discussed the archive’s establishment during the Nazi occupation, the recent tradition of restoring classic Czech movies, how NFA archivists defied the authorities to save treasures and much more with its director, Michal Bregant.

Two valuable documentary collections from Czechia have been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register: the Antonín Dvořák Archive, which contains most of the great Czech composer’s manuscripts and the Moll Map Collection , a set of ancient maps dating from the late 16th century to the 1860s.

When Time Stopped is the title of Ariana Neumann’s first book, about the history of her Jewish family in Prague during the war. Before he emigrated to Venezuela in 1949, her father Hans (or Hanuš) Neumann survived the Holocaust thanks to false papers and the audacity that allowed him to find work in… Berlin. The book is filled with extraordinary personal documents and letters preserved in a few boxes found by the author in Caracas, Prague but also Libčice or Teplice.

A radio receiver used by the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk or the microphone into which the very first radio announcer spoke. These are just some of the rare exhibits that are currently on display at the National Technical Museum in Prague as part of an exhibition marking the centenary of Czech Radio.

Until recently, it was thought that the oldest full-length radio play preserved in the Czech Radio archives was from after the Second World War. But that changed thanks to a chance discovery of a Czech adaptation for radio of Jack London’s 1906 novel White Fang, which though in a very poor condition, was restored and digitised.

It was exactly a hundred years ago, on 18 May 1923, that listeners in Czechoslovakia were first able to tune in to regular radio broadcasts. Much has changed since then. Today Czech Radio has ten nationwide stations and fourteen regional studios, based in towns and cities around the country. And of course, there is also Radio Prague International, broadcasting in seven languages around the world. Back in 1923 there was just one station, which in those early days broadcast for a few hours every day from a scouts’ tent on the edge of Prague. To mark the anniversary, we take a journey through the radio archives.

One of the last battles to take place in World War Two Europe occurred south-west of Prague around the town of Milín, several days after Germany had officially capitulated. It was unique in that the combat saw units of the Wehrmacht, SS, Soviet Union, United States and Czech partisans all take part in the fighting. A newly opened exhibition documents the events that took place there and the deaths that may have been avoided had the allies taken a different approach.

President Petr Pavel on Sunday took part in an annual memorial in South Bohemia to victims of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust. He was the first Czech head of state at the event in over two and a half decades and his attendance meant it garnered extra attention.

A question that never ceases to intrigue Czechs: Could their country have joined the democratic fold of nations if the US army had liberated Prague in 1945?

Czechia was the place where the last shots of World War II were fired in Europe. The generally accepted narrative is that, with most of the country liberated by the Soviet Red Army, the former Czechoslovakia was inevitably headed for the communist Soviet bloc. Vít Smetana from the Prague Institute of Contemporary History dispels some deeply-rooted myths perpetuated by the communists about what happened in the very last days of WWII in Czechoslovakia.

The Czech-American community in Chicago will be marking 150 years since the birth of Anton Cermak, a Czech immigrant who became the mayor of Chicago and was assassinated in 1933, after only two years in office. Two such events are planned for the coming days.

Archaeologists from the Moravian Museum in Brno have announced a unique discovery. During a survey near the city of Ostrava they discovered a stone with an engraving of a mammoth and a horse, which dates back about 15,000 years ago. According to experts, the artefact has immeasurable historical value.

What was life like in the Gulag camps, how many of these camps were there in the Soviet Union, and how could a person end up in one? These are just some of the questions explored by a new educational project designed for primary and secondary school students. It was created by the organisation Gulag.cz and is now being tested in one of Prague’s schools.

Mysterious ritual sites, ancient burial tombs, and rock carvings in an unknown script. These are some of the exciting discoveries made by an international expedition in Oman led by Czech archaeologists, which has found monuments and tools dating back thousands of years.

Brian Jakubec was born in South Africa and is a successful IT manager at Lenovo. But his life was shaped by events that took place in far-away Czechoslovakia when his father, still in his teens, joined the Bata shoe empire, where he would one day become a senior official. Fate would have it that, almost a century later, Brian’s work took him to Slovakia and opened a quest of discovery about his Czech roots and the Bata school of work ethics that he himself adopted. Brian joined me in the studio to talk about his journey into the family past.

A portrait of a Jewish woman called Anna Wotzilkova, who was born in South Moravia and died in the Holocaust, has been donated to the newly planned Mehrin Moravian Jewish Museum by her descendants, who now live in the United States. The painting was brought to Brno this week by her granddaughter Ann Altman:

The small town of Vysoké Mýto, in north-east Bohemia, has been named Czech Historical Town of the year for 2022. The award, which comes with a one-million-crown cheque, honours those towns and cities that have excelled in preserving and renewing their cultural and architectural heritage.

Ploština was a small settlement in the Zlín region of Moravia. On April 19, 1945, close to the end of World War II, it was set on fire and many of its inhabitants were massacred by the Nazis for having supported the anti-Nazi resistance. A new monument has now been erected on the site of the tragedy.

For 85 years, a monument in Orlová to the fallen Czech soldiers of the 1919 Polish–Czechoslovak War has been a plain list of names on slabs of stone. But it used to be dominated by a huge statue of a Silesian eagle with soldiers at its feet, which was torn down by Polish troops after the 1938 Munich Agreement. Now a five-metre copy of the statue is being crafted and will soon adorn the monument in the east Moravian town once again.

One of the foremost opponents of the former Czechoslovak communist regime, Dana Němcová, passed away early on Tuesday morning at the age of 89. Despite years of persecution by the secret police, she never let up in her quest for freedom.