Famous Czech People

The specific part of maturita topic 8 (Free time, hobbies, culture and sport), at B2 level. You don’t need to know everyone – choose three or four people from different fields whom you can talk about in more detail, and be ready to say why they matter to you.

History and politics

• Charles IV (1316–1378) – King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor. He was brought up at the French court, spoke five languages and made Prague the capital of the Empire. During his reign, often called the Golden Age of the Czech lands, he founded Charles University (1348), the New Town of Prague, Charles Bridge and Karlštejn Castle. In a TV poll he was voted the greatest Czech of all time.
• Jan Hus (around 1370–1415) – a priest, preacher and rector of Charles University who criticised the wealth and corruption of the Church. He was burnt at the stake in Constance in 1415 for refusing to take back his teaching, and his death led to the Hussite wars. He also simplified Czech spelling.
• John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) – a philosopher, theologian and educator, called the teacher of nations. He had to leave the country for religious reasons and spent most of his life in exile. He believed that school should be a “playful workshop” and that education should be available to everybody, including girls and the poor.
• Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) – a philosopher and professor who became the first president of Czechoslovakia (1918–1935). He is respected for his democratic and humanistic values, and under his leadership Czechoslovakia was one of the few working democracies in Central Europe between the wars.
• Václav Havel (1936–2011) – a playwright and dissident who was imprisoned by the communist regime. He was one of the leaders of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. His motto was “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.”

Culture

• Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) – often called the father of Czech music. His best-known works are the comic opera The Bartered Bride and the cycle of symphonic poems My Country, which includes the famous Vltava. At the end of his life he became completely deaf, but he went on composing.
• Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) – the most internationally famous Czech composer. He spent several years in the USA, where he wrote the New World Symphony, part of which was even taken to the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts. His opera Rusalka is also very popular.
• Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) – a painter and designer whose posters made him one of the stars of Art Nouveau in Paris. He spent years painting The Slav Epic, a series of twenty huge paintings about the history of the Slavs.
• Franz Kafka (1883–1924) – a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague. His novels The Trial and The Castle and the story The Metamorphosis describe people lost in a world they don’t understand; the adjective “Kafkaesque” is used all over the world.
• Karel Čapek (1890–1938) – a writer, journalist and playwright. In his play R.U.R. he introduced the word robot (invented by his brother Josef). His novel War with the Newts and the play The White Disease warn against dictatorship and war.
• Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) – the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, a comic novel about the First World War which has been translated into more than fifty languages.
• Jaroslav Seifert (1901–1986) – a poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984.
• Miloš Forman (1932–2018) – a film director who left Czechoslovakia after 1968 and won two Oscars in Hollywood for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.

Science

• Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884) – a monk in Brno who discovered the basic laws of heredity by experimenting with peas. He is considered the founder of genetics.
• Jaroslav Heyrovský (1890–1967) – a chemist who invented polarography and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1959.
• Otto Wichterle (1913–1998) – a chemist who invented modern soft contact lenses. He made the first ones at home with a machine built from a children’s construction kit.

Sport

• Emil Zátopek (1922–2000) – one of the greatest long-distance runners in history. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki he won the 5,000 m, the 10,000 m and the marathon, which he was running for the first time in his life. He was famous for his extremely hard training.
• Věra Čáslavská (1942–2016) – a gymnast who won seven Olympic gold medals. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico she protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
• Martina Navrátilová – a tennis player who won Wimbledon a record nine times in singles.
• Jaromír Jágr – an ice hockey legend who played in the NHL for more than twenty years and, together with the Czech team, won the Olympic gold medal in Nagano in 1998, an event that every Czech remembers.

Talking about a famous person

When you choose a person, try to cover these points:

1. Who the person was and when they lived.
2. What they did or created – one or two concrete works or achievements.
3. Why they are important – for the Czech Republic or for the world.
4. Your opinion – what you admire about them, or whether they are still relevant today.

Key vocabulary

Useful phrases

• He / She is best known for…
• He / She is considered (to be) the father of…
• What makes him / her special is that…
• Thanks to him / her, …
• I really admire him / her because…
• If I could meet one famous Czech, it would be… because…

Questions the examiner may ask

Try to answer each question in two or three sentences, then click on the hint to compare.