Velvet Revolution

She explains why modern research is moving beyond centuries of myth to rediscover the real Jan Hus.

I think the biggest difference lies in the general perception of Jan Hus before the Velvet Revolution and today.

Jan Hus was part of the narrative of communist propaganda, according to that narrative, Hus was a protector of poor people and fighter against oppression, against the corrupt Catholic Church, and especially against the Germans.

This characterization, however, is misleading and oversimplified and depicts a figure who never actually existed.

but Dvorak could not be easily banned by authorities, and his origin story of the Bohemians and their baptism sat uneasy with officials.

In 1987, during late communist normalization two years before the Velvet Revolution and four years before the Soviet Union dissolved, with Czech nationalism a driving force, The oratorio for Lyudmila, the great patron saint and martyr, was performed by the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the direction of Václav Neumann.

The National Historical and Christian Oratorio, with its repeated use of Lord have mercy on us in Czech, served as a kind of protest.

St. Ludmilla, for centuries a symbol of Bohemian and Czech Christianity, the patron saint of Bohemia and grandmother to Wenceslas, martyr and saint is remembered on this, the 16th of September.

Once things were shifting in Eastern Europe, I was a university student.

The Berlin ca- Wall came down, the Velvet Revolution, and I studied there, um, in 1990 in Letní škola, so in the summer school at Charles University.

And then I loved it so much I decided I wanted to come back for a semester, and I studied at Charles University for the fall of 1991, and that was the first time my grandfather had come back in 40 years.

My grandmother had passed away in the early 1980s, so she never returned.

guess.

There was a Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

I

think even in 1989, the scum were fucking with our money, but the savings and loan crisis, right? Remember that? Yeah.

You know, I watched the w- you know, I watched b- my, you know, I...

The, the, the coming of the fall of the, the Berlin Wall, you know, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the way the Balkan states crumbled.

[laughs]

You know, the way that people were...

Poland and Hungary held competitive elections.

The Velvet Revolution put novelist Václav Havel in charge in Czechoslovakia.

The communist government in Bulgaria fell.

But it would take a violent uprising and execution of President Nikolai Strzesek to end communism in Romania.