Czechia’s short English name fought Bohemia for decades
The Czech Republic—also Czechia, historically Bohemia—is a landlocked Central European state of 78,871 square kilometres between Austria, Germany, Poland, and Slovakia. A ninth-century duchy under Great Moravia became an imperial estate in 1002 and a kingdom in 1198 before Habsburg integration after Mohács (1526).
The hilly country has a mostly temperate climate, part continental and part oceanic. Prague is the capital, with Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň and Liberec the other main cities. It divides traditionally into Bohemia in the west, Moravia in the east and Czech Silesia in the north-east, a small corner of historic Silesia, most of which is now Polish. Since the fourteenth century these have been called the lands of the Bohemian Crown, or of Saint Wenceslaus.
About a century after the Habsburgs absorbed the crown lands, the Protestant Bohemian Revolt set off the Thirty Years' War, and victory at White Mountain let Vienna tighten its grip. When the Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806 the lands passed into the Austrian Empire, and the nineteenth century brought heavy industry. After Austria-Hungary fell, the First Czechoslovak Republic of 1918 stayed a parliamentary democracy through the whole interwar era, unique in the region.
Hitler's Germany took over after the 1938 Munich Agreement. Restored in 1945, Czechoslovakia became a communist state after a 1948 coup, and Soviet-led troops crushed the liberalising Prague Spring in 1968. The Velvet Revolution of November 1989 restored democracy, and the federation split on 31 December 1992. Today the republic is a high-income welfare state with universal healthcare and free university tuition, 32nd on the Human Development Index and a member of the EU, NATO, the OECD and the Visegrád Group.
Bohemia comes from Latin Boiohaemum, home of the Boii, a Gallic people. The modern name traces to Čech, the Slavic tribe and its legendary leader, said to have settled his people on Říp, a 461-metre hill. The word may come from a Proto-Slavic root meaning kinsman, related to člověk, person.
Source: Czech Republic
