Posted on 05/25/2025 8:56:19 AM PDT by Twotone
As a place on a map, Bohemia is roughly half of what we call the Czech Republic today. As a neighbourhood or a state of mind it can be found all over the world, in big cities, where it suddenly coalesces in insalubrious districts, flourishes briefly, raises the value of the real estate and then dies off in a flurry of media coverage regretting how these things never last.
When a Bohemia dies it usually leaves behind a few architectural remnants, a historical plaque or two, maybe even a museum, and a venerable and overpriced tourist trap like a café or tavern whose precarious survival inspires even more media coverage describing the long-gone Bohemia's heyday. As a general rule a city's first Bohemia is in some neglected downtown enclave and moves further from the centre until its artistic denizens are finally priced out of that city altogether.
My own hometown, Toronto, has had nearly half a dozen Bohemias in its history, and is a textbook example of how you can use artists as unwilling advance guards for real estate speculation. I spent much of my career as a photographer in one of those Bohemias until I was priced out. Original Bohemias can remain in place for a generation or more, but as a rule of thumb the lifespan of each successive Bohemia gets shorter and shorter until a point when the first article celebrating its attractions marks the moment when it's over.
Hollywood was never a Bohemia, but movie people consider themselves artists and love to tell stories set in some Bohemia in the near or distant past. A Complete Unknown, the recent Bob Dylan biopic, is set in New York's original and archetypical Bohemia...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
If one is looking to make enemies in a hurry, just refer to the Czech Republic as ‘The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’
Prague has become a tourist-trap. If you want to get where it feels more Czech, go to Brno.
Maybe we’re cousins. My maternal grandparents were both born in Czechoslovakia, in Bohemia.
If one is looking to make enemies in a hurry, just refer to the Czech Republic as ‘The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’
Yeah, that would do it.
Or the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. I visited the country in August, 1968, when it was under that name. Three weeks after I left, Soviet troops arrived.
I have a first cousin who has made several trips to Czechoslovakia, and I believe he centers some of his trips around Brno, where other cousins still live.
I wouldn’t mind visiting Budvar.
No. :-) My aunt worked as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins & met & married a Czech professor who was visiting during the Prague Spring. She went home with him & my cousin was 3 months old when the Soviets tank rolled in. I didn’t get to meet her until after the fall of the Wall. But I have been able to visit Prague a couple of times. Beautiful city.
Maybe we are cousins seven times removed. ;) You never know.
Prague is still a great place to visit.
And it is Bohemia
Brno is fine but Moravia
In the States, visit Ennis or West Texas to name a couple Czech communities.
A bohemian ‘starving artist’ is not a Bohemian from the CZECH REPUBLIC.
Help me with the history there, I don’t know that much detail about Central Europe.
Good timing on your departure!
After the Germans sliced off the Sudetenland and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, they divided it up and what is now the Czech Republic (less the Sudetenland which was added back in after the war) was administered by the Nazis as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Unlike central Poland around Warsaw which was administered as the General Government while the northern and western areas occupied by the Germans after the Polish invasion were to be incorporated into the Greater German Reich.
In short, the General Government was run by the Germans, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, on the other hand, was run by a puppet Czech government (although Germans in the Protectorate were exempt from control of the civilian government.
Ahh, gotcha, thanks. So it’s sort of like the equivalent of accusing them of being Vichy France.
Or submitting to their Euro-German masters.
And FWLIW I have an old friend I’ve gotten reacquainted with after a move, who came here in the 1980s as a child with his family as religious refugees from Chechoslovakia. I *think* that he and his family would be considered Moravian, will have to ask.
Maybe they should just go with “Freedonia”.
And FWLIW I have an old friend I’ve gotten reacquainted with after a move, who came here in the 1980s as a child with his family as religious refugees from Chechoslovakia. I *think* that he and his family would be considered Moravian, will have to ask.
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