Czech Radio Building: Calling All Czechs
Why is it significant?
Stand on the pavement of Vinohradská street and look at the long, sober office front of Czech Radio, with its plaques and its fresh flowers. Nothing about it looks heroic.
Key Facts
| Place | Czech Radio Building: Calling All Czechs |
|---|---|
| Address | Vinohradská 12, 120 00 Praha 2, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.07860, 14.43440 |
| Part of Walk | Wenceslas Square to the Dancing House: Prague's Century of Revolutions, 1918–1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the pavement of Vinohradská street and look at the long, sober office front of Czech Radio, with its plaques and its fresh flowers. Nothing about it looks heroic. It looks like a building where people file reports and drink bad coffee... and twice in the twentieth century, the fate of the city was decided on this pavement.
The first time was the morning of 5 May 1945. Prague had been under German occupation for six years, and Hitler was already dead. That morning the announcers stopped using the compulsory German and spoke only Czech. Then came the call that every Czech grandparent can still recite: Calling all Czechs! The broadcasters asked for help, and armed civilians, policemen and former soldiers fought their way through the corridors to hold the studios.
Within hours, barricades were rising all over Prague, built from paving stones, trams and furniture. The Prague Uprising lasted four days. The radio kept transmitting through the shooting, in English and Russian as well as Czech, begging the Allies to come. The Red Army reached the city on 9 May, and the uprising cost well over a thousand Czech lives.
The second time came twenty-three years later. In the early hours of 21 August 1968, the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. The radio read out the statement condemning the invasion, and when the tanks arrived on this street, thousands of unarmed people blocked their way. Buses were pushed across the road, a truck caught fire, houses burned. More than a dozen people were killed in the streets around this building that morning.
And the radio did not fall silent. Its staff slipped away and kept broadcasting from improvised hiding places for days, telling soldiers and citizens alike what was really happening. Now walk back towards the great domed building at the top of Wenceslas Square. It carries its own memory of that August morning... in the stone itself.