Czechoslovakian independence

For five years we have been marking the centenaries of deaths, masses in the Great War and latterly of individuals such as Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Samuel Thomas Evans.  At last we can start commemorating the first glimmers of hope from that era. Before the formal armistice of the eleventh of November, the war was practically over in large parts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. The Czech and Slovak people took advantage of the situation to declare independence on 28th October 1918. It seems that this is the first time they were able to come together as a separate nation since the subjection of the kingdom of Bohemia over 600 years earlier.

There were to be two further periods of subjugation, firstly under the Nazis (Hitler used the pretext of protecting the minority German population in order to invade) then under Stalin. Freed again when the USSR broke up, the nation split twenty-five years ago. Czechia and Slovakia joined the European Union separately, but 28th October is still celebrated.