What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 8 May 2022.

Hájkova was built in 1908.

Václav Hájek z Libočan – or, if you prefer, Wenceslaus Hájek of Libočany (died 1553) was a chronicler and author of the Czech Chronicle (Kronika česká, 1541).

Originally a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1521; from 1524, he worked as a preacher at St Thomas’s Church in Malá Strana. It seems he got into quite a lot of disputes and therefore was forced to change positions frequently.

The Czech Chronicle (Kronyka Czeska, to use the spelling applicable back then) covers the history of the Czech lands from the arrival of the Czechs in the 600s to the coronation of Ferdinand I in 1527. It was written between 1533 and 1539.

Despite its huge popularity (including translations into German), its accuracy was questioned from the start. In the 19th century, historian, politician and ‘Father of the Nation’ František Palacký pronounced a particularly damning judgement on it.

Proof: ‘History as a whole, and Czech history, know no greater pest than this man, who […] set out, with unprecedented shamelessness […] to invent and tell extraordinary stories, but also to attribute them to original written sources which were fictional’.

Not a five-star review on Amazon, then.

However, the Chronicle remains a useful snapshot both of a contemporary, non-Germanised form of Czech, and of the mood of the time in which it was written.