What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 11 December 2022.

Čelakovského sady was/were (sady – gardens – is plural) built in 1882.

František Ladislav Čelakovský was born in Strakonice in 1799.

After graduating from the gymnasium in České Budějovice, he moved to Prague to study philosophy.

Financial constraints forced him to drop out and continue his studies at the lyceum in České Budějovice, but he was expelled when found reading the works of Jan Hus.

He then studied in Linz, and returned to Prague to study at Charles University, although he failed one of his final exams and never graduated (although that wouldn’t stop him from becoming a professor at CU in 1835).

In the following years, he supported himself as a tutor, translator and proofreader.

Čelakovský also wrote poems under a pseudonym, Žofie Jandová, and collected Slavic folklore and poems, for example in Slovanské národní písně (three volumes published between 1822 and 1827).

On the non-Slavic side, he also collected Lithuanian songs in Litevské národní písně (1827).

In 1833, he became editor of Pražské noviny, and transformed one of its supplement, Česká Wčela (Czech Bee), into an independent magazine.

In 1835, Tsar Nicholas II said that, if the Poles tried to rebel, he would see to it that Warsaw would be destroyed. Čelakovský published an article about this, and pointed out that the Tatar khans had made a similar threat to the Russians in the 15th century.

The Russian Embassy complained*, and Čelakovský was fired both from the paper and from his professorship.

* In 2022, complaining remains one of their few talents, along with having too many staff and generally being awful.

He would eventually regain his professorship in 1849, having taught in Wrocław in the interim.

Čelakovský died in 1852, aged 53, shortly after the death of his second wife, Antonie.

Josef František Frič, the couple’s brother-in-law, became guardian of Čelakovský’s children, who included the botanist Ladislav Josef Čelakovský (1834-1902) and the historian and politician Jaromír Čelakovský (1846-1914).

They… definitely looked related.

The park was one of several victims of the expansion of the highway that we know as Legerova / Wilsonova, as, in the 1970s, it got split in two.

When the National Museum was given a major facelift in the later part of the 2010s, Čelakovského sady also benefitted.

Here’s a video by Prague 1, mid-reconstruction:

It was finally completed in August of this year: https://www.prazskypatriot.cz/praha-2-dokoncila-revitalizaci-jihovychodni-casti-celakovskeho-sadu / https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=596031598744290, and has definitely made walking from Prague 2 to Prague 1 a lot more pleasant.