What's in a Prague street name

Park Adolfa Borna was opened in 2020.

Adolf Born was born in České Velenice in 1930 – which was formerly one town along with Gmünd, which is now not only a separate town but is across the border in Austria.

In his late teens, he started studying art education at the Faculty of Education at Charles University, but changed his plans a couple of times and ultimately graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1955.

He studied there in the Department of Caricature and Newspaper Drawing, and I can’t be the only one reading those words right now and suddenly wanting to go back to university.

After his studies, Born made a living by providing illustrations for books and drawing caricatures for newspapers. In 1966, he and the American illustrator Gene Deitch animated the first ever screen adaptation of The Hobbit.

From 1973, the Czechoslovak authorities banned Born from presenting his works at exhibitions or in the press, and he started to focus on book illustrations and animations.

Most famously, he was responsible for the design of Mach a Šebestová, a 1982 animated series about two students and a magic telephone receiver.

From 1992 – i.e. post-censorship – Born created postage stamps for Czech Post; he also designed costumes and sets for the Czech National Theatre.

If you go to a bookshop looking for a copy of Knihy džunglí – Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book – and you come across this version, you’ll have one of Born’s last works. He illustrated it in 2015, and died in the following year.

When the park opened in September 2020 (for all the use it presumably got in the nine months after that), it was called ‘Přátelská zahrada’, or ‘Friendly park’. It was renamed after Born in 2024.