Toník Zachů is not a main character in the novel, but appears in its later stages, when Matouš (he of the title) ends up living in the forest and meets Toník, whom he once went to school with. Toník had worked as a carpenter in Vienna, but returned after getting into trouble for distributing anti-establishment leaflets.
Růza – Matouš’s love interest – allows both Matouš and Toník to stay at her father’s house, and both young men get jobs at the local factory.
Ultimately, during Matouš’s escape from prison, Toník is shot and dies, contributing to Matouš’s decision that nothing is left for him in his home village, and to flee abroad.
Until 1952, it was called U dětského útulku (‘At the children’s home’), after Dětský útulek sv. Terezičky (St Theresa’s), which opened here in 1929. The building was ultimately demolished in 1989.
Vojta shares various traits with Matouš – he’s kind, isn’t afraid to fight, and believes in justice. His parents have decided he has to become a priest, against his wishes.
In the novel, they have discussions about Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which presents a fictional island society, not unlike a monastery in its structure.
Vojta and Matouš agree that they will pursue the fight for equality between people for the rest of their lives.
This housing estate in Krč is proving to be quite the gem in terms of street names, isn’t it?
Ševce Matouše was built in 1935. I just wrote this entire post, then it disappeared when I was about to post it, so I feel like I was also built in 1935 right now.
Until 1952, it was called U krčské vodárny IV, which we’ll get around to soon enough, as there’s still a street called that nearby (with out the IV).
Meanwhile, a švec is a shoemaker (if you’ve wondering why the ‘e’ is in a different place in the street name, you try dealing with the Czech declension system and saying ‘švce’ five times in a row).
And ‘Matouš’ is a biblical name, equivalent to English ‘Matthew’, among others.
It was serialised in the daily newspaper České slovo from 1927, and published in book form in 1932. Very intentionally, its events are take place around 1848.
Matouš Štěpánek starts the book as a schoolboy with two traits: a feeling for justice and a bit of a temper. This clearly comes from his father, who ends up serving a prison sentence for taking justice into his own hands after Matouš is caned by his teacher.
Matouš later leaves for Hungary, where he broadens his horizons – and linguistic skills – and decides that his life goal is to help achieve equality between people.
Back in his home village, Matouš falls for a cheerful, energetic local girl, Růza Kyklová. Unfortunately, another local shoemaker, Jíra Macháček (much more uptight and humourless) feels the same way.
Růza declares that she’ll marry whichever of the two men gets a job as a teacher at the local school. In the meantime, Matouš goes to Prague to take part in the barricades during the Prague Uprising.
Fake news, stating that Matouš has been killed in a duel, reaches Růza; she therefore chooses to marry Jíra. However, Matouš is merely injured, and when he returns, he becomes disillusioned with life and rebels against the authorities.
This lands him in prison on several occasions; during one of these, both his parents die, and, one time when he returns home, he finds his home has been burnt down by a loan shark, so he goes off to live in the forest.
While there, he meets up with Růza, whose marriage to Jíra is not what she had hoped for. Matouš and Růza start a relationship and have a child together; however, Matouš ends up in prison again and Růza and child end up in poverty.
Taking pity on his estranged wife, Jíra goes to help her, but, despite a visit at Christmas, Růza dies. Matouš escapes from prison around the same time, and, realising he has no reason to stay, sets off abroad.
O ševci Matoušovi a jeho přátelích stands out for its autobiographical elements (some characters are people whom Stašek knew as a child) in his home village of Stanový), its use of phrases and features of other Slavic languages, and its fairytale-like quality.
Karel Vik was born in Hořice, near Jičín, in 1883. From 1902 to 1906, he studied landscape painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Prague.
He won an award for being the best student in his field, and, upon graduating, used this to visit Italy and the Balkans. Within a year, his paintings were being shown at exhibitions, and he was published in the literary magazine Zlatá Praha.
In 1914, Vik won a bronze medal at a graphic exhibition in Leipzig; from this point on, he devoted himself to artistic graphics, especially woodcuts.
The following year, he moved to Turnov, where, in 1919, his paintings were used to decorate the train station (they’re still there). In 1921, Český ráj (Bohemian Paradise), a cycle of 11 woodcuts, was produced.
Remaining productive in later years, Vik was awarded the title of Meritorious Artist in 1963. He died in Turnov in 1964.
Until 1960, the street was called Záloženská, due to its location near the local savings bank (záložna).
Ladislav Matěcha was born in Smrčí in 1893 and worked as a carpenter. He lived in house number 127 on this street.
He was a member of the Communist Party, as well as of the Včela consumer cooperative, which had been founded in 1905 and distributed food from warehouses to shops in working-class districts. Owned by the Social Democrats and the Communists in the 1920s, it became the exclusive property of the Communists in the 1930s.
In July 1942, Matěcha was sentenced to death for membership of the (now-illegal) Communist Party, and for high treason. He was executed at Plötzensee Prison, in Charlottenburg-Nord, Berlin, on 5 November of the same year.
He then studied law in both Kraków and Prague, graduating from the former (specifically Jagiellonian University) in 1869 and working as a lawyer in the latter from 1870 to 1873, during which time he befriended Jan Neruda (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/09/08/prague-1-day-37-nerudova/).
It was in 1872 that his first literary work, an epic poem called Václav, was published. A study of Russian poet Ivan Turgenev would follow in 1873. Both were published under a pseudonym, Antal Stašek.
In the meantime, his first novel, Nedokončený obraz (An unfinished picture), was published in 1878. Stašek’s literary work had two main influences – socialism and the Podkrkonoší Mountains.
In the 1889 elections, Zeman/Stašek was elected to the Provincial Assembly, representing the Old Czechs and holding his seat until 1895.
In 1913, Zeman/Stašek moved to Krč, living on U kola; after the war, he sat in the National Assembly as a deputy from 1919 to 1920.
Stašek’s most famous work, O ševci Matoušovi a jeho přátelích (About the Shoemaker Matouš and His Friends) was serialised in 1927. Stašek died in 1931, aged 88, and the novel – which we’ll be discussing soon too – was published in book form the year after.
Stašek’s ashes were placed at a family grave in Semily in June 1933; later that year, however, they were stolen. The ashes were never found; the perpetrator wasn’t either.
František Halas was born in Brno-Husovice in 1901. His parents were textile workers; his father had been imprisoned for his communist beliefs, and his mother died in 1908. These experiences would greatly influence his career as a poet.
When WW1 started, Halas’s father was called up to the front, where the Russians took him prisoner. Meanwhile, František finished his education, trained as a bookseller, and then worked as a clerk for an insurance company from 1922 to 1924.
He also joined a communist youth organisation, and from, 1921, worked for the communist press as well as avant-garde magazines. The nature of his poetry varied, with time, from proletarian verses to poetic (but melancholic) verses to existential poetry.
After his military service (1923 to 1925), he moved to Prague and got a job at the Orbis publishing house.
In 1936, Halas travelled to Spain during the Civil War, an experience that he would write several poems about.
During World War Two, he wrote for the (then underground) Rudé právo, and joined the Revolutionary Committee of Writers. He is pictured below in 1943.
After the war, Halas worked as head of the publishing department at the Ministry of Information (1945 to 1949); he also sat in the Provisional National Assembly, for the Communists, from 1945 to 1946, and became a member of the Society for Cultural and Economic Relations with the USSR (1945 to 1948).
After visits to Poland and the USSR in 1947, Halas remained a communist, but developed second thoughts about whether the Communists in Czechoslovakia were really up to the job. However, he still supported the February 1948 coup.
As well as his poetry, he was known for his translation of works from ‘fellow’ communist states – he translated Hungarian, Polish and Russian literature.
Halas died of heart failure in Prague in 1949. His sons were also renowned – František Xaver Halas (1937-2023) was the Czechoslovak (and then Czech) ambassador to the Holy See from 1990 to 1999, and Jan Halas (1945-2010) was a journalist who worked for Český rozhlas.
Anyone wondering how big Prague 4 is may do well to notice that that post is almost a year old, is already day 102, and that (even accounting for a few breaks in that time), we’re not nearly done yet.
From 1908 to 1912, as well as going to regular school, he attended landscape painting classes given by Václav Jansa, and then studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1919.
After a couple of years of being a member of the Mánes Foundation, Rada exhibited his work with Umělecká beseda from 1920 onwards. He lived in Železný Brod from 1920 to 1925, and maintained a deep relationship with the town even after moving back to Prague.
He was famed for his landscape paintings, typically using dark colours. These often featured horse-drawn carriages and sleighs, conveying the atmosphere of winter, or covered social themes. Rada also provided book covers for a range of Czech classics (as well as novels by Charles Dickens).
Named a national artist in 1958, Rada died in 1962. There is a permanent exhibition of his work in Železný Brod; his works are also on permanent display at the National Gallery in Prague and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Anna Maria Tilschová was born in Prague in 1873. Her father was a doctor of law; her mother was the daughter of Ferdinand Urbánek (1812-87), a sugar entrepreneur and organiser of cultural life in Bohemia and Moravia.
In 1895, Anna Maria married her cousin, Emanuel Tilsch, also a lawyer; they had two children. Anna Maria worked as a writer, with several novels published from 1905 onwards.
He was taken to hospital, but died a few hours later. His suicide would greatly influence his widow’s further works, which also conveyed disintegration of family relationships in bourgeois Prague society and the feeling of emptiness felt by so many of this group’s members.
Anna Maria’s masterpiece was Haldy (Heaps; 1927), which focused on life in Ostrava during the Great War. In 1947, she was awarded the title of National Artist.
Tilschová died in 1957, and is buried at Olšany Cemetery.
Blažíčkova was built in 1962. They were busy round here in 1962.
Oldřich Blažíček was born in Slavkovice in 1887. Along with his brother, he trained as a house painter, and then moved to Prague to develop his career.
Eventually, he got a place at the School of Applied Arts (UPŠ), eventually transferring to and graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU). The people he met through his studies included the subject of yesterday’s post, Rudolf Kremlička (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2026/04/30/prague-4-day-372-kremlickova/).
Ultimately, Blažíček became known for his landscape paintings of his native Vysočina (see 1919’s Na chmelnici / On the hop field, and 1939’s Krajina s vesnicí / Landscape with village, both below).
Rudolf Kremlička was born in Kolín in 1886, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Interested in impressionism, he became all the more so after visiting Paris, and the painter Édouard Manet became his role model.
He became one of the leading members of Tvrdošíjní (‘The Stubborn Ones’), a group of painters whose specialism was naive primitivism.
Kremlička initially painted landscapes (here is ‘Pobřeží’ (Coast; 1927)) but his work was consistently varied; he is most known for his paintings of women.
Emil Filla was born in Chropyně, near Kroměříž, in 1882, and grew up in Brno. After graduating, he got a job as a clerk at an insurance company, but soon decided office life wasn’t for him and headed for Prague.
He started studying monumental painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1903, but (pattern alert) left in 1906 because he found the teaching too conventional. A 1905 exhibition of Edvard Munch’s works might have inspired him in this decision.
Initially creating expressionist works (such as 1907’s Reader of Dostoevsky, below), the 1910s saw him moving into cubism (such as 1911’s Comforter, also below).
In 1912, he married Hana Krejčová, also a painter, in Vinohrady.
Spending much of World War I in the Netherlands, Filla worked for Maffie, the main Czech resistance organisation, in particular by passing messages written in invisible ink to resistance fighters.
Returning to an independent Czechoslovakia, Filla got a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he left after a few months so that he could devote himself to painting, and prove to everyone, including himself, that old habits die hard.
His favourite theme in the 1920s was still life, and his paintings of this era were more colourful than in the previous decade.
In the 1930s, women became a particular theme of Filla’s paintings (this is 1930’s Woman in armchair with book).
Sensing future events (and also reacting to worrying current ones), Filla’s late 1930s work warned of the rise of Nazism. On the same day that the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he was arrested and send to Dachau, then Buchenwald.
After the war, he was appointed professor at the newly founded Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and also joined the Communist Party. His work in this period focused on landscapes, but also on Slovak bandit songs.
Having suffered multiple heart attacks as a result of his weakaned health after World War II, Filla ultimately died from his seventh attack in 1953. He is buried in Střešovice.
In 2017, his ‘Seated woman’ sold at Sotheby’s for £ 729,000; four years later, 1914’s ‘Head of an Old Man’ sold for € 1.297 million.
Václav Rabas was born in Krušovice (near Rakovník, and as in the beer) in 1885. After completing his military service, he started studying at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts.
This all went well enough until 1909, when a critical article he wrote about the Academy was published. Rabas’s studies were put on hold as a result.
From 1911 to 1913, he was tutored by Max Švabinský. He was called up to fight in WWI in mid-1914, but was injured on the Eastern Front in September of the same year and never fought again.
In 1946, Rabas signed the ‘May Message of Cultural Workers to the Czech People!’, a pro-Communist manifesto. He also signed ‘Forward, not a step back!’, which supported the Communist coup of February 1948, and became a favourite of the regime.
Rabas died of a heart attack in 1954, having received the Klement Gottwald State Prize a year earlier, and is buried in Krušovice, where there is also a gallery dedicated to his work.
Karel Poláček was born in Rychnov nad Kněžnou in 1892; his father was a Jewish merchant. He also went to school there, but was expelled from grammar school for behaving badly and getting poor grades.
Poláček then studied law at Charles University, while running a student puppet theatre in Rychnov. Struggling to find employment in Prague, he joined the army when WW1 started; he served on the Italian and Russian fronts, and also escaped captivity in Serbia.
After the war, he worked at the export and import commission, an experience which influenced his first short story, Kolotoč (Carousel). He also started writing for two satirical magazines, which brought him into contact with the Čapek brothers (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/01/30/prague-2-day-24-sady-bratri-capku/).
It was actually Karel Čapek who took this picture of Poláček.
His novels were often humorous portrayals of people shaped by their professions or hobbies, and have been compared to the works of Chekov. Poláček also wrote short stories, including about the Jewish faith, and a collection titled Židovské anekdoty (Jewish Anecdotes, 1933).
Although he and his partner, Dora Vaňková, managed to get his daughter from a previous marriage, Jiřina, to England, Poláček and Dora were deported to Terezín in July 1943, and were sent to Auschwitz in October 1944.
Until the 1990s, it was assumed that Poláček died at the gas chambers in Auschwitz, but an eye-witness, Klára Baumöhlová, confirmed that he was transported to a camp at Hindenburg (current-day Zabrze), where one his plays as performed (and Baumöhlová played a role).
In January 1945, Poláček participated in a march from Hindenburg to the Gleiwitz camp (located in current-day Gliwice); he did not survive this.
In 1995, fifty years after his death, Poláček was posthumously awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.
A year earlier, Poláček’s last novel, Bylo nás pět (There were five of us), which he had written shortly before being sent to Terezín, had been made into a television series.
This tribute to the five main characters, in Poláček’s native Rychnov, is one that I find incredibly touching (photo from Wikimedia Commons, by Krvesaj).
Budějovická was given its named in 1925, having formerly been part of the road from Prague to… well, read on.
In the early 1200s, a settlement was founded in South Bohemia, and was named Budivojovice, named after Budivoje ze Železnice, a courtier of King Přemysl Otakar I, and the most important judge in Bohemia.
The area was important due to its location on the trade route from Prague to Linz. The Vítkovci, owners of one of the local settlements, Stradonice, wanted to found a proper town in the region, which set off alarm bells with the Czech royals, who sensed a threat to their power.
Therefore, in March 1265, Přemysl Otakar II (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2025/01/06/prague-4-day-6-otakarova/) founded České Budějovice. Budivoje’s son was obliged to exchange the settlement with Otakar, but he got some other territories in return, and the new town maintained his father’s name.
The Vítkovci didn’t react well to the founding of the town, or the thwarting of their plans to increase their power – in 1278, they burned it down.
King Wenceslas II managed to reduce the tensions by giving the town its first regent, Klaric; the regency would pass down through the Klaric family until the 15th century.
Budějovice’s leading position as a centre of trade was severely tested during the Hussite Wars in the 1420s and 1430s; notably, it also remained Catholic and was never invaded. Similarly, when the Bohemian Revolt, against the Catholic Habsburgs, took place in 1619, Budějovice didn’t join in.
Budějovice acted as capital of Bohemia for almost two years in the 1630s, due to the effect on Prague of the Thirty Years’ War, but also endured a huge fire in 1641. The glory days were effectively over.
That said, in the 1700s, the town gained some of its most distinctive features, including the Water Tower (1724), the Samson Fountain (1727) and the Town Hall (1727-30).
(Side note: I spent a lovely long weekend in ČB in 2018, and took pictures of all of these, but they seem to be lost to me after my first Instagram account disappeared with no trace or explanation in 2021. Back your data up, people)
ČB also became a place of pilgrimage – an image of Virgin Mary of Budějovice, located in the Church of the Sacrifice of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was attributed with miraculous powers, and copies of it were placed all over the city.
The 1700s also saw occupation by Bavarian troops during the First Silesian War, nearby battles between Austrian and Prussian troops during the Second Silesian War, and increased significance for the city when it became the seat of the region (1751) and then a diocese (1785).
ČB was occupied yet again in the early 1800s – by the French (1805) and the Bavarians (1805-6). It was still pretty small at this time, with about 5,000 inhabitants, but a little invention called the railway would eventually change this state of affairs.
In 1827, a horse-drawn railway to Linz was inaugurated – the first in mainland Europe. By 1871, the connection would go all the way to Vienna, and, in 1874, ČB was connected to Prague (the horses were obviously not in use by this point).
The city benefited from industrial development, too; production by Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth, one of the world’s oldest stationery companies, was moved there in 1848.
A quick note that you might have been past some of Koh-i-Noor’s stores. This picture is from Brno, and ‘one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen’ doesn’t do it justice.
Another company you might have heard of – Český akciový pivovar, later Budweiser Budvar Brewery – was founded in 1895.
Industrialisation also attracted Czech-speakers from the rest of Bohemia – and, in 1890, meant that, for the first time, Czech speakers outnumbered the German speakers, who had long enjoyed a privileged position.
By this time, the city’s population was definitively dominated by Czech speakers, who occupied all key positions until the Nazis occupied Bohemia and Moravia from 1939 to 1945.
At the end of WW2, the city also suffered the effects of US air raids. It was then liberated by the Soviets on 9 May 1945; its remaining German population (of about 7,500) was forcibly removed shortly afterwards.
Soviet troops would be much less welcome when they arrived again on 21 August 1968, occupying the city (where the locals put a sign saying ‘Kindergarten’ on the Czech Radio station, knowing this would make the troops struggle to find and occupy it), and shooting dead one resident, 24-year-old Václav Baloun.
In 1968, Czech Radio operators broadcast illegally from the South Bohemian Theatre; in 1989, the actors and students of the same theatre would kick-start the local events of the Velvet Revolution.
One of the organisers, Vladimír Špidla, would be Prime Minister from 2002 to 2004.
In 1991, Budějovice gained its own university (having previously hosted branches of Prague’s Charles University).
There is so, so much more to say about České Budějovice, even after all of the above. I can’t show you my photos, as previously mentioned, but I can guarantee that it’s a lovely place with a great main square. With 97,000 inhabitants, it is the country’s seventh-largest city, and very deserving of your time.
But, to end, I need to bring up the well-known slogan, ‘V Českých Budějovicích by chtěl žít každý’ (‘Everyone would like to live in České Budějovice’). This comes from Záskok (‘Substitute’; 1994), a play by Žižkov’s Jára Cimrman Theatre (Jára Cimrman surely needs his own post or twenty ASAP).
It sometimes gets forgotten that that phrase, in the play, is followed by ‘kromě mě teda’ / ‘except for me, then’, which playwright and general legend Zdeněk Svěrák wants you to know is not in any way a disparaging comment about the city, and nor should it be.
‘Květnových bojů’ translates as (street) ‘of the May battles’, and commemorates the fact that Krč had a particularly hard time of it during the Prague Uprising of 1945.
Bystřice is a town of 4,700 people in Central Bohemia, about six kilometres south of Benešov. The earliest written mention that we know of is from about 1350. It developed due to its location on a trade route.
In 1943, the western part of Bystřice became part of SS-Truppenübungsplatz Böhmen, an SS military training ground, and its inhabitants were forcibly removed on 31 December of that year.
Bystřice also had the misfortune to host a concentration camp for people who were married to Jews and unwilling to divorce them. Those who passed through the camp included actor Oldřich Nový (1899-1983), painter and propagator of rugby Ondřej Sekora (1899-1967), actor Miloš Kopecký (1922-1996) and film director Ladislav Rychman (1922-2007).
Its second street sign, meanwhile, is one I won’t forget in a hurry.
Krchleby is a village in Central Bohemia, six kilometres north of Nymburk, and about a sixty-kilometre drive to the northeast from Prague.
The origins of Krchleby’s name have never quite been agreed on. ‘Krch’ means ‘left’ in Old Czech, and ‘leb’ means ‘skull’, or ‘head’. And so there have been theories that the residents walked leaning to the left, bowed their heads to the left, or were left-handed.
Other theories suggest it’s derived from ‘kirles’, meaning ‘old church’, or that Krchleby initially had an S at the start, and that ‘Skrchleby’ denoted people who would save (skrbit) bread (chléb).
In any case, Krchleby was first mentioned in writing (that we know of) in 1323, has a population of 814, and shares its name with at least six other settlements in the country, and, no, nobody is certain why they’re called Krchleby either.
Neveklov is a town of 2,800 people in Central Bohemia, about 12 km east of Benešov and, therefore, about 30 km north of Prague.
The earliest written mention we know of dates from 1285, and we assume it was once the court of somebody called Nevykl or similar. That written mention concerns the sale of the settlement to the Zderaz Monastery in Prague’s New Town (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/09/01/prague-2-day-159-na-zderaze/).
Neveklov was promoted to market town status in 1563; its subsequent history follows a familiar pattern for Bohemian towns (confiscated from Hussites and given to Catholics in the 1620s / badly damaged by fires in 1752, 1790 and 1814; ravaged by plague in 1772).
In September 1942, Neveklov and its surrounding villages were evacuated so that the SS could set up ‘SS Training Area Bohemia’. Returning residents in 1945 found a town in disrepair, and with unexploded mines.
These days, Neveklov offers fine views of the Vltava, as well as cultural monuments including the church of St. Havel, a rectory, a chapel from 1700, a synagogue and the Jewish cemetery.
What's in a Prague street name 