Dissident Juliana Jirousová dies at age of 79

Czech painter Juliana Jirousová has passed away of natural causes just a few weeks shy of her 80th birthday. The writer and columnist Petr Placák announced her death on Facebook in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Jirousová was a signatory of Charter 77 and the wife of poet and dissident Ivan Magor Jirous, who was best known as the artistic director of the Czech psychedelic rock group The Plastic People of the Universe, and later one of the key figures of the Czech underground during the communist regime's "normalisation" period. He passed away in 2011.