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Two giant butterflies made from Spitfire aircraft fuselages have being installed on the Máj department store in the centre of Prague, which will soon reopen to the public after a 2-year-reconstruction. The giant art sculptures are the work of artist David Černý, who has many unusual art pieces around Prague.

His latest work has come under fire from the Club for Old Prague which claims that the purple-and-turquoise butterflies are kitsch.

Černý has vehemently defended the art work, saying that the butterflies made from Spitfire fuselages were created in honour of the fighter pilots who served in the RAF. He said the sculptures were originally planned for the NATO headquarters in Brussels. A similar fighter jet will be placed there sometime in the near future, he said.

The opposition ANO party retains a strong edge over its rivals in opinion polls. According to a survey conducted by the Kantar agency for Czech Television, if elections were held today, ANO would get 32 percent of the votes, followed by the ruling Civic Democrats with 15.5 percent and the Pirate Party of the governing coalition with 11 percent. The opposition Freedom and Direct Democracy party would get 9 percent of the votes, followed by the coalition parties Mayors and Independents with 7.5 percent and TOP 09 with 5 percent of the votes. No other party would cross the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in the lower chamber.

Relations between Czechs and Sudeten Germans have improved significantly in recent years, and the days when Czechia viewed conferences of the Landsmannschaft with apprehension are now a thing of the past, the Czech ambassador to Germany, Tomáš Kafka, said in an address to the annual gathering of Sudeten Germans in Augspurk, Bavaria. The Sudeten German Landsmannschaft which organizes annual gatherings is one of the biggest organisations representing ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Ambassador Kafka attended the meeting as the official representative of the Czech government. He conveyed to the gathering greetings from President Petr Pavel, saying that the Czech head of state is very pleased with the direction and dynamism with which Czech-German relations are developing.

In the past, Czech-German relations were burdened by the past, driven also by Czech fears of potential property demands from descendants of Germans expelled after the war. The moto of this year’s gathering, which was held three weeks before the European Parliament elections, is Sudeten Germans and Czechs - Together for Europe.

Top officials, WWII veterans and foreign diplomats attended a ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Terezín ghetto on Sunday. Among the participants were President Petr Pavel, Senate chair Miloš Vystrčil and Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Markéta Pekarová Adamová.

In her address, the speaker of the lower house said it is the moral duty of people to remember what happened at Terezín and to consistently fight against those who want to forget, distort history, belittle  or even deny the horrors of the Holocaust.

Also known as Theresienstadt, the 200-year-old fortress town was transformed by the Nazis into a camp where Jews from across Europe were massed until they could be transported to extermination camps. Between 1940 and 1945 over 155,000 prisoners entered its gates. Around 117,000 of them did not survive the war. Some 35,000 died in the camp itself of stress, hunger and atrocious living conditions.