Magazine

Coming up, we have a story on the somewhat unexpected cultural relations between the Czech Republic and Tajikistan. But first, as we mark the thirty fourth anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, we'll look at a newly released film on that tragic time in 1969.

Magazine

Jan 69

On 19 January 1969, Jan Palach died in a Prague hospital from burns sustained when he set himself alight on Wenceslas Square three days earlier. It was a silent and desperate protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that had begun five months before, and against the Czechoslovak authorities' acceptance of the occupation.

A newly released documentary titled Jan 69 gives us an additional perspective on the tragic death of Jan Palach and how it resonated in Czech society. The documentary consists of eight minutes of footage of crowds of Czechs lining up on Prague's Wenceslas Square and Old Town Square to honour Jan Palach just after his death.

The documentary's delayed release thirty three years after it was filmed can be attributed to a combination of politics and fate. In April 2002 the footage was found in the depository of the National Film Archives in Prague, and the archive's staff began to search for the makers of the film. Among the first people they asked was the cameraman Stanislav Milota:

"It was a total coincidence. As I say, last year after thirty three years people from the National Film Archive called me, saying that they have some sort of material there that they are unable to identify. And asking if I could take a look because it is possible that they are some sort of old black-and-white things. And that there are some people, some crowds. They asked me because they knew that I was then, in that period, in the sixties, a cameraman of feature-length films, and I had shot the film "The Cremator." And they also knew that in August '68 I had shot the news, the aggression in August by those five armies, and the occupation as such."

Mr Milota recognised the film as his own work. He had made it with the producer Jaromir Kallista with the support of the then director of Barrandov Film Studios Vlastimil Harnach. All three were dismissed from Barrandov because of the documentary.

Mr Milota himself thought that the communist-era secret police - the StB - had destroyed the film. After the Velvet Revolution he had even searched for it in the StB archives in November 1989, but he did not find the footage and thought it had disappeared.

"I was surprised and astonished during the first couple of seconds. I did not realise that it could be what I had been looking for thirty three years, because I actually thought it did not exist any more. But after a moment I realised that it was that, that small documentary that was quickly, practically half-illegally, done, in order to preserve the historical facts. At that time I was working on a feature-length film in Israel, and I took one copy there. There were only two copies, one of them disappeared. And so this one that disappeared reappeared thirty three years later last year."

Ironically, Jan 69 had its world premiere in Moscow at the Human Rights Film Festival in December 2002. The Czech public will get to see this new perspective on a telling event in Czech national history exactly on the thirty fourth anniversary of Jan Palach's death, when the film will be broadcast on Czech Television.

And now we go to Tajikistan...

From Dushanbe to Prague

What place does Tajikistan have in Czech culture? Many would wonder whether two such distant and small cultures could be significantly related at all. But an exhibition that has just opened at the Czech National Library in Prague shows that history has produced some interesting exchanges between the two cultures.

The exhibition "Tajikistan and its Place in Czech Culture and Science" has been organised by the Czech National Library and the Czech-Iranian Society. It presents examples of Tajik literature alongside Czech works on Tajikistan and its culture. Among the prominent Czech authors represented is Jiri Becka, the Czech Republic's leading specialist in Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan, the president of the Czech-Iranian Society and the author of the exhibition:

"The study of Tajikistan has a relatively good history in this country, because Jan Rybka, an outstanding Czech specialist in Iran and orientalist, wrote a history of Persian and Tajik literature together with his students. And with that Tajik literature of the twentieth century became known to practically the whole Western world, because his book was translated into English, German, Russian and into other languages, including Persian."

Also present at the opening of the exhibition was a group of Tajiks studying in Prague, who told me that there are probably around a dozen students from Tajikistan in the Czech Republic. They were clearly delighted that Tajik culture was being presented to the Czech public through the exhibition. Their country did not have many opportunities to do so in the Czech Republic, partly because Tajikistan has no official representation here.

"I'm F. Karimov. I'm a student here in my second year in the Czech Republic. I think today's presentation is a very good action to advance good relations between the two countries, Tajikistan and the Czech Republic. And as we know, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Tajikistan have bilateral relations, but I think that they are not so close. In my mind, to get good relations, we have to make presentations such as this one more and more. A Czech presentation in Tajikistan, a Tajik presentation in the Czech Republic. And I am really glad to see that, in the Czech Republic, all nations can find out some information about Tajikistan."

So, from the Czech who compiled the first history of Tajik literature, to the Tajik students studying in Prague today, it is clear that there is a history of culture and knowledge travelling the path between Dushanbe and Prague after all.