Three names, one town: Why Czech names still stir emotions
A visit to Letohrad exposed an embarrassing gap in my knowledge: the town had changed its name not once but twice in the years after the Second World War. It also brought me back to a question that has resurfaced at the highest political level: Czechia or the Czech Republic?
Czechia returns to political debate
That discovery brought me back to a larger naming question. If a town’s name can carry so much history, what about the name of the country itself? A recent report by TV Nova showed that the argument over Czechia, which might have seemed settled, still divides political leaders.
Foreign Minister Petr Macinka (Motorists) objects to the shorter English name and favours the Czech Republic. “I really can’t bring myself to say Czechia,” he told Nova. President Petr Pavel acknowledged that the shorter form does not come naturally to everyone, but accepted its use, pointing to neighbouring countries with both formal and short names. “I think the shorter name is perfectly fine,” he said.
An official name, a personal reaction
Those contrasting reactions reminded me of one of the earliest Czechast episodes, in which I explored how the country’s names developed. Some of the people I interviewed, including geographer Jiří Preis, expressed reservations about Czechia, saying that it did not sound natural to them. Their doubts helped prompt a strongly worded response from Petr Pavlínek, a geography professor working at Charles University in Prague and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and a longstanding advocate of the short name. And he did not complain just to me and my superiors, he wrote an angry e-mail to the then deputy minister of foreign affairs responsible for financing Radio Prague International.
I subsequently invited Pavlínek onto Czechast for what became a lively discussion. He distinguished the national standardization of the name in 1993 from the notification to the United Nations in 2016. For him, the long delay and inconsistent use by institutions helped create the very unfamiliarity that opponents then cited as a reason to reject it.
“If something is not used, people do not get used to it,” he argued. “And they basically think that they do not like it.” I use Czechia myself, but I wanted to explore a different question: does agreeing on the appropriate name explain why some people struggle to identify with it? Our exchange moved from Moravian identity to the responsibilities of politicians and the value of a recognisable name abroad.
Hundreds of places, hundreds of changes
But I also wanted to look beyond the name of the country itself. That brought me to Jaroslav David, a professor at the University of Ostrava who specialises in onomastics—the study of proper names. He helped put Letohrad’s story into the wider context of post-war renaming. Across the Czech lands, he estimates that several hundred inhabited places were renamed, roughly 500 to 800. Most were small villages and isolated settlements in the borderlands, rather than major towns.
The expulsion of the German population and the arrival of new inhabitants changed the relationship between people and places. Some settlements received Czech names but later disappeared altogether. Elsewhere, existing Czech forms survived because specialists argued that names of German origin had long since become part of the Czech language. As David explains, legal procedures and scrutiny by historians, linguists and cartographers helped restrain demands for wholesale renaming.
The names people keep
What particularly interested me was how an old name can survive long after an official decision replaces it. David points to Šejdorf, a predominantly Czech village in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, renamed Okrouhlička after the war. The older name remains visible in local celebrations and businesses. “For them, the name is part of their lives and their history,” he says. The continuity of the community helped preserve a name that had disappeared from the official map.
David also cautions against seeing every change as a simple substitution. Both the creation of Gottwaldov from Zlín and the emergence of Letohrad involved administrative mergers. “It is not simply that one name replaces another,” he explains. “It is also connected with an administrative change.” Politics mattered, but so did the legal organisation of the places being named.
These conversations brought me back to the question that connects a small town square with an international diplomatic debate. Authorities can establish a name, and institutions can encourage its use. Whether people feel at home with it also depends on familiarity, memory and their relationship with the place itself. I went to Letohrad thinking I knew the place’s name. I came away with a story about three names—and a reason to ask again why what we call a place can matter so much.
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