A small country in the heart of Europe. A city of spires and cobblestones, of Baroque palaces and Gothic churches, of a river that has been crossed by writers, composers, artists, and revolutionaries for a thousand years.
The Czech Republic — and Prague above all — has produced a disproportionate number of the world’s most extraordinary creative minds. Writers who defined the literature of the 20th century. Composers whose music is performed in every concert hall on earth. Artists whose work changed the visual language of their age. Sculptors who provoke, disturb, and delight in equal measure. Politicians who wrote plays.
This is the story of the creatives who put Prague on the map — and why the city continues to produce work that the world cannot ignore.
Table of Contents
- Franz Kafka — The Writer Who Named an Age
- Alphonse Mucha — The Czech Who Conquered Paris
- Antonín Dvořák — The Composer of the New World
- Bedřich Smetana — The Sound of Bohemia
- Václav Havel — The Playwright Who Became President
- Milan Kundera — The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech
- David Černý — The Provocateur of Prague
- Karel Čapek — The Man Who Invented the Robot
- Czech Creativity Today
- The Czech Tradition of Making — and 5.MINS
Franz Kafka — The Writer Who Named an Age
Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka wrote in German, lived almost entirely in the city of his birth, and published almost nothing in his lifetime. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, having instructed his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts. Brod did not. The world has been living with the consequences ever since.
The Metamorphosis. The Trial. The Castle. Three works that gave the 20th century one of its defining adjectives: Kafkaesque. The bureaucratic nightmare, the individual crushed by systems too vast and indifferent to comprehend, the transformation that cannot be explained or escaped. Kafka wrote about Prague — its streets, its offices, its particular atmosphere of beauty and oppression — and somehow wrote about the entire modern world.
Prague has not always known what to do with Kafka. Under communism, his work was banned. Today, his face is on souvenirs, his name is on a museum, and a giant rotating silver head of his likeness — by David Černý — spins slowly outside the Quadrio shopping centre on Wenceslas Square.
Where to find Kafka in Prague: The Franz Kafka Museum in Malá Strana. The house where he was born on the edge of Old Town Square (marked with a plaque and a small bust). The Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, where his family is buried. The rotating head on Wenceslas Square.
Alphonse Mucha — The Czech Who Conquered Paris
Alphonse Mucha was born in Moravia in 1860 and became, almost by accident, the defining artist of the Art Nouveau movement. In 1894, he was working as a relatively unknown illustrator in Paris when he was asked, at short notice, to design a poster for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. The result — a sinuous, golden, extraordinary image of Bernhardt as Gismonda — made him famous overnight.
For the next decade, Mucha defined the visual language of the Belle Époque: the flowing lines, the floral borders, the luminous women with their cascading hair, the decorative panels that turned commercial art into something approaching the sacred. His posters for cigarettes, champagne, and biscuits are now in museums. His style was so distinctive and so widely imitated that “Mucha style” became a category of its own.
But Mucha always considered his commercial work a means to an end. His true ambition was the Slav Epic — a cycle of 20 monumental paintings depicting the history of the Slavic peoples, each one the size of a house. He spent 18 years painting it, donated it to the city of Prague, and died in 1939, shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo.
Where to find Mucha in Prague: The Mucha Museum in the New Town — the best collection of his commercial work. The Slav Epic is displayed at the Prague National Gallery. The Municipal House on Republic Square, which Mucha helped decorate, is one of the finest Art Nouveau interiors in Europe.
Antonín Dvořák — The Composer of the New World
Antonín Dvořák was born in 1841 in a village north of Prague, the son of a butcher and innkeeper. He became one of the most performed composers in the history of classical music. His Symphony No. 9 in E minor — “From the New World” — written during his time as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, is one of the most recognisable pieces of orchestral music ever written. The slow movement has been used in everything from bread commercials to space missions.
Dvořák was deeply Czech in his musical identity — his work is saturated with the rhythms and melodies of Bohemian folk music, transformed into the language of the symphony and the string quartet. He was also deeply human: he loved trains, pigeons, and the countryside around his summer house in Vysoká. He was homesick in New York and returned to Prague as soon as he could.
Where to find Dvořák in Prague: The Dvořák Museum in the New Town — his instruments, manuscripts, and personal effects. His grave in the Vyšehrad cemetery, alongside Smetana and other Czech cultural figures. The Rudolfinum concert hall, where the Czech Philharmonic performs his work regularly.
Bedřich Smetana — The Sound of Bohemia
If Dvořák is the Czech composer the world knows best, Bedřich Smetana is the one the Czechs love most. His cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast (My Homeland) — and above all its second movement, Vltava, which follows the river from its source in the Bohemian mountains to Prague — is the unofficial national anthem of Czech culture. It is played at the opening of every Prague Spring music festival. It is the sound of the country.
Smetana went deaf in 1874, at the height of his powers, and continued composing in silence for another decade. His late string quartet From My Life — written after his deafness — is one of the most personal and moving pieces of chamber music in the repertoire.
Where to find Smetana in Prague: The Smetana Museum on the riverbank in the Old Town, in a beautiful Neo-Renaissance building overlooking the Vltava. His grave at Vyšehrad. The Prague Spring music festival, which opens every May with a performance of Má vlast.
Václav Havel — The Playwright Who Became President
Václav Havel is one of the most extraordinary figures of the 20th century: a playwright and essayist who became the leader of a revolution, and then the president of his country. His plays — absurdist, political, deeply human — were banned under communism and performed in living rooms and basements. His essays on “living in truth” — on the moral responsibility of the individual in the face of an oppressive system — circulated in samizdat copies throughout the Eastern Bloc.
In 1989, Havel led the Velvet Revolution — the peaceful overthrow of the communist government — from a theatre in Prague. Within weeks, he was president. He served until 2003, navigating the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the creation of the Czech Republic, and the country’s entry into NATO and the European Union. He died in 2011. Prague mourned him as it has mourned few others.
Where to find Havel in Prague: Prague Castle, where he lived and worked as president. The Lucerna Palace on Wenceslas Square, which his family owned and which he loved. The Václav Havel Library in the New Town. The Velvet Revolution memorial on Národní Třída, where the revolution began on 17 November 1989.
Milan Kundera — The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech
Milan Kundera was born in Brno in 1929, studied and taught in Prague, and was expelled from the Communist Party twice — once after 1948 and once after 1968. After the Soviet invasion, his books were banned and his citizenship revoked. He moved to France in 1975 and eventually became a French citizen, writing his later work in French.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984, is one of the most widely read novels of the late 20th century — a meditation on love, politics, memory, and the weight of history, set against the backdrop of the Prague Spring and its aftermath. It made Prague — its streets, its cafes, its particular atmosphere of beauty and melancholy — legible to the world.
Kundera died in Paris in 2023, having spent nearly five decades in exile. He was, in the end, both deeply Czech and deeply European — a writer whose work belongs to both traditions and can be fully claimed by neither.
David Černý — The Provocateur of Prague
David Černý is the most visible and most controversial artist working in Prague today. Born in 1967, he first came to public attention in 1991 when he painted a Soviet tank — a war memorial in the centre of Prague — pink. He was arrested. Several members of parliament repainted it pink in solidarity. The tank was eventually removed.
Since then, Černý has filled Prague with work that provokes, disturbs, and delights: giant crawling babies with barcode faces climbing the Zizkov Television Tower; a sculpture of two men urinating into a map of the Czech Republic; a rotating silver head of Kafka; Saint Wenceslas riding an upside-down dead horse; a man hanging from a pole by one hand (a portrait of Sigmund Freud). His work is impossible to ignore and impossible to be neutral about.
Černý’s art is deeply engaged with Czech history, politics, and identity — but it speaks a visual language that anyone can understand. He is the artist who makes Prague strange again, who reminds visitors that this beautiful, ancient city has a dark and complicated history, and that beauty and provocation can occupy the same space.
Where to find Černý’s work in Prague: The crawling babies on the Zizkov Television Tower. The rotating Kafka head outside Quadrio on Wenceslas Square. The urinating figures at the Kafka Museum in Malá Strana. The upside-down horse in the Lucerna Palace arcade. Freud hanging from a pole above Old Town.
Karel Čapek — The Man Who Invented the Robot
Karel Čapek was born in 1890 and became one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century — a novelist, playwright, journalist, and essayist whose work combined philosophical depth with extraordinary readability. His 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the word “robot” to the world — from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labour or drudgery.
Čapek’s work is full of prescient anxieties about technology, power, and the human capacity for self-destruction. His novel War with the Newts — a satirical allegory about colonialism and fascism — was published in 1936, three years before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He died of pneumonia in December 1938, weeks after the Munich Agreement handed the Sudetenland to Hitler. The Gestapo came to arrest him on the day of his funeral.
Where to find Čapek in Prague: The Karel Čapek Museum in Vinohrady, in the villa where he lived and worked. His grave at Vyšehrad.
Czech Creativity Today
The tradition of Czech creativity did not end with the 20th century. Prague today is a city of designers, architects, filmmakers, musicians, and makers who continue to produce work of extraordinary quality and originality.
The Czech design scene — centred on studios in Holešovice, Karlín, and Vinohrady — is one of the most vital in Central Europe. Czech glass design, with its roots in the Bohemian glassmaking tradition, continues to produce work that is collected internationally. Czech animation — from the surrealist films of Jan Švankmajer to the contemporary studios working in Prague — has a global reputation for originality and craft.
And in a studio in the heart of Prague, 5.MINS continues the Czech tradition of making things by hand — with precision, with craft, and with the belief that the object made for a specific person, from a specific moment, is always more valuable than the object made for everyone.
❤️ The Czech Tradition of Making — and 5.MINS
What connects Mucha’s posters, Dvořák’s symphonies, Černý’s sculptures, and the laser-engraved keepsakes made live in our Prague studio? The same thing that has always driven Czech creativity: the belief that craft matters, that the made object carries meaning, that the work of human hands — whether in paint, in sound, in bronze, or in laser-engraved leather — is worth doing with care and with intention.
At 5.MINS, we make personalised souvenirs live — in front of you, in five minutes. You bring the photograph. We engrave it into premium leather, wood, or acrylic. You watch it happen. You leave with the object and the private video of the making.
The Czech tradition of making, in the city where Kafka walked, where Mucha drew, where Dvořák composed, where Havel wrote his plays in secret. Made for you. Made now. Made to last.
📍 Find us in Prague — or order online at 5mins.store.
❓ FAQs — Famous Czech Creatives
Who is the most famous Czech person?
Franz Kafka is arguably the most internationally recognised Czech creative — his name has become an adjective used in dozens of languages. Alphonse Mucha is the most recognised Czech visual artist. Antonín Dvořák is the most performed Czech composer. Václav Havel is the most celebrated Czech political figure of the modern era.
Who invented the word “robot”?
The word “robot” was coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from the Czech word “robota,” meaning forced labour or drudgery. Čapek’s brother Josef is credited with suggesting the word.
What is David Černý famous for?
David Černý is a Czech sculptor and installation artist known for provocative public works in Prague and internationally. His most famous works include the crawling babies on the Zizkov Television Tower, the rotating silver head of Kafka on Wenceslas Square, and the pink tank (1991) that first brought him to public attention.
Where can I see Alphonse Mucha’s work in Prague?
The Mucha Museum in the New Town has the best collection of his commercial posters and decorative panels. The Slav Epic — his monumental cycle of 20 large-format paintings — is displayed at the Prague National Gallery. The Municipal House on Republic Square contains Art Nouveau interiors that Mucha helped design.
Where is Franz Kafka buried?
Franz Kafka is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov, Prague — not in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, which was closed for new burials long before his death. His grave is in Section 21 of the New Jewish Cemetery.
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