page_title: Bohemia
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Bohemia / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: The Bohemian town of Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic (Pohled z Mlýnské kolonády na zástavbu nad Vřídelní ulicí)
context_page_description: Bohemia is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech lands in the present-day Czech Republic. In a broader meaning, Bohemia sometimes refers to the entire Czech territory, including Moravia and Czech Silesia, especially in a historical context, such as the Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by Bohemian kings.
  Bohemia was a duchy of Great Moravia, later an independent principality, a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently a part of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Empire. After World War I and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, the whole of Bohemia became a part of Czechoslovakia, defying claims of the German speaking inhabitants that regions with German speaking majority should be included in the Republic of German-Austria. Between 1938 and 1945, these border regions were joined to Nazi Germany as the Sudetenland.
  The remainder of Czech territory became the Second Czechoslovak Republic and was subsequently occupied as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In 1969, the Czech lands were given autonomy within Czechoslovakia as the Czech Socialist Republic.
context_section_description: After World War I, Bohemia (as the largest and most populous land) became the core of the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia, which combined Bohemia, Moravia, Czech Silesia, Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia) and Carpathian Ruthenia into one state.  Under its first president, Tomáš Masaryk, Czechoslovakia became a liberal democratic republic but serious issues emerged regarding the Czech majority's relationship with the native German and Hungarian minorities. The German Bohemians had demanded that the regions with German speaking majority be included in a German state.
  Following the Munich Agreement in 1938, the border regions of Bohemia historically inhabited predominantly by ethnic Germans (the Sudetenland) were annexed to Nazi Germany. The remnants of Bohemia and Moravia were then annexed by Germany in 1939, while the Slovak lands became the separate Slovak Republic, a puppet state of Nazi Germany. From 1939 to 1945 Bohemia (without the Sudetenland), together with Moravia, formed the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren).
  Any open opposition to German occupation was brutally suppressed by the Nazi authorities and many Czech patriots were executed as a result. In 1942, Nazi forces murdered the population of a whole village, Lidice. After World War II ended in 1945, after initial plans to cede lands to Germany or to create German-speaking cantons had been abandoned, the vast majority of the Bohemian Germans were expelled by force by the order of the re-established Czechoslovak central government, based on the Potsdam Agreement that acquiesced to large-scale ethnic cleansing. The Bohemian Germans' property was confiscated by the Czech authorities and amounted, according to contemporary estimates, to a third of the Czechoslovak national income. Germans who were valued for their skills were allowed to stay to pass on their knowledge to the Czech migrants. The expulsion severely depopulated the area and from then on, locales were referred to in only their Czech equivalents regardless of their previous demographic makeup. The re-settlement of the formerly German-settled areas allowed many poorer people to acquire property, thus equalizing the Czechoslovak society.
  The Communist Party won the most votes in free elections but not a simple majority. Klement Gottwald, the communist leader, became Prime Minister of a coalition government.
  In February 1948 the non-communist members of the government resigned in protest against arbitrary measures by the communists and their Soviet protectors in many of the state's institutions. Gottwald and the communists responded with a coup d'état and installed a pro-Soviet authoritarian state. In 1949, Bohemia ceased to be an administrative unit of Czechoslovakia, as the country was divided into administrative regions that did not follow the historical borders.
  In 1989, Agnes of Bohemia became the first saint from a Central European country to be canonized by Pope John Paul II before the "Velvet Revolution" later that year.
  After the Velvet Divorce in 1993, the territory of Bohemia remained in the Czech Republic. The new Constitution of the Czech Republic provided for higher administrative units to be established, providing for the possibility of Bohemia as an administrative unit, but did not specify the form they would take. A constitutional act in 1997 rejected the restoration of self-governing historical Czech lands and decided for the regional system that has been in use since 2000. Petr Pithart, former Czech prime minister and president of the Senate at the time, remained one of the main advocates of the land system, claiming that the primary reason for its refusal was the fear of possible Moravian separatism.
  Bohemia thus remains a historical region, and its administration is divided between the Prague, Central Bohemia, Plzeň, Karlovy Vary, Ústí nad Labem, Liberec, and Hradec Králové Regions, as well as parts of the Pardubice, Vysočina, South Bohemian, Olomouc and South Moravian Regions. In addition to their use in the names of the regions,
caption: Bohemian city Karlovy Vary
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2007:10:20 23:16:03", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[50, 13, 343/10]", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "E", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[12, 52, 258/5]", "GPS GPSTimeStamp": "[13, 49, 15]", "GPS GPSStatus": "A", "GPS GPSMapDatum": "WGS-84", "GPS GPSDate": "2007:05:31", "Image GPSInfo": "924", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1222", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5909", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/1000", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:05:31 15:49:15", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:05:31 15:49:15", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "326559/32768", "EXIF ApertureValue": "6", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "176", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "900", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "3888000/877", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "432000/97", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}