czech republic

The Czech Republic also known by its short-form name, Czechia. Czech is a landlocked country in Central Europe bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the southeast, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west. The Czech Republic is a landlocked country with a hilly landscape that covers an area of 78,866 square kilometers (30,450 sq mi) with a mostly temperate continental climate and oceanic climate. It is a unitary parliamentary republic, with 10.7 million inhabitants. Its capital and largest city is Prague, with 1.3 million residents; other major cities are Brno, Ostrava, Olomouc and Pilsen. The Czech Republic includes the historical territories of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia.

Czech is spoken by about 10 million residents of the Czech Republic. A Eurobarometer survey conducted from January to March 2012 found that the first language of 98 percent of Czech citizens was Czech, the third-highest proportion of a population in the European Union (behind Greece and Hungary).

As the official language of the Czech Republic (a member of the European Union since 2004), Czech is one of the EU’s official languages and the 2012 Eurobarometer survey found that Czech was the foreign language most often used in Slovakia.

Prague is the only major city in Europe that wasn’t extensively bombed in WWII. For this reason, you will find many of the buildings in the historic centre standing as originally built, some dating to the Middle Ages!

Czechs consume the most beer per capita in the world. You can go join them for a Pilsner-style larger (their most famous brew) in any old alluring pub – called a hospoda – around town.

The Czech Republic is considered part of Eastern Europe, but Prague is more west than Vienna, which is in central Europe.