The majority of Czechs (39.2 percent) are Roman Catholic, with a smaller number (4.1 percent) adhering to Protestant denominations. The capital city, Prague, preserves one of the oldest and richest architectural traditions in Europe, with many buildings, such as the Romanesque Church of St. Masaryk, consists of a blue triangle on a rectilinear background of white and red.The Czechs are a Slavic people, closely related to the Slovaks in speech and custom, but with a distinct history and national identity.Divided between the followers of Hus—the Hussites—and the Catholics, the country was attacked by crusaders and plunged into turmoil.Through a dynastic union with the Jagiello family in Poland, the kings of Bohemia eventually became linked to the House of the Austrian Habsburgs, which ruled there from 1526 to 1918.By the turn of the century, a widening gap between the first and second generations was already in evidence.In 1900 there were 199,939 American-born Czechs as opposed to 156,640 Czechs who had been born in Europe.Two prominent rulers of the House of Přemsyl were Wenceslas the Holy (c.

Under its ruling dynasty, the Přemsylides, Bohemia became Christian in the ninth century and a member of the Holy Roman Empire in the eleventh century, led by the German kings but retaining its own monarchy.However, a national awakening in the nineteenth century, culminating in the political protest movement of 1848, reestablished a sense of Czech identity.After the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia and Russia in 1914, the Czechs and Slovaks, in a struggle to establish a common republic, joined the side of the Allies.Under Communist rule until 1989, the Czech Republic (Ceska Republika), which shared a common federal government with Slovakia until 1992, is now an independent state with democratic, multiparty institutions.Located in central Europe and occupying a territory of 78,864 square kilometers, it is bordered on the northwest and southwest by the Federal Republic of Germany, on the south by Austria, on the southeast by Slovakia, and on the north by Poland. Of that number, 81.3 percent claim to be of Czech ethnic origin; 13.2 percent are Moravian; and the remaining 4.5 percent belong to other groups, notably Slovak, Polish, German, Silesian, Romany (Gypsy), Hungarian, or Ukrainian. The flag of the Czech Republic, designed and first flown in New York to honor the visit of the World War I patriot Tomaš G.Prior to the nineteenth century, few Czechs had immigrated to the United States, and evidence of their presence during the colonial and revolutionary periods is sketchy.Hermann Augustine (1605-1686), one of the founders of the Virginia tobacco trade and compiler of the first map of Maryland and Virginia, is thought to be the first Czech immigrant.This year also saw the arrival of Vojta Naprstek, a radical free thinker and a vocal opponent of the Austrian government who, as part of a general amnesty extended to political refugees, returned in 1857 to his native land where he opened an American museum to acquaint European Czechs with America.By the late 1850s there were an estimated 10,000 Czechs living in the United States.Chicago, tied to the West by rail and more readily accessible to the immigrants, became the most populous Czech settlement.By 1870, other cities with Czech concentrations included St. At the turn of the century, Czech immigrants were more likely to make the journey to the United States with their families. Moreover, it was not uncommon in large families for the head of the household to make more than one trip to the United States, bringing along one or more children each time.Favoring monarchical control over the Protestant Reformation, the Habsburgs opposed the Bohemian estates, a struggle that resulted in the defeat of the Bohemian Protestant insurgents at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620.Many thousands of noblemen were expelled from the country, and Bohemia was completely absorbed into the Habsburg empire, with German becoming the primary language of instruction in the schools.Under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a further period of liberalization began in the 1980s that led to the downfall of Communism in 1989, when largely peaceful strikes and demonstrations in Prague swept aside the old regime and elevated dissident playwright Vaclav Havel to the presidency.After a brief coexistence in a federation with Slovakia, the Czech Republic became fully independent in 1992.