Famous people who grew up or lived in the Czech Republic
10 notable people grew up or lived in the Czech Republic. Each listing explores the home and neighbourhood, and how the place shaped the person they became.
Antonín Dvořák1841–1904
📍 Náměstí Dr. Dvořáka 1, 277 51 Nelahozeves, Central Bohemia, Czech Republic
I was born Antonín Leopold Dvořák on the 8th of September 1841 in Nelahozeves, a village on the Vltava River north of Prague, the son of a butcher and innkeeper who played the zither. The…
Egon Schiele1911
📍 Široká 71, 381 01 Český Krumlov, Czech Republic
I grew up in Tulln, on the Danube, where my father was the stationmaster; I drew trains endlessly as a boy. He became ill and died when I was fourteen. Český Krumlov, the old Bohemian town…
Emil Zátopek1922–1937
📍 Kopřivnice, Moravian-Silesian Region, Czech Republic
I was born in September 1922 in Kopřivnice, a small town in the hills of northern Moravia, dominated by the Tatra works, the great factory that built cars and lorries. I was one of the…
Franz Kafka1916–1917
📍 Zlatá ulička 22, Prague Castle, 119 00 Prague, Czech Republic
I was born in Prague's Old Town and hardly ever left the city — this little mother has claws, I once wrote. I lived for years in my parents' apartment, under the shadow of my overbearing…
Gregor Mendel1843–1884
📍 Mendelianum, St Thomas's Abbey, Mendlovo náměstí 1, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic
I was born Johann Mendel, a farmer's son in a small Silesian village, and I joined the Augustinian friars of St Thomas in Brno in 1843 because I loved learning and my family could not…
Gustav Mahler1860–1911
📍 Kaliště 32, 396 01 Humpolec, Kraj Vysočina, Czech Republic
I was born Gustav Mahler on the 7th of July 1860 in Kaliště, a village in Bohemia, the second of fourteen children of a Jewish innkeeper. The village and the surrounding Bohemian landscape…
Ivan Lendl1960–1978
📍 Ostrava, Czech Republic
Ivan Lendl was born in Ostrava, a coal-mining and steel-making city in the north of Czechoslovakia, near the Polish border, in March 1960, the only child of two fine tennis players. His…
Martina Navratilova1959–1975
📍 Řevnice, Czech Republic
Martina Navratilova was born in Prague in October 1956, and after her parents divorced when she was about three, her mother, Jana, a gymnast, skier and tennis player, moved the family to…
Sigmund Freud1856–1860
📍 Sigmunda Freuda 117/15, 742 58 Příbor, Czech Republic
I was born in this house in Freiberg in Mähren on the sixth of May 1856 — what is now Příbor in the Czech Republic, though no such nation existed then. We were Jewish and therefore of…
Václav Havel1936–2011
📍 Rašínovo nábřeží 78, 120 00 Praha 2, Czech Republic
I grew up in Prague under Nazi occupation and then Communist rule, and the city shaped me as a playwright and then as a dissident. I was born in 1936 into a bourgeois family — my father was…