Bratislava, Sept 26 (CTK) – Representatives from six Czech and Slovak leading cultural institutions signed yesterday a memorandum which provides for the preparation of joint events to mark the centenary of establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
The participating institutions are the National Museum, Moravian Land Museum, Silesian Land Museum and the Military History Institute Prague on the Czech side and the Slovak National Museum and the Slovak National Gallery on the Slovak side.
The memorandum was signed on the margin of yesterday’s joint meeting of the Czech and Slovak governments in Bratislava.
Michal Lukes, director general of the National Museum in Prague, said intensive preparations for the celebrations of the anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s establishment after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One as well as other anniversaries in 2018 have already started.
The highlight of the celebrations will be a joint exhibition to be held in Prague and Bratislava in 2018.
It will have several parts: the period after the foundation of Czechoslovakia, the building of the republic, the division of the state after Slovakia declared independence in 1939 and formed a Nazi-sponsored Slovak state, the post-war restoration of the joint state of Czechs and Slovaks, the communist dictatorship (1948-89), efforts to ease the conditions in communist Czechoslovakia and the period after the fall of communism in 1989, which was followed by the split of the country into the Czech and Slovak republics as from January 1993.
The exhibition will be held at Bratislava Castle from April until September 2018 and in October it will move to the National Museum in Prague.
In addition to it, an exhibition focused on historical ties between Moravia, which is the eastern part of the Czech Republic, and the neighbouring Slovakia, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries will be held in the Moravian Land Museum in Brno.
An exhibition in the Slovak National Gallery will be devoted to links between Czech and Slovak visual culture.
All exhibitions will be accompanied with a programme in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
