Prague, Jan 18 (CTK) – An interactive monolingual dictionary, Encyclopaedia of Migration, which offers answers to the most frequently asked questions about migrations and refugees’ stories, was presented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague on Wednesday.
This non-profit educational project connects Czech university students and experts.
The dictionary also contains basic entries on the Middle East and migration due to climate change and explanations of important legal and anthropological terms.
The stories of people on the run are connected with entries on the phenomena and events which the narrators explicitly mention as well as those which ensue from their life stories.
The encyclopaedia informs the broad public in a comprehensible form about the current results of scientific research, Jakub Mucka, the project coordinator, said in a press reelase.
The authors launched the project symbolically in the days when the heroic death of student Jan Palach is commemorated.
“We do not dare to compare ourselves to Palach, but his sacrifice is inspiratory. We consider Jan Palach a living symbol of a person who feels responsibility for the world around himself and who himself wants to give it something,” Mucka said.
Palach, a 20-year-old Czech student, burnt himself to death in January 1969 to rouse the society from lethargy following the 1968 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring communist-led reform movement.
In February, entries related to the conflict in Ukraine and the situation in Belarus and Russia will be added to the encyclopaedia.
Gradually, the project is to further embrace the history of migration, information on minorities in the Czech Republic and relationship to Christianity and Islam.
