Prague, June 21 (CTK) – Hundreds of guests, including Czech ministers, military representatives and war veterans, attended the celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s 91st birthday staged by the British embassy in Prague, also marking this year’s 65th anniversary of Elizabeth’s coronation.
A surprise was a wax figure of Elizabeth II, which the embassy loaned for the birthday party.
Ambassador Jan Thompson said today’s event marked the official birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.
This year is also the 65th anniversary of her coronation, and in the near future, a centenary will elapse since the launch of close diplomatic relations between the Czechs and the British, Thompson said.
She thanked the Czech friends and guests to the party for their warm acceptance of British culture, and wished Happy Birthday to Queen Elizabeth.
In her welcome speech, Thompson reminded of certain intersections between the culture of the Czechs and Britons, and also of the recent reception of Czech President Milos Zeman by the British Queen.
Greeting the guests, Czech Chamber of Deputies chairman Jan Hamacek expressed his sympathy to Britain over the recent terrorist attacks and the disastrous fire of a high-rise house in London.
He, too, pointed at the historical links between the Czech Republic and Britain, which have been recently mentioned mainly in connection with the anniversary of the Anthropoid operation, in which Czechoslovak paratroopers trained in Britain killed Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi deputy Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague on May 27, 1942.
The guests to the party included some of the hundreds of Winton children, mostly Czechoslovak Jews whom British Nicholas Winton saved by dispatching whole trains with them from Prague to families in Britain in the last months before the outburst of World War Two.
Elizabeth II was born on April 21, but official celebrations of British sovereigns’ birthday have been traditionally held in June when the probability of a nice weather is higher.
