Zaoralek is backing “Czechia” as the official short name of the Czech Republic, he told journalists on 12 April.
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The Czechs, pushed and pulled between East and West over the centuries, have long suffered from an identity crisis. “The Czech Republic is impractical and I have never much liked Czechia”.
But so far there is no standardized one-word English name for the Czech Republic, unlike, say, France, the shortened version of the French Republic.
Or that, in 2013, some analysts mistakenly described the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing as hailing from the Czech Republic, confusing it with Chechnya, a restive region of Russian Federation almost 2,000 miles away, and alarming Czech diplomats who issued a clarification.
The largest part of the country is known as Bohemia (“Cechy” in Czech), but there are also other parts, Moravia and Silesia, so one name was needed that doesn’t exclude those historic lands.
To make it official, the Foreign Ministry will ask the United Nations to include the option in its databases.
Opposition Many however are opposed to the name change. The long-form name will remain the Czech Republic.
Some suggested that the name was a reminder of the country’s split from Slovakia, though others said it just sounds nasty: The word is “short and harsh sounding”, one Czech cartographer told Radio Prague in 2004.
In 1989, its people ended decades of communist rule in the Velvet Revolution.
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The Czechs themselves, of course, use the abbreviation Cesko, but there is no agreed English translation, although Czechlands and “Czech” have all been floated by pesky foreigners, to the minister’s consternation.
