Jan Hus (1370 – 6 July 1415), often called in English as John Hus or John Huss, was a
Czech priest, philosopher, reformer and master at Charles University in Prague. After John
Wycliffe, the theorist of ecclesiastical Reformation, Hus is considered to be the first Church
reformer, as he lived before Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli.
 Since 1390 he studied the Charles University in Prague, where in 1396 achieved a title
of Master.
 In 1400 he became a priest and since 1402 he preached in Prague at the Bethlehem
Chapel.
 In 1409 he became the rector of Charles University. Hus preached in Czech and he
also used Czech for writing his books.
 He was also a reformer of the Czech spelling and he was responsible for translating
the Bible into Czech and for the release of Kutna Hora decree (it abolished the
supremacy of German professors at Charles University).
 Church was not pleased with Jan Hus’s views and he got into a dispute with dogmatic
interpretation of the Church, represented by the pope. His teaching threatened the illgotten assets of the leading representatives of the Catholic Church.

After the ban, which was plotted over him in 1412, he left Prague.
First he lived in Kozí Hrádek and in Sezimovo Ústí, after that he lived in the castle
Krakovec near Rakovníka.
 He gained support of influential circles, including King Wenceslas IV. In 1412, Hus
stepped against the selling of indulgences.

Two years later, he accepted the Emperor Sigismund´s invitation at
the Council of Constance to defend his teachings.
 After several hearings at the council Hus was declared a heretic, his priestly title was
revoked and he was sentenced to death by burning. His teachings, however, refused to
recant.
 He was burned 6th June 1415.
 His death strengthened the reform movement in Czech countries, which later grew into
the Hussite wars.
 The followers of his ideas were Hussites. They founded the town of Tábor.
Works
 O církvi (Latin, De ecclesia)
 Proti bule papežské (Latin)
 O českém pravopise – (Latin, Orthographia Bohemica)
 Dcerka
 Výklad Viery, Desatera a Páteře (Czech)
 Knížky o svatokupectví
 Postila (Czech)
 O šesti bludiech
Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti
( 1896 Bernartice – 1971 Písek ) a Czech doctor
interested in tropical diseases and entomology. She established the Czechoslovak Surgical
Institute in Baghdad where she worked both as a director and a surgeon between 1925 and
1935. She focused on examining the so called “Baghdad boils“. She got a nickname “Albert
Schweitzer in a skirt“. She treated some members of the Iraqi Royal Family.
In Iraq she collected various kinds of local insects. She sent them to the Czech National
Museum and enriched the museum with 500,000 species. Some of them had not been
explored before and some were named after her.
She married an Italian – Giorgio Di Lotti. They had two children – a son Radbor and a
daughter Drahomila Lydie. Kálalová was obsessed with work and continued to work in her
hospital. She became ill with feared dengue fever. The whole family came back to her
birthplace in Bernartice in Czechoslovakia where she recovered.
After several years of a happy family life it came to a disaster. Her husband and their two
children were killed by the Nazis. It was on the last day of the Word War II. She was injured
and survived only because the killers believed she was dead among all those that they killed.
Her family was killed in front of her eyes behind their house.
In 1947 she toot part in an international women´s conference in the USA, held by Eleanor
Roosevelt.
Kálalová had a gift for languages too. She spoke fluently fourteen languages: English, French,
German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Norwegian, Icelandic, modern
Greek, Tajic and Georgian. She worked as a translator too.
During their life in Baghdad she and her husband had many foreign visitors in their house.
She spoke many languages with them. Their son Radbor was just learning the mother tongue
but he could not learn it properly because he heard many languages every day. He never
learned it and he spoke a mixture of the languages that he was listening to as a child for all his
life. It caused his problems with comunication and he had big problems at school too.
Krtek, The Mole was first seen in 1956 in Prague, when
Zdeněk Miler wanted to
create a children's cartoon about how flax is processed. He wanted a strong Disney influence
to the cartoon by choosing an animal for the leading role, and decided to pick a mole after
stumbling over a molehill during a walk. The first film called "Jak krtek ke kalhotkám přišel"
("How the mole got his trousers") was released in 1956. It won a Silver Lion in Venice.
Production for further episodes started in 1963 and since then, around 50 episodes have been
created. The last one was "Krtek a žabka" ("The mole and the little frog").
The first episode of the cartoon was narrated, but Miler wanted the cartoon to be understood
in every country of the world, so he decided to use his daughters as voice actors, reducing the
speech to short non-figurative exclamations in order to express the mole's feelings and world
perception.
In 2011 the U.S. astronaut Andrew Feustel, whose wife is of Czech ancestry, took a plush toy
of Krtek to the space on the board of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
The mole was created by Zdeněk Miler, the Czech cartoonist. He was born on 21st February
1921 and he died on 30th November 2011. Miler was born in Kladno just west of Prague. He
became an animator partly because of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He took part in
the demonstrations held consequent to death of Jan Opletal which lead to the closing of
universities and colleges. He escaped being sent to a Concentration camp. Instead he wound
up working as an animator.
Miler made about 70 films. In approximately 50 of them, the protagonist was his most famous
creation, the small mole (Krtek in Czech).
Krtek was a huge success in Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe and Germany from the
beginning and today Krtek can be seen in over 80 countries.