Charta 77
Music is sometimes is able to move the globe—a good example is Charter 77 in response to the imprisonment of underground musicians in the communist Czechoslovakia. The Czech Centre in Bratislava will have an outdoor exhibition at Pohoda that concentrates on the key Czech and Slovak figures who signed the Charter 77 petition.
06. June 2017
At sixteen panels, you will see key the participants of Charter 77 in the photos of the State Security tracking actions and other documents from the police archives. The exhibition was prepared by the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. The exhibition commemorates this year's 40th anniversary of the publication of the Charter 77 petition. The document called for respect for human and civil rights, which Communist Czechoslovakia also signed for with the signing of the Helsinki Protocols in 1975.
The authors and first signatories of Charter 77 were people such as Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, and Ladislav Hejdánek. It was a response to the arrest and condemnation of four “long haired” from the Czech underground, members of band The Plastic People of the Universe: Magor, Vráťa Brabenec, Sváťa Karásek, and Pavel Zajíček. The regime did not expect that these “rowdies”, whose crime was the freedom of creation, would be stood up for by the then dissident intellectual elite. Thanks to them, the Charter became the most important anti-Communist act in our country. By January 1990, nearly 2000 people signed the Charter. The exhibition provides basic information on the Charter, presents contemporary documents, and informs about the persecution of the signatories by the then State Security.