Czechia document photos online

The most famous Czech export isn't beer or crystal glass - it's a word printed in nearly every language on Earth. In 1920, Prague playwright Karel Capek staged R.U.R., and his brother Josef proposed naming the artificial workers "roboti," from the Old Slavic robota meaning forced labour. The word "robot" entered global vocabulary almost overnight. That same talent for quiet world-firsts runs through Czech identity: the soft contact lens worn in millions of eyes, the sugar cube dropped into coffee, and the golden lager that became three-quarters of all beer brewed today were all born in the Czech lands.

• Passport In the January 2026 Henley Passport Index the Czech passport ranked joint 6th worldwide, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 183 destinations.
• Currency The Czech koruna means "crown," inheriting the name of the krone/koruna launched across Austria-Hungary in 1892 - the region's first modern gold-based currency - and is still subdivided into 100 haleru, even though the last haler coins vanished from circulation in 2008.
• Money quirk Because the smallest coin is now 1 koruna, every cash purchase in Czechia is legally rounded to the nearest crown at the till, so the sub-unit survives only on paper and in card payments.
• Statehood Czechia was born from the "Velvet Divorce" of 1 January 1993, when Czechoslovakia split into two countries peacefully and by negotiation, and it joined the European Union in May 2004.
• Demographics By the end of 2024 about 1.09 million foreign nationals lived in Czechia - roughly 10% of the population - with Ukrainians the largest group at around 594,000, followed by Slovaks and Vietnamese.
• Invention The soft contact lens was invented in 1959 by Czech chemist Otto Wichterle, who spun his first hydrogel lenses on an apparatus built from a child's construction kit and a phonograph motor.
• Language The word "robot" was coined for Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R., derived from the Czech robota (forced labour), and premiered on Czech soil in Hradec Kralove in January 1921.
• Record Prague Castle is recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest ancient castle in the world, an irregular complex roughly 570 metres long that has served as the seat of Czech rulers and presidents for over a thousand years.
• Beer The world's first pale golden lager - Pilsner - was brewed in Plzen in 1842, and Czechs remain the heaviest beer drinkers on Earth, averaging about 126 litres per person in 2023.