Aug 13, 2008: Garden of the Office of the Czech Government will be open to the public during the weekends

Forty years after August 21, 1968, Czech Premier Mirek Topolánek will open to the public the garden of the Straka Academy, the official seat of the Czech Government. He will inaugurate an exhibition called “For Your Freedom and Ours“ that will be staged in the garden of the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic until the end of October. People will be free to visit the venue of official receptions of foreign statesmen regularly during the weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. between April and the end of October.

“Some people in the then Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic and the Hungarian People’s Republic did not keep silent. This exhibition is a tribute to those natural defenders of freedom who did not take freedom for granted,“ says Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek about the prepared exhibition.

The exhibition, marking the fortieth anniversary of August 1968, describes the protests against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Treaty troops from the other socialist countries. On one of the 12 panels of the exhibition, Tatiana Bayevova gives her recollections of the eve of the demonstration in the Red Square in 1968: “The more I understood the situation, the greater anger it evoked in me. Intuitively I perceived the ongoing violence and the fact that my country has again become a gendarme of Europe. I knew a labour camp was in store for me and I prepared for that. At night I cleaned up my flat and wrote a letter to friends and parents. There were no doubts in my mind whatsoever.”

The exhibition “For Your Freedom and Ours“ is held under the auspices of Czech Premier Mirek Topolánek. It was prepared by the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Author of the concept of the exhibition and its editor is Petr Blažek.

In addition to the exhibition and the opening of the garden of the Straka Academy to the public, Premier Mirek Topolánek will play host in Prague to the Slovak Premier Robert Fico on Thursday, August 21, 2008. They will meet in the Kramáø Villa, lay flowers to the grave of the Czech student Marie Charousková killed in August 1968 at Klárov, visit the Slovak Institute and inaugurate an exhibition called “And Tanks Arrived in 1968“ in Prague’s National Museum.