As Czechs celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful demonstrations that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in November 1989, the absence of the democratic movement’s most prominent leader and first post-revolution president Vaclav Havel, who died in 2011, was felt.
While Havel is well-known internationally as the “philosopher king,” a former political prisoner who became president, there is another, less well-known figure in many of the iconic photographs of Havel from that time pictured with him, smiling warmly under a thick, tobacco-stained mustache,read more about Jiří Dienstbier.
