Under a headline reading "Technoparty: Peace and 'weird people,' " the nation's leading daily, Mladá fronta Dnes, chimed in the day after CzechTek in a full page of coverage dedicated to the aftermath of one of summer's largest and best-established music raves.

Interior Minister František Bublan, who has never taken responsibility for the debacle last summer caused by heavy-handed police beating partyers in front of news cameras ("Note to self," he must have been saying last August. "Next time do that off camera.") is quoted in a thoughtful sidebar under the headline: "How will CzechTek be in 2007?"

The visionary top cop, who was wise enough not to enter the main staging area of CzechTek this year, remaining on the fringe with his 400 police comrades so that no flying eggs could interrupt his sound bites to the news crews, makes a characteristically philosophical observation in this second article:

He says of raves, "The myth has been extinguished that, if it's illegal, it's more free, it's better."

A good number of the partyers at CzechTek who recall the days before organizers began officially leasing land for the event and securing proper permits might be inclined to hang on to that myth; something about phalanxes of police does tend to reduce a party's credibility as an underground, anarchic event.

But the trouble is, CzechTek hasn't really been "illegal" for three years now. The 12-year-old event first became a draw for the youth of Europe because of it's grapevine buzz. There were no posters and, though it may have popped up somewhere on the Internet, its location was never announced until just before the party. Usually it was held in a convenient field without anyone troubling to obtain official permits from anyone.

For better or worse, those days are long gone. Last year's CzechTek, in fact, was legally leased and permitted and only turned into a melée when some partyers trespassed across neighboring land to get to the party — a situation made worse when police closed down road access.

These days, as large-scale party organizers know all too well, getting 40,000 people together for a successful event takes months of planning, hard work, cooperation with landlords and officials, provisions for hygiene, safety, sound systems and courting corporate sponsors (Staropramen got its logo displayed at CzechTek this year, for one).

In short, it's more like a job — even an investment — than an art orgy among the daisies.

It's probably in the nature of police, and possibly the mainstream media, to be suspicious of such gatherings. After all, there are surely drugs present. And the thousands of youths who turn up do indeed look weird to those not comfortable with tattoos, piercings, odd hair colors, loud techno and ripped-up combat clothing.

Suspicious or not, authorities seem to have learned that it's all pretty harmless in the end — and that if they just stay calm and professional, monitoring at a discreet distance, they can avoid both violence and embarrassment to themselves.