Wenceslas III was tragically murdered at a time when he tried to save a promising empire reaching from Šumava Mountains almost to the Baltic Sea. His death ended an entire era, and its date ranks among those of other tragic moments of Czech history, such as the defeat of the Protestants at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620; the Munich conference in 1938, when then Czechoslovakia first lost its border areas to Hitler's Germany; March 15, 1939 when Germany occupied the country; or the Soviet-led invasion Aug. 21, 1968.

The dynasties that came after the Přemyslids did have foreign blood, but so did the Přemyslids themselves — through wedlock — and Charles IV, the Father of the Country, after all, did have a Přemyslid mother.

Putting aside the tragedy of 1306, we should also see the positive: The Přemyslids founded a state with its heart in the Prague area and made it a part of "the European world."

The Czech lands today are geographically a lot closer to the map of the Přemyslid state than [first President Tomáš Garrigue] Masaryk's Czechoslovak Republic, which spanned all the way to Carpathian Mountains and the Ukrainian steppes.

Thus, to take the long view, we are commemorating 700 years since the sad end of a family that gave Czechs many great personalities rather than the end of one dynasty as such. The Přemyslids have secured our place in Christian Europe from which many have tried to remove the Czech lands in the centuries that followed, the last such attempt (the communist era) being still recent.

Fortunately enough, the foundations of our state, as laid down by the Přemyslids, proved strong enough to prevent that and for this we owe the dynasty our thanks, Navara writes.

The Hochtief VSB company, which is building a home for elderly Holocaust survivors in Prague, is fully owned by an Essen-based company of the same name, a company with a long tradition — but its history from the Nazi period is very complicated toward Nazi victims, Tomáš Jelínek writes in Právo Aug. 4.

Not only did the company take part in the Third Reich's projects from Western Europe to Iran but it also carried out special projects for Hitler himself: the Berlin bunker and his recreation resort in Bavaria. At that time, the company made use of slave labor and concentration camp prisoners. The company management was no passive victim of the regime but a part of the Nazi top brass.

Today, its subsidiary won a contract from Prague's Jewish Community to build a home for the last Holocaust survivors. History wasn't mentioned at all during contract negotiations. The current community leaders say there wasn't any point in mentioning it more than 60 years after the war, and the subsidiary says it was only purchased by Hochtief VSB in the late 1990s. Both speak of intentional manipulation. Prague Jewish Community officials should admit they made a mistake. And, together with the company, they should solve the problem, unless they want a project for the Holocaust survivors to bear the scent of historical associations, Jelínek writes.