Bohemia

Bohemia is the western two-thirds of Czechia, a basin enclosed by mountains so neatly that its outline has barely changed in a thousand years, even as the powers ruling it kept changing. From Prague its kings governed a realm that was for a time the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and its people gave Europe the Hussite reform movement a century before Luther, the defenestration that set off the Thirty Years' War, and much of the Habsburg monarchy's industry. Bohemia has not been an administrative unit since 1949, yet it remains a living historical and cultural region, called Čechy in Czech, and its English name endures in the word bohemian, born of an old French belief that the Roma came from there.

Bohemia covers 52,065 square kilometers. The Ore Mountains on the northwest, the Sudetes and Giant Mountains on the northeast, and the Bohemian Forest on the southwest wall it in, while the gentler Bohemian-Moravian Highlands mark its eastern edge along the watershed between the Elbe and the Danube. Nearly all its rivers, including the Vltava through Prague, drain north to the Elbe, which leaves through a sandstone gorge into Saxony. About 6.9 million people live there, roughly two-thirds of Czechia's population, in Prague, Plzeň, České Budějovice, Liberec, and spa towns such as Karlovy Vary. Today almost all of historic Bohemia lies within Czechia, apart from small fringes such as Kłodzko Land, culturally Bohemian but Prussian from 1742 and Polish since 1945.

Bohemia grew from a Přemyslid duchy of the 9th and 10th centuries into a kingdom whose crown became hereditary in 1198, and its king ranked among the Holy Roman Empire's electors. The lands of the Bohemian Crown once included Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia, but Lusatia went to Saxony in 1635 and most of Silesia to Prussia in 1742. The Habsburgs held the throne from 1526 to 1918, when Bohemia became the core of Czechoslovakia, which gained small border areas from Austria in 1920. The 1938 Munich Agreement handed the German-speaking borderlands, the Sudetenland, to Germany, and in 1939 Germany occupied the rest as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After 1945 most Bohemian Germans were expelled, and since 1993 Bohemia has formed the larger part of the Czech Republic.

• Prague
  Czechia's capital, the City of a Hundred Spires capital
• Austria-Hungary
  The Habsburg dual monarchy of a dozen nations, dissolved at the end of World War I formerly part of
• Czechoslovakia
  The Central European republic of 1918 that ended in a peaceful Velvet Divorce formerly part of
• The Holy Roman Empire
  A thousand-year patchwork of principalities, free cities and church lands in the heart of Europe formerly part of
• Silesia
  The Oder basin that passed from Bohemia to Austria, Prussia, and finally Poland formerly united with
• Moravia
  The eastern Czech land of the Morava River, wine country, and an early Slavic state neighboring region
• Czechia
  The landlocked heart of Central Europe, crowned by Bohemia and Moravia today part of