Tigrid Centenary

THE "TIGRID CENTENARY" PROJECT WAS CREATED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF PAVEL TIGRID. THE PROJECT WAS PREPARED BY A TEAM OF TEACHERS FROM OUR SCHOOL. IT WAS A THREE-DAY EVENT THAT CULMINATED IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE - A ROUND TABLE "PAVEL TIGRID AND CZECH DEMOCRATIC JOURNALISM IN EXILE". IT TOOK PLACE ON 24 OCTOBER 2017 AT THE JIŘÍ MYRON THEATRE (NDM).

A number of distinguished guests visited Ostrava and Pavel Tigrid's Language School - memoirists, former dissidents, historians and political scientists. About 600 students, 60 teachers and 100 visitors from the Ostrava public were introduced to Pavel Tigrid by the most authoritative people: his daughter Deborah Tigrid, former Czech Ambassador to France and candidate for the presidential election Pavel Fischer, publicist Karel Hvížďala, chartist and writer Ivanka Lefeuvre, historians Vilém Prečan (ČSDS), Petr Blažek (ÚSTR) and Radek Schovánek.

A video greeting and a short commentary on the personality of Pavel Tigrid was recorded by Tomáš Halík (he was in the USA at the time of the meeting). The roundtable was moderated by Jan Pokorný, Director of News at Czech Radio, and the discussion was recorded and broadcast on the Czech Radio.

On the same afternoon, a public debate on the topic "Pavel Tigrid and Czech democratic journalism" took place at the PANT Centre. Historian Vilém Prečan, publicist Karel Hvížďala and writer and chartist Ivanka Lefeuvre talked about Pavel Tigrid - an exceptional personality of the Czech exile, editor of Radio Free Europe and publisher of the quarterly Svědectví. What was his role among Czech exiles? How does he still inspire, provoke and irritate? What of his views and attitudes has not become obsolete and where is Tigrid's contemporary journalism most lacking?

The conference and debate was organised by the Pavel Tigrid Language School in Ostrava and the Educa24 agency in cooperation with the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre and the PANT association. The Moravian-Silesian Region, whose governor, prof. Ing. Ivo Vondrák, CSc., granted the event patronage.

What Does Pavel Tigrid Have in Common with Ostrava?

Fifteen years ago, what has always been true would have been true... nothing! He had never been here, he had never written or dreamed of Ostrava, he owned no property here and his family had no affection for these parts. In 2003, however, some teachers of one of Poruba's grammar schools decided to invite Tigrid to the town and introduce him to the local students. It was just after the end of the school year and Tigrid was delighted with the idea, but he kindly refused. He was almost eighty-six and three weeks later the newspapers reported that he had left this world in the peace of his family's free will.

However, the idea of "getting" the most famous Czech exiled journalist to Ostrava did not stick. Teachers in Poruba decided to get Tigrid's name for their school, even though it did not arouse much enthusiasm among politicians or the public in the traditionally left-leaning region. It worked. In 2005,

Mrs. Ivanka Tigridová visited Ostrava and gave her approval (also sanctified by a decree of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic) to give the school an honorary name and on 1 September the Pavel Tigrida Language Grammar School was established there. This could have been the end of the matter, as today every school is the holder of various honorary names, but... But the school's management and passionate teachers did not want to give up and kept trying to somehow "trap" Tigrid in Ostrava. They tried the obligatory high school knowledge competitions (Tigridiade for talented publicists and modern historians), various public readings and other low-profile events, until a truly historic opportunity appeared! The idea of making a statue of Tigrid in Ostrava was born... The city hadn't invested in similar cultural activities for years, so the competition from other new installations was almost zero and the Porubians saw a chance to move history a little bit and get Tigrid here, at least in bronze. In order to satisfy the black humour of modern history, Zdeňka Průšová, the headmistress of the gymnasium at the time (honour her efforts!), extorted from the manager of the collection yard a several-ton marble plinth (overgrown in nettles for twenty years) on which V. I. Lenin stood in Poruba!

During the communist regime, the gigantic statue looked down on the working people in the area of today's Main Street, formerly Lenin Avenue, and the plinth was to become the place where the lifelong advocate of democracy would meet the founder of Soviet totalitarianism. The idea was worth a million and was enthusiastically embraced by the entire Tigrid family, who promised to visit Ostrava on the occasion of the statue's unveiling and to tell students and the public about their experiences of their intelligence-scarred childhood. The students and teachers of the high school announced a collection and tried to raise money through various events so that they could install the statue in the jubilee year 2009 (20 years after the fall of the communist regime). It wasn't quite easy, so it was unveiled in spring 2010 and in the end it was a bust (by the academic sculptor Rybička). However, it became interesting again and as an accompanying programme, a conference "Pavel Tigrid and Radio Free Europe" was held in Ostrava, where many of Tigrid's colleagues and friends (Pavel Pecháček - former director of RFE, Lída Rakušanová - editor of RFE, Jacques Rupnik - political scientist, Karel Schwarzenberg - former chairman of the International Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and patron of the Czechoslovak Republic, and Petruška Šustrová - chartist and journalist - spoke.)

The conference filled the large auditorium of the VŠB and showed that high schools can also do a good job in popularizing "scientific topics". Tigrid was more widely written and talked about in Ostrava, and the high school in cooperation with the PANT association soon prepared a large travelling exhibition "Pavel Tigrid - in words against totalitarianism", which is still travelling around Czech schools today, accompanied by carefully prepared worksheets designed to diversify, otherwise still quite traditional, history teaching. A momentary interest in "Tigridian" topics swept through several schools and Ostrava, occasionally fed by teachers with their popularisation seminars and pupils with a happening. The Language School took the effort to spread awareness of the ideas, attitudes and significance of Pavel Tigrid seriously and has earned its place among the few institutions that deal with Tigrid more systematically today. This can be evidenced by the "Tigrid Centenary" project, which began in the spring of 017 (it dealt, for example, with the interesting parallel between Tigrid and Komenský as two exiles under duress) and culminated in October with the international conference "Pavel Tigrid and Czech Democratic Journalism in Exile" (more info above).

But nothing ends there. The students and teachers of the Pavel Tigrid Language School have reserved a whole week before the autumn holidays to smuggle their "patron saint" into the streets of Ostrava again. They processed Tigrid's adventurous life in the form of a crammer's song and tried to make the autumn Kuří rynek sing with it. There they also installed an exhibition, which they decided to translate into English and French, performed small excerpts from Tigrid's works and surprised with many sympathetic pranks...

All in all, considering the question in the introduction, it doesn't look bad at all: unlike Paris, Prague or Semily, everyone in Ostrava will be able to say after this autumn that Pavel Tigrid has never been here more than he is today...