In 1791 a vast outdoor exhibition took place in Prague to mark the coronation as King of Bohemia of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. The celebrations included the first performance of what was to be Mozart’s penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito. Its story, of an emperor who shows mercy even to those who plot against him, was no doubt intended to appeal to a ruler who had already pursued peace in Europe with considerable intelligence and skill.

The century following Leopold’s death was dominated by a period of enlightenment and increasing industrialization, during which Bohemia witnessed a sea-change in the form of the Czech National Revival. Although still technically part of Austro-Hungary, the Czechs under the Revivalists laid claim to their own history, culture and most importantly their original language.

All of this was reflected in the 1891 centenary exhibition, this time held in a purpose-built ‘crystal palace’ at Holešovice, in the loop of the river Vltava. The second great exhibition was an enormous success, and did much to boost the argument for a legitimate independent state, a dream which was to bear fruit in 1918 with the creation of the first Czechoslovak Republic under the leadership of Tomaš Masaryk, affectionately known to all Czechs as TGM.

"A purpose-built ‘crystal palace’ at Holešovice, in the loop of the river Vltava."

No-one would have suspected that before the 1991 exhibition could take place, the Czechs would have to endure the horror of two world wars and many brutal years of occupation by the Nazis and then by the communists; nor that, by the time the bicentennial celebrations came round, the Czechoslovak Republic would once more have emerged as an independent state, dressed rather differently, but with the spirit of 1891 intact.

The extraordinary chain-reaction of events of 1989 was the culmination of a war of attrition between public opinion and the great behemoth of the USSR which had been simmering away for decades between the Czechs and their Russian liberators from Nazism. As if to make up for its being on the furthest edge of the empire, Prague had been rewarded in 1949 with the largest Stalin in the world. For twelve years he towered above the city with an avuncular gaze before becoming an obvious victim of the Soviet’s own antipathy to the lionization of Stalin. The statue’s destruction was perhaps the first crack. If Stalin could go, then perhaps the whole paranoid lot of them could be got rid of too.

Vrat'a Brabenec: lead of the proto-punk group The Plastic People of the Universe

In the quaintly-named ‘Shakespeare and Sons’ on Crimea Street one of the regular drinkers is a man who knows more about this than most. Vratislav Brabenec was one of the early members and later the lead of the proto-punk group The Plastic People of the Universe. Taking their cue from the events of the so-called Prague Spring of 1968, their music was as inflammatory to the Soviet authorities as any street protest. Free-thinking radicals, their voice had to be suppressed, and so it was: in 1976 Vrata and others were simply locked away, as if bars could hold them back.

Instrumental in their release was a petition drawn up by a group of dissident artists, writers and musicians: Charter 77 picked up the latent energy of the Prague Spring and ran with it, gradually building worldwide opinion in favour of freedom of expression for a country which had been Europe’s piggy-in-the-middle for far too long. The mouthpiece of Charter 77 was a playwright of whom very few outside Prague had ever heard: Václav Havel. In 1989, when finally Stalin’s heirs went the same way as the statue, the playwright became the president; and in 1997 Vrata returned from Canada to his homeland and revived the Plastics.

Brabenec takes a swig out of an enormous goblet of red wine. In slow, gentle, measured English he intones ‘The Garden… the Garden is open’ and makes a simple gesture with his hands. He should know. As well as playing the sax with a mad energy, these hands have returned to the task for which he trained: landscape gardening. Vrata’s latest project is a new green space for an EU-funded technical college in the north of Prague. Cultivating their gardens is something these cultivated people have always done well. There is a terrible urge to disparage themselves, but the resolution and intelligence of the Czech Revival lives on.

Karel Sladkovsky: "one of the luminaries of the Revival years"

As if to prove the fact, just round the corner from Shakespeare’s a new café is about to open: the Sladkovsky, named after one of the luminaries of the Revival years, a firebrand editor and lawyer who inspired his followers in seeking greater independence within the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Vojtech Hynais's stage curtain in the National Theatre

It was Sladkovsky who laid the foundation stone of Prague’s National Theatre in 1868. Uniting art, literature and architecture in an act of great public generosity, this building is the greatest example to me of the cultivation of Prague’s garden. Above the stage is picked out in gold the motto of those earlier revolutionary thinkers, the precursors of Masaryk and Havel. However distant they may seem, its words resonate with all the past and present history of the independent Czechs: ‘Národ Sobĕ’ – ‘The Nation Unto Itself’.