You can explore Příbram from home

Karel Čapek
Karel Čapek found his second home in Stará Hut near Dobříš. Here he went for walks in
nature, worked on his house and garden, and met with friends. He also wrote. More than a hundred texts and works by Karel Čapek are freely available on the website
of the MunicipalLibrary in Prague, including those he wrote in the Dobříš ravine - White Sickness, War with the Mothers, Mothers and the unfinished novel The Life and Work of the Composer Foltýn.

The 1937 film adaptation of The White Sickness, the crowning achievement of actor
and director Hugo Haas, can be found on the National Film Archive's YouTube.

Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Dvořák first visited Vysoká u Příbrami in 1877. He immediately fell in love with the region. "I feel very happy here," he wrote in letters to his friends. Eventually he composed over thirty works here - and many of them are among the most important of his entire oeuvre.

On Czech Television's iBroadcast, you can watch the first television production of Rusalka from 1960 with the legendary Eduard Haken as the Waterman, a recording of The Devil and Kate from the National Theatre, or Symphony No. 8 from last year's opening of Dvořák's Prague.

The complete digital archive has been made available free of charge these days by the Berlin Philharmonic. Here, too, Dvořák's works from the "Vysotsky" period can be played, such as the second series of Slavonic Dances or Symphony No. 7, led by the current chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, Semyon Byčkov.

Jan Drda
When in the spring of 1946 a group of former students of the Příbram Gymnasium (Drda himself had graduated from the Gymnasium) came to visit Jan Drda at Dobříš Castle and told him about the tragic events that had taken place at the school during the Heydrichiad, he received the subject for one of his most famous stories.

The Higher Principle describes the actual events of June 1942, when sexton Antonín Stočes tore a photograph of Adolf Hitler out of a magazine with the words "This doesn't belong here!" The incident made its way to the German authorities. The Gestapo arrested Antonín Stočes and his father Vojtěch, as well as the school's headmaster Lukeš - allegedly for approving the assassination of Heydrich. All three were executed a few days later in Tábor prison.

Drd's treatment differs from some of the realities, as does Jiří Krejčík's later film. The short story was published in the collection The Dumb Barricade, in which Jan Drda told the stories of ordinary World War II heroes.

František Gellner
At the urging of his father, František Gellner went to study at the Mining Academy in Příbram in 1901. He was engaged in other activities rather than school, and his studies were as unsuccessful as all the previous ones. Nevertheless, in his "Příbram exile" he collected so many verses that it made a whole collection. It was published in early 1903 under the title The Joys of Life. You can download it on the website of the Municipal Library in Prague.