Marek Pražák

* 1964

  • "I came home from school on the seventeenth and in the evening, while my then wife was in bed, I turned on the Indian tranny, I don't know if it was Free Europe or Voice of America, and there were already the recordings, someone was probably recording something from the National Avenue and suddenly this Smid, this fictitious student who was killed and what happened there and so on. Then the strikes in the theatre, the students, it was already Saturday. Sunday, so it was already clear, when we came to school on Monday, we were supposed to have the army right away. So me and the boys who were supposed to have the military department, we went to see our good gentlemen who said, `Our boys, our eared boys' and so on, they were such good, tidy college, soldiers, officers. So there was this funny situation, we said, 'We're going, we just came here to tell you that we're not going to the army today, we're going to Prague for the occupation strike, because there's already a strike there, and they said, 'Boys, don't be silly, boys, this is shit, did you hear that in Vienna?' Because they were looking at Vienna, of course, like every Zlin guy and the Brno guys were looking at Vienna: 'Did you hear that in Vienna? They were shouting anti-state slogans on the National Avenue around the National Theatre. So they left us alone and we went. Rightly, as soldiers, they should arrest us, put us before a military court, because we, still as soldiers, would have had exemplary punishment."

  • "We as a college of arts and industry were very much in terms of that propaganda, so there were press stands and there it went, but it was, nothing was certain, it was very dramatic those first days and there was a lot of that misinformation, we were locked in the school and suddenly the information was, 'Quickly leave the school, there's a helicopter and the cops are descending on the school from above.' There were some trucks with riot police passing by and that's how they wanted to get the students out of the school and that's what happened at the philosofical faculty because a girl went to call her mother from a phone booth and the phone booths were bugged, so at that moment when she answered the phone it said, 'Quickly leave the school, the riot police are there.' She ran to say it in the school, so everybody came out, some guys locked the door, slammed the door and it was very difficult to get back into the school after that."

  • "When I was fifteen I got a tape of some guy and then I found out years later that it was Sváťa Karásek, and those were the great songs, right. Say no to the Devil, say no. And so on. So that's when we were learning guitar and I didn't know who he was. Google wasn't, he basically like didn't exist for us as far as a name. Then the Kryl songs, we played that too, and we also kind of didn't really know who he was, as long as we liked the songs. But I was fascinated by the Sex Pistols and the Beatles when I was fifteen, so of course, even though I was long-haired, I burned my T-shirts, No Future, I cut my girlfriend's name into my arm with some razor blade, the trinkets on my mother's yellow coat, the dog chain around my neck, and the chimney sweeps on my legs, so I was constantly stopped by the cops at a crosswalk somewhere when I left Ostrava for the small towns."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Zlín, 06.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 28:51
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
  • 2

    Olomouc, 29.05.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:13:47
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

We thought we were partying, but instead we were revolutionizing

Marek Pražák in the 80s
Marek Pražák in the 80s
photo: archive of a witness

Marek Pražák was born on 26 June 1964 in Ostrava. From an early age he was inclined towards art and as a child he attended the Folk Art School. He did not manage to get into the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Uherské Hradiště, so he entered the Tallman Gymnasium in Ostrava in 1979. It was already at the time when he was discovering the free-spirited world of the máničky (longhair) and the associated culture, which inspired him to write and compose his own poems and songs. After a year he failed and was expelled from school at the same time. Thanks to his father’s intervention, he was allowed to enter the grammar school in Ostrava-Zábřeh, where in the 1980s a rigid regime marked by communist ideology and education reigned. It was a period when he fell into depression and introspection, which gradually shaped his aesthetics and poetics. From the age of fifteen, Marek Pražák travelled to Prague, where he met the underground community and also actively performed as a singer-songwriter himself. After he was accepted to the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague in 1986, he was offered the opportunity to sing in the alternative-industrial formation Svoz řepy from Gottwald (Zlín). In addition to that, during the following years - even after the Velvet Revolution - he was active in other bands. On 20 November 1989, as a student, he actively participated in the Prague occupation strike. During the revolution, students from his department produced, reproduced and distributed information leaflets. Marek acted as a liaison between the key sites - Ječná Street, DISK theatre and Laterna Magika, and also took part in persuading citizens in businesses or schools. He received his university diploma in 1992 and has lived as a freelance artist ever since. He has worked on projects for Czech Television, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre and the National Theatre Ballet in Brno. He has won several awards. In 2024 he lived in Ostrava.