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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Czechs agog as national archive prepares to open mysterious envelope
sealed for 20 years
By Jack Guy and Ivana Kottasová, CNN
Updated:
10:45 AM EDT, Wed September 17, 2025
Source: CNN
Citizens of the Czech Republic are waiting with bated breath for a
longstanding mystery to be solved: What were the last words of the
country’s revered first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk?
The final thoughts of the statesman, who governed the Czechoslovak
Republic from 1918 to 1935, are believed to have been recorded by his
son Jan Masaryk just before his death in September 1937 and have been
sealed in a letter ever since, according to Czech public radio, which
has set up a to cover the opening of the envelope on Friday.
Historian Dagmar Hájková, head of the department of modern social and
cultural history of the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech
Academy of Sciences, a public research institution that focuses on
modern Czech history, told the radio station that Jan is thought to
have written down his dying father’s words as he sat at his bedside.
“If we imagine the moment, he might have written it on his knee, in a
hurry, nervously, so the handwriting might not be legible. It might
also be more fragmentary and not in a form of a coherent speech,” she
said.
Masaryk had been in poor health since 1934, said Hájková, so there is
a chance that the letter could date from earlier than 1937, when it may
have appeared that he might not live much longer.
While next to nothing is currently known about the contents of the
letter, its subsequent journey has been well documented.
When Jan Masaryk died under suspicious circumstances just days after
the Communist coup in 1948 he left the letter to his secretary,
Antonín Sum. Sum smuggled it out of the country, which had become a
Soviet satellite state in the aftermath of World War II.
Sum and Lumír Soukup, another former personal secretary of Jan
Masaryk, kept the letter safe for decades before donating it to the
Czech National Archive in 2005 on the condition that it remain sealed
for 20 years.
That period comes to an end on September 19, meaning Czechs will
finally find out what their first president said just before he died.
The case of the mysterious envelope has attracted a huge wave of
interest across the country, with all major Czech media covering the
event and social media full of speculation about the contents of the
letter.
Many are anticipating words of wisdom or premonitions from Masaryk,
perhaps a warning about the impending war or the threat coming from
Russia.
“I don’t think it will be political. Maybe something about
inter-generational relationships?” X user Lenka Lubicova said.
Others are looking for a more practical message. Klára Voláková, a
teacher, said on X that she asked the children in her class what they
thought was inside.
“They let their imagination run wild and so I got answers like ’a
recipe for (traditional Czech dish) svíčková, strudel or other
delicacies, or maybe information about his father,” she said,
pointing to a long-running, and widely dismissed, conspiracy theory
that Masaryk was in fact the son of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph
I.
The letter will be unsealed in a ceremony at Lány Castle, about 30
miles (50 kilometers) west of Prague, with current President Petr Pavel
in attendance, and Czech public radio will broadcast a live stream.
Masaryk, often simply referred to as TGM, was the founding father of
independent Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian
empire.
Originally a philosophy professor from a poor, working-class
background, he played a leading role in European affairs during and
after World War I and served as Czechoslovakia’s first president,
from 1918 to 1935.
Masaryk remains one of the country’s most revered historical figures
and his legacy is cloaked in an almost mythical aura of admiration.
He is widely seen as an extraordinary statesman who possessed a unique
blend of intellect and political ability, and who remained a humble and
approachable father figure for his people throughout his long tenure.
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