Statue of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in Sušice

The Statue of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk stands on a square in Sušice, a town in the Pošumaví region of the Czech Republic, at the foot of the Šumava mountains. It depicts the first president of Czechoslovakia, the figure most closely tied to the country's independence in 1918, and belongs to a wider family of Masaryk monuments erected across Czech towns both between the two world wars and again after 1989.

Where did this particular statue come from?

The story of the Sušice statue is unusually turbulent, closely mirroring the political upheavals of 20th-century Czechoslovakia. The original monument to Masaryk, created by sculptor Otakar Švec, formed part of a memorial to local fallen soldiers. During the German occupation, in 1940, the statue was confiscated by the occupying authorities — a fate shared by many monuments symbolizing Czechoslovak independence, which were removed or melted down for wartime material.

After the war, residents of Sušice wanted to restore the president's monument to the town, but the original statue could not be located. In 1947 it was decided to commission a new one, and Otakar Švec was approached again. The order was placed in April 1949 for 250,000 Czechoslovak crowns, and the new statue was finished that same year, in October.

Why wasn't the monument installed right away?

The statue's completion coincided with a dramatic shift in Czechoslovakia's political climate. Communists had seized power in February 1948, and Masaryk, as a symbol of pre-war bourgeois democracy, had become politically inconvenient for the new regime. On 20 October 1949, the town council decided that the finished statue would not, after all, be placed on the site intended for it. Instead, a monument to a Dukla Pass fighter was announced — commemorating Czechoslovak soldiers who fought in the 1944 Battle of the Dukla Pass, an episode readily promoted by postwar communist propaganda.

The completed Masaryk statue was thus left in limbo, with no place in public space for the next two decades.

How did the statue return to Sušice?

The turning point came only in 1968, during the brief political thaw known as the Prague Spring. On the initiative of several Sušice residents, the monument was recovered and placed on a pedestal in the middle of the town square, above the earlier memorial to the fallen. It was a symbolic moment — Masaryk's return to public space coincided with a broader national reappraisal of pre-war democratic traditions.

That moment of relief proved short-lived. After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and the onset of the so-called normalization period, commemorating Masaryk again became politically undesirable. The monument remained standing on the square, but for decades it existed without clear identification — no plaque or marker openly stating whom it depicted.

What changed after 1989?

Only in the 1990s, following the fall of the communist system and the restoration of political freedom in Czechoslovakia, was the statue's original identity formally restored. It was once again clearly identified as a likeness of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and its presence on the square in Sušice became a lasting part of the town's historical memory.

Frequently asked questions

Who is depicted in the Sušice monument? Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia and a co-founder of the country's independence in 1918.

Who created the statue? Sculptor Otakar Švec, who made both the original statue confiscated in 1940 and the postwar replacement that stands in Sušice today.

Why did the statue stand unidentified for years? Because of the communist authorities' political hostility toward Masaryk as a symbol of pre-war democracy, particularly during the normalization period after 1968.

Where exactly is the monument located? On a square in the center of Sušice, a town in the Pošumaví region of the Czech Republic, near the Šumava mountains.