PhDr. Jan Jakub Outrata

* 1948

  • "Today the problem is money. There is a conflict between the prices of the land and the real estate that are built on them. No property rents unless it has some interesting properties. Surveys are done too, but now they are based mainly on plans, on old plans and documents. But you don't get the reality from them. For example, from the plan you can see that there is a Gothic wall, but in those archive plans you can't see if there is a Gothic portal, window or painting. You can only see that when you’re there with the help of the soundings, and that's a job that is no longer done today."

  • "Around 1968, there was a preservationists conference on 19th and 20th century buildings. It was the first impulse to notice that 19th and 20th century monuments had any value at all. Since then, that interest has been growing."

  • "That year, 1969, we won in a hockey game, it was 4 to 3, so we went out to the streets. I went out with a friend from high school who had polio and walked on crutches. We ended up on Národní třída, where everything was already jammed. I then continued to Wenceslas Square and there the famous "Aeroflot" event happened. There were Aeroflot shop windows, they had this little airplane... I went up in a parade with torches that people had made out of Evening Prague packages. When I went there, Aeroflot was still there, but when I went back, it wasn't there anymore. It was clear that it was some kind of provocation. That an agent threw a stone there and of course the people joined in."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 16.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:11:16
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We have freedom in the Czech Republic today, even though some people don‘t think so

Jan Jakub Outrata, approx. 1968
Jan Jakub Outrata, approx. 1968
zdroj: Contemporary witness

Jan Jakub Outrata was born on August 12, 1948 in Washington, D.C., where his father, JUDr. Vladimír Outrata, worked as an ambassador. In 1951 the family returned to Czechoslovakia. He grew up with his younger brother Matěj. His maternal grandfather, Ludvík Strimpl, was an artist who participated in the Resistance movement during World War I and also introduced Beneš to Štefánik in France. During the First Republic he worked as an ambassador in Benelux. His grandmother Jiřina Strimplová spent the war years in exile in London near her friend Hana Benešová. His uncle Eduard Outrata was the exiled Minister of Finance during the war, and after 1948 he was sentenced to 12 years by the Communists in a mock trial. His parents Eva and Vladimír Outrata spent the war years in France, England and the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, Vladimir Outrata was prematurely removed from his diplomatic post in the U.S., presumably because of his brother‘s accusations of alleged treason. His parents were expelled from the Communist Party, but his father was allowed to teach international law at the Faculty of Law. Jan Jakub Outrata graduated from grammar school in the 1960s, studied art history from 1968 to 1973, and then worked his entire life at the Institute of Historic Preservation. In March 1969, he witnessed the celebration of the victory of Czechoslovakia over the USSR at the World Ice Hockey Championship, during which provocative actions took place on Wenceslas Square. He was also somewhat involved with dissent, for example with Janek Mlynárik, and he also remembers the so-called Palach Week in January 1989. He devoted all his life to saving architectural monuments. In 2023 he lived in Prague.