Jul 17 2008
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson statue
The monument of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of USA was built in 1928 by Albin Polasek and stood near the Prague main railway station in the past but in 1941 it was destroyed by the Nazis during the occupation. Prague’s main train station (Hlavni Nadrazi) was officially named Wilson Station (Wilsonovo nádraží) in 1919 in honor of Woodrow Wilson but the name was changed under the communist regime, but in 1990 it was again officially renamed after Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson is a Czech national hero as a unified Czechoslovakia became independent in October 1918 in large part with the help of Woodrow Wilson. At that time Czechoslovakia was one of the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Wilson met with future Czech President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, in the United States and had been won over to the idea of self-determination for the Czechs and Slovaks. Wilson officially supported the idea of a Czechoslovak Republic to become independent of Austria and Hungary and continued supporting an independent Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918-1919.
And now it is planned to reconstruct Wilson statue and place it again on original place. The costs of reconstruction work are estimated at about 1 million USD. Hopefully the new statue of Wilson will be completely identical to the former as the Prague National Gallery saved a plaster bust of the Wilson statue. It is planned to be completed in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the period of the Communist normalization in Czechoslovakia.