Editor, writer and screenwriter Petr Hořejš, author of the extensive book series Wandering in the Czech Past, has died. The man who previously wrote under the pseudonym Petr Hora lived to be 84 years old. His wife Jitka Hořejsová informed about his death on Thursday.
He started creating a series of books about Czech history in 1979. When Toulky first appeared as a supplement to Mladé svět, it immediately gained readers. The author, who is not a historian, tried to innovate in them – in contrast to official “histories”, to tell Czech history polyphonically, in several bands, with references to important events in the world. In addition to the book series Wandering in the Czech Past, Hořejš was the author of the books Péťa Varič and Jiří z Poděbrady the European and co-author of the publication Prázdniny se slehačkau.
Wanderings through the Czech past also had its radio version, it was filmed in Brno between 1995 and 2018 and is one of the most successful projects of Czech Radio. According to the director Jaromír Ostrý, Hořejš and the author of the show, Josef Veselý, were able to find interesting stories in history. “That’s the key. Maybe they weren’t so much interested in the dates, but rather the fates of the people who lived then and the stories of the events that happened,” Ostrý said. He recalled that Wanderings through the Czech past enjoyed extraordinary attention from readers and radio listeners and is still repeated. Their release on CD was also a success.
Petr Hořejš was born in Bratislava in 1938, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, and after a short stint at Czechoslovak Radio, he worked as a publishing editor at Albatros for about ten years.
In 1972, Hořejš was fired from the publishing house because he refused to approve the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Under the pseudonym Hora, he then wrote, for example, columns Péťa Varič and Péťa Rodič for the magazine Mladý svět. In the 1980s, he worked as a pumper at Water Resources.
After 1989, Hořejš briefly returned to Albatros as a director, but later devoted himself only to the work of a journalist and writer. He also took part in the creation, conception and scripts of the Czech television competition series O poklad Anežka Česka, in 1991 he became a co-founder of the Pangea Foundation.
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