We are an informal group of historians who, whether professionally or out of personal interest, have long been engaged with the Spanish Civil War, with particular emphasis on the foreign volunteers who took an active part in it. What brings us together is a shared effort to understand this conflict in all its complexity.
This website was created out of a practical need to gather information, materials, and outputs in one place. At the same time, it serves another equally important purpose. It preserves the memory of our own activities. In the past, this circle has organized numerous lectures, debates, exhibitions, publications, and informal meetings, many of which remained without a lasting record and gradually faded from collective memory. This is something we aim to change.
We do not seek to establish a formal institution or promote a single interpretive line. On the contrary, we see this space as an open platform for sharing research, sources, experiences, and the questions that the Spanish Civil War and its international dimension continue to raise. We are interested both in new scholarly approaches and in public facing and educational activities that can make this topic accessible to a wider audience.
People
A research fellow at the Historical and Documentation Department of the Military History Institute. He studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where he is also a doctoral candidate. His dissertation focuses on the prestige and social standing of professional officers in interwar Czechoslovakia. He also explores the relationship between the military and society in the twentieth century, as well as issues of military preparedness, with particular attention to developments from the 1930s to the early phase of the Union for Cooperation with the Army in the 1950s. His research further engages with the social and cultural history of the military in the twentieth century and with military thought.
A historian and research fellow working at the Náprstek Museum, part of the National Museum, where he is employed as an archivist. His work focuses on topics related to postcolonial theory and its application in the museum field. He also deals with issues connected to European migration, particularly to the United States. He is the author and co author of several exhibitions. He completed his doctoral studies in general history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His dissertation examined the relationship between Czechoslovakia and the Vietnam War. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast Dějiny bez konce.
A graduate of history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He has worked at the Historical Institute of the Army of the Czech Republic and the Military Historical Archive, and since 2006 he has been affiliated with the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the military history of Czechoslovakia and Central European countries between 1918 and 1945, with particular emphasis on Czechoslovak military units during the Second World War and the armed forces of Central Europe in the interwar period. He also examines questions of nationality and ethnicity within the military environment.
Originally trained as an aircraft mechanic specializing in avionics, he later studied archival science and auxiliary historical disciplines at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University between 2013 and 2019. He works at the Archive of the National Museum as a curator of the collections of the Archive of the Museum of the Workers’ Movement. His long term research focuses primarily on the history of Czechoslovak aviation, the Spanish Civil War, the communist resistance, and the history of the South Slavic countries. Among his publications, he is, together with Jiří Rajlich, the co author of extensive syntheses in Czech on the participation of Czechoslovaks in the Spanish Civil War, including Jan Ferák and the Others. Czechoslovak International Brigaders, Pilots, and Aircraft in the Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939 and They Were Called “the Spaniards.”
He studied history at the Institute of Czech History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Institute of History at the same faculty. His dissertation project focuses on the relationship between the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and social democracy throughout the twentieth century. In addition to the history of the social democratic movement, his research also covers the history of Yugoslavia, with a particular focus on its socialist period, as well as the figure of Antonín Zápotocký.