The Czech Republic is set to change is name to "Czechia" in an effort to achieve greater recognition on the global stage.
The Czechs, pushed and pulled between East and West over the centuries, have long suffered from an identity crisis. It doesn't help that many consistently confuse the Czech Republic, with its predecessor, Czechoslovakia, or neighbouring, Slovakia.
Or that, in 2013, some analysts mistakenly described the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing as hailing from the Czech Republic, confusing it with Chechnya, a restive region of Russia nearly 2,000 miles away, and alarming Czech diplomats who issued a clarification.
Government endorsement
Czech leaders, including president Milos Zeman, prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka, speakers of both chambers of parliament and the foreign and defence ministers met Thursday and endorsed the new name.
The foreign ministry said a one-word name is more practical and flexible for various uses. “It’s not good when a country does not have any clearly defined symbols, or cannot say clearly what its name is,” said foreign minister Lubomir Zaoralek. “It would be good to set the record straight once and for all. We owe this to ourselves and to the world,” he said.
On Thursday, Czech officials said they would have the name added to the UN database of geographical names, which records country names in the world body’s six official languages.
Mr Zaoralek had hoped to see Czechia on athletes' jerseys at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer, but was dismayed to learn that uniforms emblasoned with "Czech Republic" had already been designed.
President Milos Zeman, who referred to his country as Czechia on a 2013 trip to Israel, said Czechia was shorter, "nicer" and less "cold-sounding" than the Czech Republic.
When the decision does go through, Czechia will officially become the conventional short-form name for the country, while the Czech Republic will remain the conventional long-form name.
Opposition
Many however are opposed to the name change. Regional development minister Karla Slechtova, thinks the name is too close to Chechnya. She tweeted on Thursday that the Czech Republic had invested more than $40 million into a tourism promotion campaign using its full name, and should stick to it.
In some other languages, including French and German, the Czech Republic is already designated by a single name, but in Czech itself the name "Cesko" has only made slow progress since 1993 and ‘Cechy’ - or Bohemia - is still commonly used to mean the whole country.
Czechoslovakia to Czech Republic
Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, out of the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The nation suffered the seizure of territory by Hitler in 1938 and a Soviet-led invasion in 1968.
In 1989, its people ended decades of communist rule in the Velvet Revolution. But in 1993, it split amicably into separate Czech and Slovak states, with the Czech state commonly known as the Czech Republic in English. Czechs began to refer to their newly truncated country as “Cesko”, but there was no universal agreement over how to translate that into English.
Agencies