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Full profile page: Cesky Cestovatel

Most of the history knowledgeable people usually associates Russian (Stalinist, Soviet) aggression with the joint invasion of Poland in 1939 in close cooperation with the German Wehrmacht and the subsequent invasion of neutral Finland. However, the violent secession of the northern territory of Romania in June 1940, known as Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, seems to have been the dust of oblivion in our region. But not in a country which, like the Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians or Estonians, experienced what it means to have the stamped shoes of the Stalinist empire.

We know a lot of wars of different lengths from history. Seven days, seven years, thirty years and even a century long. But have you ever wondered how long the shortest war lasted? Believe it or not, it was half an hour. Exactly half an hour and eight minutes. It was not a fight between mafia families or indigenous tribes, but a regular conflict between two sovereign states. It took place more than a hundred years ago on the east coast of Africa, where in August 1896 Great Britain and Zanzibar got into a crossroads, so to speak, (or perhaps crescents - a conflict between a Christian and a Muslim country).

Instructed by the more or less romantic stories of the Bounty rebels, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, or the popular educational travelogues of Czech ethnographer Miloslav Satingl, we have mostly the Pacific and its picturesque islands associated with a relaxed atmosphere full of sun and endless ocean of palm-washed palm beaches and calm. Leaving aside the bitter experience of World War II, which the Japanese brought into the Pacific, it would be naive to think that the locals had never known a bloody cut before. As early as the 13th century, long before the discovery of the Samoa islands by Europeans, the locals resisted the attacks of kings from the Tonga Islands. Six centuries later, even three great powers were going to compete for Sam at the same time - Great Britain, the United States and Germany!