A new country was born in a single day as an empire crumbled.

On October 28, 1918, in the final weeks of World War I, the Czechoslovak National Committee proclaimed an independent Czechoslovak state in Prague. Austria-Hungary, which had ruled the Czech lands for centuries, was falling apart.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk became the first president of the new republic. Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, but October 28 is still celebrated as a national holiday in the Czech Republic.

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