A decades-long mystery will be revealed in Czechia later this week, when a letter with what’s believed to be the final words of Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president, is unsealed.
A ceremony will take place Sept. 19 in Lány, a small town in the Central Bohemia region of Czechia, to divulge Masaryk’s final sentiments as jotted down by his son, Jan, who was at his bedside in 1937.
The event will be livestreamed on Czech Public Radio, which has an entire website devoted to the mysterious letter.
Jiří Křesťan, historian and archivist of the National Archives, told the website that Jan Masaryk, who served as Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, died mysteriously in 1948. He says the letter was likely kept by his personal secretaries, Antonín Sum and Lumír Soukup.
Through Soukup, it is believed the letter and other documents made its way to Scotland, where it stayed for decades, and then to Southern France in the ’80s.
Once Soukup died in 1991, the exiled estate was handled by his widow and daughter.
Jan Masaryk’s secretary, Antonín Sum, is said to have helped bring the mystery envelope to the National Archives in Prague in 2005.
Archivist Křesťan told Prague Radio International that Sum requested that the letter with the alleged final words from Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk be sealed for 20 years, an instruction he had written on the envelope himself.
