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Seventy years ago this week, having already shuttered Czechoslovakia’s monasteries in the spring of 1950 and interned thousands of monks in “concentration cloisters”, the Communist authorities turned their anti-religious fervour to the nation’s nunneries.

The reconstruction of Libušín, a historical chalet in the Beskydy Mountains in the east of the country, has been finally completed. The famous Art Nouveau Folk building was almost completely destroyed by fire in March 2014 and the restoration of the national heritage site cost over 117 million crowns.

Patrik Pařízek, a curator at the National Technical Museum, is a specialist in the artistic craftsmanship of historical clocks. So specialised, in fact, he had to search for a Czech university that would let him pursue a doctorate on the subject. I spoke with him shortly after the opening of a special exhibition he is curating at the Museum of the Czech Karst in Beroun, called “A soul full of clockworks”, featuring a wide array of rare mechanical toys and automatronic objects.

The Czech pine from the village of Chudobín, which was voted European Tree of the Year 2020, may be much older than previously thought. Experts say the remarkable tree, previously estimated to be 350 years old, could actually be as old as half a millenium.

Several hundred people gathered on Prague’s Old Town Square on Monday to support people in the music industry who face an uncertain future due to ongoing coronavirus restrictions. The industry which employs roughly 130,000 people and has an annual turnover of 20 billion crowns, is now operating at 15 percent capacity with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Following a recent uptick in coronavirus cases, the Czech government has agreed to establish a special body to oversee the “smart quarantine” initiative. That body will be under the direction of the Ministry of Health – which has been criticised for failing to implement an effective system – but also the Army. Meanwhile, the ministry will roll out a new “traffic light” system mapping infection rates by local district rather than region.

Visitors to the iconic Dancing House in Prague, co-designed by world-famous architect Frank Gehry and Prague-based Vlado Milunić in the early 1990s, can now see spaces normally inaccessible to the public. The new tour includes the technical facilities, the courtyard and a lookout point with a view of the Prague Castle and the apartment where late president Václav Havel lived for decades.

Scores if not hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world have enjoyed the work of Czech sound designer Juraj Mravec. The 43-year-old has worked on a long list of shows that includes such commercial and critical hits as The Crown, Veep, Black Mirror and Peaky Blinders. When Mravec stopped by at our studio, the conversation took in everything from the difference between international and Czech productions to what precautions he takes to protect his hearing.

The Health Ministry has announced it is reintroducing a number of nationwide restrictions to contain the spread of COVID -19. As of midnight Friday facemasks will once again be compulsory at indoor events involving more than 100 people and public events will be restricted to 500 people starting next week. Meanwhile, City Hall has declared that Praguers will also have to wear masks when they visit the doctor or a pharmacy.

Czech artist Alfons Mucha, perhaps best known worldwide for his oft-imitated Art Nouveau posters, was born 160 years ago this Friday. He showed an exceptional talent for drawing from an early age, and went on to find fame and fortune in Vienna and Paris, before settling in Prague. There, he turned his paintbrush to the Slav Epic, a gift to the city – and indeed the Czech nation – that took him nearly two decades to complete.