Czech tramping

Tramping (in Czech and Slovak language) is a movement incorporating woodcraft, hiking/backpacking/camping and scouting, with a characteristic flavour of and styled on American culture, especially the Wild West. The latter is particularly noticeable in the tramping song, a song and musical style associated with tramping.

Tramping originated in Czechoslovakia in the beginning of the 20th century and is still present in today's Czech Republic and to a lesser degree in Slovakia. It manifests itself in a distinctive style of clothing, hiking culture and tramping music. For the urban youth it was a specific form of a "return to the nature".

Czech interest in 'Amerika' dates back to the nineteenth century, when Bohemia and Moravia (and most of Central Europe) were provinces of the Austrian Empire. Writings about the United States to Czechs through journalistic and monographic reports by Jan Náprstek and others highlighted to exotic degrees the natural and cultural richness of 'Amerika' (to use the word that Franz Kafka, who was from Prague, used as the title of his 1927 novel). The first community of Czech "tramps" arose probably in 1918. Having been an original Czech movement, tramping became popular in Slovakia in 1925-1928

The introduction of the worldwide scouting movement to the region roughly coincided with the beginnings of the popularity of the 'western' novelist Karl May, a German, and the formation of the first Czechoslovak Republic. The economic successes of the new nation and its many political and social links to the United States (for example the first Czechoslovak President, Tomáš Masaryk, was married to Charlotte Garrigue, who was from a prominent American family and part of the reason for Masaryk's success in persuading Woodrow Wilson to support the inception of Czechoslovakia) meant that Czechs' interest in things American continued in earnest. Films starring Tom Mix and the 'modernistic' strains of the latest foxtrots and tangos were some of the many cultural imports.

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