This website is dedicated to a significant Boy Scout group Psohlavci (The Dog-heads) that had created a strong base and provided the leaders and its units for the Scouting Movement rebirth in Czechoslovakia in the Sixties and Seventies of the last century while it was still prohibited.
In the Czech lands, the Scout Movement was founded in 1911; it was suppressed during the Nazi occupation in 1940 and renewed in 1945. After the Communist coup d’état in 1948 the developing movement was put down for the second time; its properties were confiscated and many of the leaders were imprisoned. But the Boy Scout ideas just did not fuse with totalitarianism. The young leaders did not want to resign to this fact and in 1959 they founded an illegal Rover venture unit called Dakota to lever out the injustice committed on the Czech youth by banning the Scouting Movement. Led by Ivan “Hiawatha” Makásek (* 1944), the members of Dakota inclined to E.T. Seton’s woodcraft and got themselves engaged as patrol leaders in a tourist troop led by a former Scoutmaster Josef “Bobr” (Beaver) Zikán since 1964 according to the Boy Scout principles.
Originated in 1965 and despite the disfavor of the Communist regime the troop association Psohlavci had been working on restoration of Scouting Movement in Czechoslovakia. In 1968 it had already incorporated 13 troops totaling more than 700 members and creating a foundation for refurbishment of scouting in Czechoslovakia and became its leading power.
The short time of free scouting had been stomped out by the Soviet invasion and the Scout Movement was banned in Czechoslovakia for the third and time in 1970. After that each of the union’s thirteen troops went its own illegal way and many of them have survived until the final renewal of the movement after the fall of the Communist regime. Many of them function till these days.
Persecuted by the Communist secret police, sadly, Josef Zikán committed suicide in 1976 but hundreds of kids and young people growing up in the troops affected by his leadership became upright and honest men and some of them are working for the Scout Movement till the present time.
