The unveiling ceremony of Václav Havel´s Place will take place in Makasiinipuisto Park in front of Helsinki Central Library Oodi. You will find exact location of Václav Havel´s Place on the map in the attached invitation.

The ceremony will start at 12.30, with guests of honour Mr. Joakim Strand, Finland´s Minister for European Affairs and Ownership Steering, and Mr. Juhana Vartiainen, Mayor of Helsinki.

The ceremony will be followed by screening of the documentary “Václav Havel – Living in Freedom“ in Maijansali of Helsinki Central Library Oodi (Töölönlahdenkatu 4, Helsinki).

The access to the event is free.

Please register by 25 April via registration form: https://forms.gle/Y1LzucXDCpqzzDbv9

More details can be found in the attached invitation.

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This Václav Havel´s Place in Helsinki has been kindly sponsored by: Quercus Foundation, VAFO Group, Teemu Lehto, Ivan and Hugo Chadima, Tomáš Vlasák, Gabriela and Petr Babický, Hannah and Jiří Balaštík, Miroslava and Jiří Voříšek, Marek Vinš.

The screening of the documentary has been kindly sponsored by VAFO Group, a leading European producer of superpremium pet food.

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Václav Havel (1936 - 2011)

Czech writer and playwright, political dissident and leading personality in the course of political changes in November 1989. After the fall of communism, Václav Havel was the last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).

Havel’s Places

A great homage to the memory of Václav Havel was the idea to create “Havel’s Place” in the symbolic form of two chairs linked by a round table with a tree growing through its centre. It is a place where people can sit and reflect and make new contacts, engage in dialogue or listen to the ideas of others.

Biographic documentary “Václav Havel – Living in Freedom” (Život podle Václava Havla)

The ambition of the film makers has not been to map out history through an account of Havel´s life, but to draw his film portrait, with the story narrated by Václav Havel himself. By means of shots and photographs, they offer the viewer a look into Havel´s eventful life, all its stages and the roles he played in them – from childhood, compulsory military service and the beginnings of his theatre career to the Chartist and presidential periods.