Rainbow Parade and Community Meetings: 150 Events to Take Place at Prague Pride

The Prague Pride festival for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBT+) people will take place this year from 7 to 13 August at several locations in Prague.

It will offer over 150 events, including a parade that will march from Wenceslas Square to Letná on Saturday August 12th.

The theme of the 13th edition is traditions and their importance for the functioning of society, with the motto “More traditional than you think,” says Eliška Černá on behalf of the event organizers.

“We perceive traditions as natural, but that’s only because they have been handed down over several generations. In fact, they are invented by people, and for a specific purpose. Therefore, traditions need to be revised over time and it needs to be decided whether they still serve their original purpose or whether they are just a relic of the times,” said festival director Kamila Fröhlichová.

People do not usually associate traditions with queer themes, but the organizers say the opposite is true. People of other sexual orientations have always been around and are therefore a more traditional part of society than it might seem at first glance, said Tereza Košt’álková of the creative agency VMLY&R, which prepared the Pride campaign.

The festival’s community events will take place on Střelecký ostrov, the intergenerational programme will take place at the headquarters of the Život 90 organization on Karoliny Světlé street, and the queer artists’ exhibitions will be at the Langhans café.

A new addition is the Pride Café at Dorado Coffee on Betlémské náměstí, where the programme for international participants will be concentrated. For the first time this year, there will also be nightly music performances in the long-forgotten underground space at KKafe on Střelecký Island.

The highlight of the programme will be the so-called Rainbow Parade, which is attended by tens of thousands of people. It will go from Wenceslas Square to Letná Park, where the programme will continue. For ecological reasons, the parade will again not include cars with combustion engines or dancing floats powered by generators, organizers said.

The festival has been given patronage by Ministers of the Interior Vít Rakušan (STAN), Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavský, Regional Development Ivan Bartoš (both Pirates), and the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Markéta Pekarová Adamová (TOP 09).

The Prague Pride festival with a parade was held for the first time in August 2011. At that time, it sparked stormy protests by conservatives. In the following years, the protests gradually faded.

In 2020 and 2021, the rainbow parade could not take place because of the Covid pandemic, and last year up to 60,000 people attended