My masterpiece? When the wife of the chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia signed the declaration A Few Sentences
Zdeněk Koryčanský was born on 7 March 1940 in Ostrava. He spent his whole life in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm where his parents worked as blue-collar workers. His relatives farmed in the area which is still called Koryčanské paseky. His uncle Josef Koryčanský shot himself dead there in the 1950s after the communists nationalised his farm. Zdeněk graduated from the Secondary Technical School and then he worked as a designer in Tesla and Elektroprojekta companies in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. Since 1968 when the Soviet troops started to occupy Czechoslovakia, he strongly disliked the Communist regime. In 1989 he was behind the distribution of the declaration A Few Sentences. He was under surveillance of the State Security because of it and there were several house searches in his flat. Remarkably, he managed to hide all the materials from the State Security officers because the then chief of Public Security in Rožnov warned him via a priest. Nevertheless, he was accused of subverting the republic and put on trial for spreading the petition. However, the trial was halted because the communist regime fell in 1989. Zdeněk Koryčanský was then elected a Vice-Mayor of Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. After two years in office, he returned to work as a designer and became the director of a private company he and his colleague founded.