Emil Holub (1847-1902) is one of the most famous Czech travellers and explorers. He was the first Czech traveller who travelled through a large part of Africa and brought back unprecedented and unknown species of animals, plants and minerals and a lot of ethnographic material. Moreover, he also reached the Victoria Falls region and provided world geography with the first detailed maps of the area. The Holub African Museum was founded in his honour in Holice.

Emil Holub was born in 1847 in Holice into the family of physician František Holub. Following his father`s example, he studied medicine, but soon after graduation his adventurous nature drew him elsewhere, outside his native Bohemia, to the unexplored regions of Africa. At the time of Holub`s youth this continent was still largely unknown with many unexplored places, undiscovered tribes and full of scientific mysteries. Inspired by the journals of another great traveller and explorer, David Livingstone, Holub decided to go on a voyage of discovery to the diamond mines in South Africa. In 1872 he began his first voyage of discovery in Cape Town, and in the interim, while working as a doctor among the diamond miners, he went out to explore the geography of Africa. His first journey also took him to Victoria Falls, whose very precise geography he provided to world science. During his expeditions he also collected countless natural objects - animals, plants and minerals, which he then brought back to Bohemia. Holub`s great merit, comparable to his scientific contributions to the natural sciences, was his ethnographic collections, which became the basis for the Náprstek Museum in Prague. From his first trip he brought back thirty thousand items, including nineteen thousand insects, which were the largest entomological collection ever brought back from this continent. His second expedition was not as successful, as the party suffered unfortunate casualties. Despite this, Holub brought back many more natural and ethnographic materials. He gave public lectures about his travels and became famous also thanks to his successful book Seven Years in Africa. Towards the end of his life, he had to place most of his collections in smaller museums or sell them off to private collections, and Czech science thus lost its most comprehensive collection of materials from Africa. Even so, a collection was assembled from his legacy, which became the basis for Holub`s own museum, which was founded in 1956 in his native Holice.

Keywords: botany; entomology; physical geography; geography; Africa; traveller; ethnography

Museum and Memorial to Emil Holub in Holice