Jaroslav Šuvarský

Jaroslav Šuvarský was born on 25 May 1941 in Závidov, a village in what is now Ukraine, into a family of Volhynian Czechs, the Czech community that had settled in Volhynia in the nineteenth century. In 1947, after the Second World War, the family moved back to Czechoslovakia.

Under the communist regime his family's so called petty bourgeois origins meant he was not allowed to go to university after leaving school. In 1959 he nevertheless won a place at the Orthodox theological faculty in Prešov, in Slovakia, and graduated in 1964. He continued his studies at the theological academy in Leningrad, at the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Bossey, Switzerland, and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. In 1973 he defended a doctoral thesis on Bishop Gorazd, the first Czech Orthodox bishop, who was executed by the Nazis in 1942.

Šuvarský was editor in chief of the Orthodox journal Hlas pravoslaví from 1970 to 1980 and taught as an associate professor at the Orthodox theological faculty in Prešov from 1977 to 1990. From 1980 to 1990 he headed the office of the Metropolitan Council as chancellor, and from 1983 to 1991 he was a member of the central committee of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He helped establish the bishop of the Olomouc and Brno eparchy in 1982 and worked to build closer ties with the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

From 1990 to 1992 he administered the Prague eparchy, and from 1992 he served as its director and as priest in charge of the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street, Prague. He held the rank of mitred archpriest and metropolitan protopresbyter.

Much of his work was devoted to the memory of Bishop Gorazd and of the victims of the Heydrich Terror. He gave the main address at Gorazd's canonisation in Olomouc on 6 September 1987, wrote the book Biskup Gorazd in 1979, and proposed the posthumous award of the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk to Gorazd, granted in 1997. In 1995 he and his wife Eva founded the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror in the cathedral crypt, where the paratroopers of Operation Anthropoid died, and he directed it until 2016. In March 2010 he welcomed the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, to the cathedral. He sat on the organising committee of the Operation Anthropoid memorial in Prague Libeň, unveiled in 2009, and in January 2011 blessed two marble steles in the cathedral courtyard bearing the names of 294 resistance members who had helped the paratroopers.

Šuvarský was married to Eva Šuvarská, with whom he founded and ran the Heydrich Terror memorial and who wrote a guide to the cathedral. They had three children, Eva, Jaroslav and Anastázie.

Records of the communist State Security, the StB, held by the Security Services Archive list him as an agent registered in 1966 under the code name Aspirant. His handling officer described him as a very active and repeatedly rewarded agent. In 2017 he went to court to clear his name and lost, as reported by iDNES.cz.

Jaroslav Šuvarský died in the early morning of Friday 13 November 2026, at the age of 85. His death was announced on Facebook by Father Antonij Drda and reported the same day by the Union of Orthodox Journalists, which closed its notice with the Orthodox farewell, memory eternal.

Šuvarský is remembered above all for keeping alive the memory of Bishop Gorazd and of the paratroopers and civilians who died after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The crypt memorial he founded with his wife in the Prague cathedral became one of the city's most visited sites of the Second World War. He received the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Gold Star first class, the memorial medal For Loyalty 1939 to 1945 of the Czech Union of Freedom Fighters and the Cross of Merit of the Czech Ministry of Defence, second class. His legacy is also marked by the revelation of his collaboration with the StB during the communist era.