- It’s a beatnik neighborhood near Greenwich Village
- It’s an interior decorating style
- It was a kingdom in Europe for almost 900 years
If you guessed number 3, you’re right. From the 12th century right up until 1918, it was the Kingdom of Bohemia. And it’s where the Teplys are from.
An excerpt from Wikipedia:
The Kingdom of Bohemia was a medieval and early modern monarchy in Central Europe, the predecessor of the modern Czech Republic. It was an Imperial State in the Holy Roman Empire.
Since 1526 it was ruled by the House of Habsburg, as part of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Bohemia
At the end of World War 1 in 1918, Bohemia became part of the newly organized country of Czechoslovakia. After World War II, Czechoslovakia was a puppet state of the Soviet Union until the fall of communism in 1989. In 1993, the “Velvet Divorce” split Czech and Slovakia into two countries.
Today the Czech Republic is made up of the lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. This map shows those lands overlaid on a current map of the Czech Republic.
You can see the location of the Teply ancestral villages, about 100 miles east of Prague. More about those later.
Sources
Family Nibbles 