Wedding Prepartation
We were advised us to check carefully with the ‘Matrika’ in the district of Prague where we wanted to get married. It seems each district of Prague has different rules, and depending on the mood and personality of the person behind the desk your task can vary from being amazingly quick and simple to painstakingly long and complex. Unfortunately for us, the latter was the case.
For the marriage ceremony to be registered my birth certificate had to be translated into Czech, and had to be officially “certified”. Unsure of exactly what this meant I contacted the UK government office and applied for a certified copy. I had to send them my original birth certificate. I had one copy in Prague and sent it by Czech Express Mail, so it had a tracking number and guarantee.
The wedding was set for 29th June and the birth certificate had a processing time of 6 weeks which had now passed, so I contacted the UK office to find out what was happening. I almost died when they told me they had no record of it! I quickly confronted Czech Mail, who claimed it had been lost outside Czech so it wasn’t their responsibility. I didn’t have time to get angry and the only option now was to apply for a new birth certificate so I chose the fast track option and this arrived one week later. It went straight to the law translator’s office but they couldn’t provide the translation till Monday (5 days before the Wedding).
Apostile for getting Married Abroad
On Monday morning we received a call that it needed an apostile before translation. I’d never heard of an apostile but after a few curse words and tears we composed ourselves and found out this was the certification the ‘Matrica’ needed. The only place where we could get it processed and delivered before the wedding was from a fast track apostile service in London. My dad calculated that he could send the other copy of my birth certificate from Leeds to London that morning, they could process it on Tuesday, send it from London later that day and it would arrive in Prague Wednesday or Thursday. Phew! I called the apostile office Tuesday morning and the birth certificate hadn’t arrived. More tears and panic! The only way I was going to solve this was if I went there myself. I booked a last minute flight to London that evening so I could get this apostile no matter what. Within 24 hours I was back on Czech soil, apostile in hand, hundreds of pounds shorter and with a few more grey hairs.
The translation was done on the Thursday and we begged the ‘Matrica’ to open on Friday so we could get all the paperwork done for the wedding the following day.
The Wedding Day and Aftermath
There was an amazing feeling of relief and joy as we knew we now had everything and we enjoyed our wedding day immensely. I remember the priest asked just before we went into church “Are you sure you both want to go through with this?” I answered “after the last few days it would take a huge effort to stop us!”
Oh, my birth certificate turned up in the UK government office 3 months later. Another 2 months later we got 300kc compensation from Czech Mail.