Tomas Masaryk, or a statue of him at any rate, towers over the foot of Embassy Row at Mass. Ave. and 22nd. Often called "President-Liberator," Masaryk was the George Washington of Czechoslovakia.

The memorial is one of a several in D.C. honoring foreign dignitaries -- think Simon Bolivar, Queen Isabela, Benito Juarez. At least Masaryk lived in D.C. for awhile, at the former Powhatan Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and 18th Street. Before he eventually left the U.S., Masaryk took with him his American wife, Charlotte Garrigue. From her he also took her maiden name as his middle. From those initials derive another of his nicknames: TGM.

While living in exile during World War I, he helped to draft the Declaration of Czecho-Slovak Independence. During his stay in the United States, Masaryk persuaded Woodrow Wilson to recognize him as the leader of the provisional country; when the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, he returned to unify the Czechs and Slovaks in a single republic. Masaryk was re-elected twice, and in 1935 was succeeded in office by his foreign minister, Edvard Benes. Masaryk passed away two years later.

Two years after that, the Nazis invaded. The country he worked so hard to build would never be the same again. Under the strain of a half-century of Communist rule and the new world it entered when the Iron Curtain finally lifted, Czechoslovakia couldn't hold together. in 1993, the country's leaders peacefully dissolved it into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The agreement became known (to journalists, if not those involved) as the Velvet Divorce. Yet Masaryk remains a powerful figure in both countries.

The Masaryk tribute, a gift from the Czechs, is one of the city's newest memorials. President Bush signed a bill authorizing the memorial in Nov. 2001, only a few months after construction of the National World War II Memorial had commenced, and just as controversy about overcrowding on the National Mall was coming to a head. The Memorials and Museums Master Plan, approved weeks before Masaryk got the go-ahead, helped determine the monument's off-mall location.

The memorial was unveiled on March 8, 2003. But the statue itself is much older than that. Czech sculptor Vincenc Makovsky crafted the figure shortly after Masaryk's death in 1937. But because of the Nazi and then Soviet occupations, the statue went three decades before being cast in bronze, during a brief period of political liberalization known as the Prague Spring, in 1968. When the USSR changed its mind and cracked down in August of that year, it went back into storage. This figure of an elderly Tomas Masaryk did not see the light of day until it came to Washington 35 years later.