Czech couples get less attention from the Seychelles wedding industry than almost any market of comparable size, which is odd given how specific and knowable the process is.
What Seychelles asks you for
The Seychelles half is the same for everyone. Two foreign nationals need a valid passport and an apostilled birth certificate each, plus an apostilled divorce certificate if either has been married before or a death certificate if widowed. The banns run for eleven days. The government fee is SCR 3,000 on Mahe, Praslin or La Digue. Two witnesses must be present and we provide them. The certificate is issued within twenty four hours of the ceremony.
The zvlastni matrika in Brno
Take the certificate, its endorsements, an official Czech translation, your birth certificates and your ID to the matrika where you live. That office forwards everything to the zvlastni matrika in Brno, which is the only registry in the country that validates marriages concluded abroad and issues a Czech marriage certificate.
Allow several weeks. It is a single queue for the entire country, so there is no way to route around it and no advantage to living in one city over another.
The six month trap, from both ends
Czech documents must not be older than six months from the date of issue on your wedding day. At the same time the registry has thirty days by law to hand documents over. So the usable window is narrower than it looks and it closes from both sides.
One bride we came across had her plans wrecked by a registrar's holiday landing on top of public holidays. Order early, and treat the six months as five.
The most common failure
A missing apostille or a missing official translation. Without both, the matrika will not register the marriage at all, and you will be arranging an apostille from Prague for a document held in Victoria. Get the Supreme Court apostille before you leave the islands.
Write down your witnesses
This is a small thing that almost nobody tells Czech couples and it causes real trouble later. Note each witness's full name, address and date of birth on the day. The Czech registry may ask for those details, and if a local person acted as your witness they are extremely hard to trace from three thousand kilometres away months afterwards.
If we provide your witnesses, ask us for their details in writing on the day and keep it with the certificate.
A warning about smaller offices
Local registries that rarely see foreign weddings are inconsistent. One agency reported an office rejecting exactly the documents it had accepted for another couple a year earlier. If that happens, ask politely for the specific legal basis of the refusal in writing, because the file goes to Brno either way.