Why does Czech, a landlocked language, have a word like “paluba”?

Paluba is the Czech word for “the deck of a ship,” and it sits among a surprisingly full nautical vocabulary in a language spoken in a country with no coastline. Czech inherited words like paluba, kotva (“anchor”), plachta (“sail”), and přístav (“port”) through 19th-century maritime literature, especially translations of Jules Verne and adventure novels that swept through Habsburg-era reading culture. The vocabulary survived into modern Czech.

This clip is a classic Czech bar joke: a lady stands on the paluba of a ship in a strong wind, holding her hat with both hands while the wind reveals everything else. The punchline depends on the listener knowing the word paluba.