- Shawn Basey
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Walking through the Old Town in Prague, you’re in for an enrapturing experience. The old Baroque architecture, the winding alleys, the brutal crowds of gaping tourists. And this weekend on Sunday, when you come out to spy the secrets of the Astronomical Clock and take a selfie with a thousand other people, you might also notice a huge pile of wreaths stacked around the statue in the middle of the square.
Yeah? It’s Jan Hus Day. That statue, by the way, is Jan Hus, now considered a saint by the Orthodox, mainly because he bit his thumb at the Catholics.
Though it wasn’t really his intention. But you know what they say: the road to getting burned at stake is paved with good intentions.
Jan Hus
Before Martin Luther, before Calvin, before burning heretics was even a thing, there was Jan Hus, the man who would be the kindling of the Reformation (while many consider Wycliffe the match).
Jan was curious about why the regular folks couldn’t drink the wine at Church, that is, to take the Eucharist “in two kinds”. Back at that time, they’d just give the laity the bread, while the priest got the best bit of the service and downed the wine (the body and blood of Christ, respectively).
He was also spending a lot of time at the somewhat schismatic Bethlehem Church, led by yet another Jan, Jan Křiž, along with Hanuš of Mühlheim. It was a "preaching church", that is to say, non-sacramental, where the preaching would only be in Czech and not Latin.
It was a weird time for the Catholic Church too. Back then, we had two popes! And the pope claiming authority over Prague was a real stickler and didn’t think much for people questioning things like sacramental distribution. So he kicked ole Hus out of the Church.
Which wouldn’t have been that big of deal, except that Hus was a priest and an exceptionally good orator. After this, he jumped off the Wycliffe and started preaching things like against plenary indulgences, kind of “get out of hell free” cards that the pope was dealing out to fund his own projects along with other anti-papal criticisms.
The birth of the Czech nation
The Biblical language at the time was Latin, while the political language of the Holy Roman Empire was German, as multi-ethnic as it was. Czech was slowly becoming the language of farmers and dull village folk, while the supposedly educated would speak in High German, so much so that by the 1800s (long after this) Czech German was considered the highest scholarly German there was (this is not to say that everyone was speaking German, far from that, but rather concerning the attitudes towards the two). And in order to preach religion, you had to do it in the “Biblical language”, which was naturally Latin, since the Bible was written in Latin… oh, wait a second.
Latin was really just a power move by Italian and French ecclesiastics, whose languages remained very close to the Vulgate Bible that St. Jerome translated the Bible into. But we’re not really talking about that anyway.
So, Jan went to his roots. He went along with the Bethlehem folk and started speaking the language of his people. The villagers. The poor and the downtrodden. Czech.
And he got so far into preaching in Czech, that he even figured new ways to write the language, adding the precursors of the diacritics, the funny markings that change the sounds and make Čech so much easier to read than Polish.
The Council of Constance
The pope, or antipope as we call him now, didn’t like that at all and summoned him to a council in Constance, a kind of halfway point between Prague and the holy city of anti-Rome, which the French call Avignon. In Constance, they were having a big council to resolve the whole antipope thing anyway, so why not a trial on top?
But instead of any kind of real hearing, a bunch of the antipope’s minions captured him, tied him up, pushed him through a show trial, and then tossed him to the secular courts who promptly burnt him at stake. His last words were something prophetic, like, “In another 100 years will come a guy you can’t just tie up and burn at the stake”. Possibly in reference to Martin Luther, who would splinter the Church and the Holy Roman Empire forever. With that threat, the executioners gathered his ashes and tossed them into the Rhine River, preventing people from pretending to create relics from his bones.
The Hussites
But really, it didn’t take that long. After the local authorities had rounded up some rowdy Hussites and took them prisoner at the New Town Hall, a riot had formed outside, with the famous one-eyed general, Jan Žižka at the head. The rioters, excuse me, “peaceful protesters”, were demanding the release of some Hussites who had been taken prisoner by the Catholic-aligned authorities.
The peaceful protesters stormed the town hall and launched the authorities out the window, which started the timeless Czech tradition of “defenestrating” people you’re upset with.
After the defenestration, Žižka and the Hussites took Prague.
Jan Žižka
Žižka was such an amazing and interesting character that Pilsner Urquell should make a beer advertising campaign off the guy.
Žižka once led an army of peasants and farmers to victory against armored knights using castles made of wagons.
He didn’t always have one eye, but when he did, he could still take the strategic advantage.
He never lost a battle, even after losing his other eye. And even when he didn’t have any eyes, he still won. Some say he could feel the enemy’s fear in the wind.
He once trained an army to fight with farm tools and tore down the king’s guard with a farmer’s flail.
Just before he died, he wanted to keep fighting, so he demanded his men turn his skin into leather used for war drums.
He is Jan Žižka. Stay thirsty, my friends.
A free throne
The rebellion of Žižka was perfect in timing. Just after the defenestration, the King died from a heart attack, and the nearest possible heir was King Sigismund in Hungary. So the Bohemians said screw it, we’ve had enough with these royals.
King Sigismund didn’t have enough with the Bohemians though, and he gathered forces loyal to the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. His army of Hungarians and Germans began marching towards Prague, far outnumbering the Hussite. Žižka sped down to Tabor and gathered some reinforcements, and he set up camp on Vitkov Hill in his neighborhood of Žižka.
Žižka would win his battle against the King at Vitkov Hill, where his statue now stands (which is, by the way, the third largest horseman in the world, and also there’s another Žižka statue of him riding an upside down horse in Palac Lucerne).
The Hussite Legacy
The Hussites were fierce warriors, winning battle after battle, defying expectations and proving that ordinary believers could stand against established powers. They did awesome things like making wagon forts, waging early chemi-biological warfare by flinging poop over castle walls, and eventually turn against themselves with many rejoining the Catholics in the classic Czech attitude of “yesh mariatad” or something like that, which is Czech for “I have strong feelings about this but there is nothing to be done like everything else in life”.
Years later, the Church basically said, “About Jan Hus, seems like a decent fellow, our bad.” And then they started letting the commoners drink wine at mass.
So anyway, that’s what all the wreaths and flags are about.
