on suicidal parachutists and death by bridge

Charles Bridge on Navalis

On May 15 of every year thousands of Czechs gather to make the descent from St. Vitus in the castle, cross Charles Bridge, and finish at the opposite bank of the Vltava, where there’s an orchestra on a barge waiting to play. The event, called the Navalis, celebrates the life and martyrdom of St. John Nepomuk. Before the procession, there’s a festival at the castle where many Czechs are dressed in traditional, medieval looking clothes, and sing old Czech songs along with church music. What seems to be all the priests of Prague then rally the folk together, pass out palm branches and head down through Mala Strana, a brass band playing solemn religious music as a background to the procession. Watching the parade, I couldn’t quite tell if it was a celebration or a day of mourning - much like viewing the average sober Czech man, it’s hard to read the emotions. But after seeing one priest with a peasant kick back a couple of shots of what appeared to be Slivovitz - plum vodka - I decided that it must be a celebration.

We followed the crowd and made our way to Charles Bridge. There the crowd stopped and what must have been a priest mumbled a lot of stuff in Czech over loudspeakers. All I could make out were the words “parachutist” and “10 minutes” as those are pretty similar in every language. It also makes clear sense to celebrate the commemoration of a man who was killed by being thrown off a bridge. My wife kept asking me what we were waiting for and I kept repeating, “Parachutist! 10 minutes!” as though that should really mean anything in context of the bridge and the expected concert on boats.

Parachutists coming in!

Then people started looking up. The parachutists had arrived! There were about 5 of them, with what appeared to be some sort of rockets firing sparks out of their feet. The first one swung himself into a spiral, falling ever faster and was coming quite close to the bridge. There was a gasp from the crowd as people were sure he was in for it. At the last moment, he hurtled himself under the bridge, came out on the other side, and landed safely in the Vltava - though I don’t know how safe it is to be in that murky brown water.

After the parachutists finished their presentation, the boat orchestra started up, playing old classical music across the water. With all the people in medieval dress and the huge towers and churches surrounding, it had the ability to transport one across time as though you were standing in that spot 300 years before. Except for all the purple lights around the orchestra, the spotlight, and the motorboat of drunk, shouting tourists. But for all that, it was exactly like 300 years before.

There we were at the foot of the statue of St. John Nepomuk, near a plaque with his cross - which had five stars and marked the exact spot where he was de-bridged - listening to Mozart. St. John Nepomuk met his end there much earlier than just three hundred years ago. It was arguably back in 1393 when he was thrown over the edge of Charles Bridge to meet his watery demise. Probably not the first to die in that way and certainly not the last, he was though the most famous in the long list of Czechs getting killed by being thrown off of things - castles, bridges, windows, etc. You can’t have a famous Czech death without someone being thrown off of something or out of somewhere.

St. John Nepomuk was the confessor to the Queen of Bohemia, wife to King Wenceslas IV - who is not to be confused with the Good King Wenceslas I of Christmas carol fame. The bad one, Wenceslas, the Fourth of His Name, King of Romans and Germans and Bohemia, son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, was not a popular king. His hold on the Iron Crown was shaky, as - in a nearly Game of Thrones style drama - he was intermittently at war with the Swabian League, a group of nobility that took offense at his ascendance and reassertion of imperial authority.

Constantly being harassed by those he considered clear underlings, it perhaps comes as no surprise that he was a paranoid and jealous man, which is what led him to his conflict with St. John Nepomuk. It’s not known which wife of Wenceslas was the possibly unfaithful one - the one who mysteriously died at the age of 23 or the other who was mysteriously gored to death by a deer - but whichever, according to the Chronica regum Romanorum, one of them was possibly flirting a bit too much with her hand servants. When the king approached Magister Jan, as he was called back then, he demanded to know her Confessions, saying something like, “You must tell me! I am the king!” To which Magister Jan famously replied, “Only the one who rules properly deserves the name of king.”

Too good a fate is never in store for someone who says that to a king.

Magister Jan then made his way through the Prague Torture Museum, after which he was unceremoniously dumped into the river, blood, guts, and all.

Of course, this bit more romantic version of his death surfaced a few hundred years after his death. Earlier histories note St. John’s support of the Roman Pope, while Wenceslas preferred the Avignon Pope (and who wouldn’t, the guy was called the Anti-Pope!). John confirmed a supporter of the Roman Pope as the head of the Abbey of Kladruby, which possessed vast lands in Western Bohemia, including the primary trade route to the Imperial City of Regensburg. Meanwhile King Wenceslas wanted to turn the abbey into a cathedral, thereby being able to herald imperial authority over it and its lands. This latter story, of a struggle of power between Church and State, is probably the truer one, but isn’t as fun.

Whichever the case concerning his death, St. John Nepomuk was beatified on May 31, 1721 and finally canonized on March 19, 1729, though the first statue to be placed commemorating the saint was put up on the bridge in 1683 and the May 15 festivities started in 1715. He was made saint due to his protection of the Sacrament of Confession and can be recognized by the halo with the five stars, a cross, and an angel with a finger over his mouth, telling John to keep quiet about the Queen’s affairs. St. John Nepomuk is also the protector saint against drowning and flooding, the latter which he appears to not be so good at, since the Vltava rises up and destroys much of Prague every 10 years or so. He’s also the patron of bridges, communication, and Venetian gondoliers, as well as being a patron of the City of Venice. 

The concert on the Vltava

And that all was what I was considering while looking down at the purple tinted orchestra playing Cosi fan tutte, with hundreds - perhaps thousands - of palm leaf bearing Czechs crowded in on the stones of Charles Bridge.

you are not from the castle

My first exposure to Kafka was like anyone else’s, a reading of “Metamorphosis” in high school. When you’re that young, it’s truly impossible to get a full grasp of the meaning of most stories - lacking the life experience, it can be hard to relate with something someone much older and more experienced has written. Of course, it’s main themes of alienation and loneliness can probably be pretty familiar for most teens; there’s still something more to the prose, however. A teenager has a couple of years of loneliness - an adult can have decades of loneliness, and that kind of dark decay of the soul is much more profound than you can truly appreciate when young. Of course, a teenager always thinks he alone can understand such a vast sorrow, but that’s not so.

To brush up on this understanding, and to see why a good friend of mine hated the Prague writer so much, I had purchased a copy of one of his collections of short stories and was determined to read it. This was back when I lived in Denver, with that constant level of fear and alienation I was feeling from my own culture building up inside of me. It wasn’t so much that I was in truth alienated, but maybe it was that I was at a point of life that if I wasn’t alienated, then there must have been something mediocre about me, and hence the fear. What greater and worst thing is there in life than to be mediocre? And when you look at all the greats of history, most have accomplished so much by the age that I was, in my mid-twenties, and there I was with a mediocre desk job, a mediocre salary, mediocre stories, a mediocre life. And there I was reading the Collected Works while sitting alone on my toilet, while Augustus Caesar meowed outside, clawing underneath the door, trying to save me from the depths of whatever renal attack he imagined the great porcelain toilet monster was letting me have. What else could all that noise be? he must have been wondering with great fear. If the God dies, then where will the mana come from?

Last Sunday, I went to the Kafka Museum, here in Prague. At the time of reading the greater hull of Kafka’s works while sitting on my toilet back in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver, I had no design to ever live in Prague. I didn’t even want to visit the city, as it was already overused and outdone by hipsters throughout the town - “I’ve been to Prague, it’s so out there, on the border of civilization, and amazing and artistic.” Right, not really - I’ve been to the places on the "border of civilization", and in those regards, Prague is quaint. You can quote me on that when talking to hometown hipsters.

The Kafka Museum is in a building where in all likelihood Franz Kafka never set a foot. The Mala Strana of his time was dilapidated and run down, smelling of fish and sewage and overrun by gypsies and fortune tellers. That’s not to say that scene was beneath Kafka, as he lived over in the Jewish ghetto or roundabout for most of his life, just swap the fish for some freshly butchered dead kosher products and it was roughly pretty similar dirt stained walls and caking of grime leftover from the greater days of the since fallen Holy Roman Empire. It was at that time, one of the principal cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though most of the newer construction, factories and development were taking place outside of the center. As this was before the advent of the airplane, tourism was slight, nothing like in today’s record numbers of Russians fleeing Vlad the Great’s ever tightening grip for a last and possible final breath of fresh freedom. Indeed, Prague was having its own problems back then, with the German, Czech and Jewish populations all about equal and all three equally discontent with each other. The Germans and Czechs were seeking out their own national identities - the Germans already as the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of those who built up the city, and the Czechs seeking out the strength of their own identity - the first period in history where Czech was even spoken openly on the streets of Prague. The third ethnic group at large in Prague were the Jews, most of whom spoke German, and whose identity would often waver in-between the other two groups. That was the Prague that Kafka was born into, completely different from the Czech utopia now, where you’re more likely to here a hodge-podge of Slavic languages and English than anything German.

"The Piss" by David Cerny

The entry of the museum is just off of Charles’ Bridge, in a small square hidden from the main tourist walks by a gate. In the small square is a symbol exhibition of modern Czech art, a fountain by the much acclaimed Czech artist, David Cerny. It’s called "The Piss" and is composed of two male statues with rotating pelvises and dipping peters, pissing into a pool made in the shape of the country. You can write a message and send it in, and the male pair will piss out the message, like children writing their names in the snow.

The museum tickets (200 crowns, or about 10 USD) are bought in the gift shop, which is the door to the left of the statues, while the museum itself is on the right. You enter in, the large angry lady - there is no museum in the Czech Republic complete without a large angry lady - sends you upstairs. The first floor of the museum if full of the finer details of Kafka’s life - basically edited prints from wikipedia displayed in a slightly more visually appealing manner. By the end of this reading tour - of course, what can you expect from a museum about an author - you’re pretty tired and ready for a beer. But then there’s a staircase down and alas, another floor!

The stairs are appealing though, boosting you with some additional strength, and besides, there's no other way to exit. A dark, red light is cast outward from underneath each step, making it seem like your descending into the fires of Kafka’s self-prescribed madness. Down at the bottom, there’s an angled mirror, with a quote in German from Kafka, probably something like “There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.” Then you turn and you’re in a hall of file cabinets, never ending file cabinets, as the hall turns and turns and seems endless, symbolizing the bureaucratic hell that haunted Kafka, and influenced his writings towards misanthropy and loneliness. There is nothing that shoves your face into the compost heap of human existence quite like being a single cog - no, a bolt - in a giant organization, nothing that shows you how meaningless you are, when your own existence can be forgotten and subsumed by your lesser qualified coworkers. “You are not of the castle, you are not of the village. You are nothing.”

Then, a video display about the Castle, weird cardboard cutout scenes from Prague, quotes to belittle your existence and lots of smoke and mirrors. Then next room a dark fortress or prison, past the windows another video showing a man’s back being opened with a scalpel, peeling away the skin in various directions.

And then, like a Czech movie, you're standing outside, everything’s over but nothing has ended, and you scratch your head and try to figure out the meaning of what you just went through. But now you’re back standing in front of the pissing men, and all the meaninglessness is just about too much to handle.

Thanks God you're in Prague and there’s a lot of fantastic beer.