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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Commemorations, festivals : Czech

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Society Festivals Remembrance Czech Jungmann, Josef [Prague (CZ) 1878] Zaboj [Dvůr Králové nad Labem (CZ) 1857] Vyšehrad cemetery [Prague (CZ) 1869] Poster, Czechoslovak Ethnographic Exhibition 1895 Prague (CZ) Czechoslovak Ethnographic Exposition Foundation of the National Theatre Křižík Fountain 1891 Prague (CZ) Jubilee Exposition Nekula, Marek Dobiáš, Dalibor

In the Bohemian Lands, the festival culture of Romantic Nationalism benefited significantly from older (Counter-Reformation) religious traditions. The idea of a national “resurrection" is, characteristically, derived from religious parlance, and pilgrimages to nationally sacred places (which emerged with the development of cultural tourism in the 1830s and 1840s), or national funerals (later on in the century) drew on religious practices and combined national and religious symbols – e.g. the crown of thorns allegedly placed by Božena Němcová on the coffin of Karel Havlíček Borovský to indicate his martyrdom at the hands of the Habsburg authorities. Conversely, traditional church festivals were infused with the historicism of Romantic Nationalism; witness the pilgrimages to Hostýn Hill, where (as the legend had it) in the 13th century the Czechs, with the help of the Virgin Mary, had averted the subjugation of Europe by the Tatars, and where in the 1860s the millennium of Slavic mission of SS Cyril and Methodius was celebrated. It is no coincidence that priests in the tradition of Enlightenment Patriotism were at the forefront of the national movement in the first half of the 19th century.

Another important source of national festival culture were traditional folk festivals. These had been integrated into patriotic elite culture with the coronations of Franz II (1792) and Ferdinand V (1836) in Prague. The ideal of the "unspoiled country folk" was also enshrined in the pastoral ideology of the city-based Czech ethno-national movement both as part of urban festivities and in infusing municipal public space (e.g. in Josef Mánes’s allegory of the twelve months at the Prague Astronomical Clock, 1865). As early as 1834, Josef Kajetán Tyl’s operetta Fidlovačka (“The shoemakers’ feast”) invoked the spring festival of Prague shoemakers held in the Nusle Valley near Prague after Easter. The play’s idyllic, rural-oriented song Kde domov můj? (“Where is my home?“, composed by František Škroup) gained popularity to the point of ultimately becoming the Czech national anthem. Carefully chosen patriotic and ethno-national symbols appeared at dance festivals and balls in the 1840s. The Czech character of these festivities was signalled by symbolic decorations, e.g. busts of national greats, nationally evocative Slavic costume (čamara frocks), dances (polka, mazurka), verse declamations and choral performances of patriotic songs. In this way, Czech-language literary culture strengthened its prestige and found a wider audience; a number of poetry anthologies and occasional publications were produced for such festivals.

When the post-1848 neo-absolutist period drew to a close in the 1860s, new possibilities for festival culture in the Bohemian Lands opened up. Celebrations involved the carefully orchestrated management of national symbolism and media coverage and in the process aimed to convert the gathered crowds into a nationally conscious Czech public. Thus, the laying of the foundation stone of Prague’s National Theatre (1868) not only included a massive fireworks display, but also took advantage of the traditional religious St John of Nepomuk pilgrimage. Not only the religious and secular pilgrims were transported to Prague by specially scheduled trains, but also the stones associated with nationally significant places countrywide, from the primordially Slavic to the Hussite period: hills and mountains like myth-wreathed Říp and Radhošť as well as the aforementioned Hostýn, Vyšehrad, associated with the mythical princess Libuše and with the Přemyslid princes, the sacred Svatobor grove, Žižka-associated places like Trocnov and Žižkov, the Blaník mountain from which it was foretold a legendary host of patriotic knights would one day emerge, and the Bohemian Forest Range, which was imagined to form the spatial demarcation of the nation’s borders. The mighty, yet local festival in Prague symbolically unified the nation’s territories (Bohemia and Moravia) and asserted their Czech-Slavic nature (heedless of their heterogeneity and German cultural presence).

Previously, in 1857, a statue had been erected in Dvůr Králové dedicated to Záboj, the hero of the faux-medieval Manuscript of Dvůr Kralové discovered there. The event triggered a clash over the Manuscript’s increasingly disputed authenticity, which in turn affected the legitimacy of the Czech ethno-national programme as a whole in contrast to German culture and traditions. In the second half of the century, this ethno-national antagonism became more strenuous, marked by the solemn foundation of cultural institutions and in commemorative celebrations such as the ceremonial (re)naming of streets or unveiling of monuments (as in the case of the Jungmann monument’s pedestal in 1873 and statue in 1878).

Culturally assertive gatherings also increasingly revolved around a new tradition of national funerals. This began in 1847, when Czechs buried and honoured Josef Jungmann with a national funeral mass. On Jungmann’s coffin was displayed his Slovník česko-německý (“Czech-German dictionary“), revered as a harbinger of the national language resurrection. And while the aforementioned funeral of Karel Havlíček Borovský (1856) took place under police supervision and active participation in it represented a certain risk, the funeral of Václav Hanka (1861) became a powerful national demonstration, where the success of the Czech national party in the Prague municipal election coincided with heightened tempers over the ongoing controversy over the authenticity (and Hanka’s role in the “discovery”) of the Manuscript.

Attendants and spectators at such events found themselves in an embodied community sharing the deceased’s national commitment; that sense was mediated to wider circles by the event’s coverage in the nationally-minded press. Hanka was the first national figure to receive a funeral at the memory-invested site of Vyšehrad. A year later, Božena Němcová received a national funeral and a posthumous pilgrimage to Vyšehrad. The Czech writers’ association Svatobor (“The Sacred Grove”, founded in 1862) aimed not only to give support to writers and their families, but also to preserve their memory through commemorative festivals and monuments. Among these, the funerary pillar to Václav Hanka (the first Czech ethno-national monument in greater Prague), Josef Jungmann (the first Czech ethno-national monument in central Prague), Karel Hynek Mácha and František Palacký (1912) stand out. These efforts culminated in the national funerary monument known as Slavín (1889-93), administered by the Svatobor association on the Vyšehrad cemetery, which maintained well into the 20th century its function as a national camposanto pantheon.

The role that Hussitism, thanks to František Palacký and his generation, had acquired in the modern national mythology is illustrated by the "Tabori movement" after 1867, when the Habsburg Monarchy entered into an Austro-Hungarian dualism that largely bypassed the aspirations of the Slavic populations. These massive camp gatherings (which also were taken up in the Slovenian lands) followed the Hussite precept of asserting the truth (i.e. the nation’s aspirations) against the world. Between 1868 and 1873 they mobilized large crowds at memory-invested places such as Říp or Blaník Mountain, the castles of Bezděz or Karlštejn, or the former Hussite battleground at Lipany in Central Bohemia. These gatherings were intended to demonstrate the unity of the nation and force Franz Joseph into concessions to Czech demands. Similar mass demonstrations of national mobilization were the participation of Czech representatives in the Slavic Congress in Russia (1867), the return of the Bohemian Crown Jewels to Prague (1867), and the 1868 national pilgrimage to Konstanz (where Jan Hus had been burnt at the stake in 1415). The larger public, who subscribed to the cultural legacy of Hussitism regardless of religion, could take note of these festivities through press coverage.

On the whole, mass venues into the 1880s were historicist in orientation. When Prague’s National Theatre was completed in the early 1880s, it was decorated with representations of the national past and of Bohemian places made memorable by their Czech-national associations. The new, historicizing building of the National Museum in Prague contained a pantheon decorated with busts of national personalities past and present. This intensified in the 1890s with the novel cultural/commercial platform of World fairs. The Jubilee Exhibition (Prague 1891; also known as General Land Centennial Exhibition) and the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition (Prague 1895) also had a festive character, manifesting a robust connection between national culture and bourgeois patronage. Both exhibitions were accompanied by a series of well-attended and media-reflected activities. They were characterized (as such World fairs generically tended to be at this time) by a mixture of historical and popular elements; witness the diorama of the “Defence of Charles Bridge against the Swedes in 1648” at the Jubilee Exhibition, Mikoláš Aleš’s monumental canvas of “Fighting the Saxons at Hrubá Skála”, exhibited at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895, or the folk villages displayed in the same event. Accompanied by purpose-built structures like the 1891 Křižík Fountain, or a free replica of the Eiffel Tower on Petřín, these events clearly represented a modernizing turn in Czech society at the end of the 19th century.

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1.1.2.3/c https://e-rn.ie/czc-16