Wenceslaus II · The Eternal Voice

For seven hundred and twenty-one years I have been silent

Welcome. For seven hundred and twenty-one years I have been silent, and today I am finally allowed to speak.

My name is Wenceslaus, the second of my name upon the Bohemian royal throne, the sixth Bohemian king. I died on the twenty-first of June, thirteen hundred and five, at the age of thirty-three, of lung fever and exhaustion — of an illness you call tuberculosis today, which we in our time could not yet even name, let alone cure.

After the death of my father, Ottokar II, others governed the land in my stead for five years, for another fourteen years I ruled as his uncoronated heir, and only for the last eight years of my life did I wear the royal crown. Then came that June, and with it a silence that lasted seven centuries. And I waited with perseverance, which over the course of those long years proved to be the only royal virtue I managed to retain. I speak now only because someone remembered — for without remembrance, the dead have no voice.

In the center of this room lies a sandstone coffin on loan from the Vyšehrad Chapter. It likely holds the remains of one of my distant ancestors — Vratislaus, the first among us to wear a royal crown, or his son Soběslav. No one knows for certain anymore. The name has been lost; the stone remains.

Around the coffin you may see four faces, the protectors of this land. Among them is my namesake. Just as they once were for me, they still remain the patrons of the land for you — and that is precisely why I am able to meet you today above this memorable stone.

Such was forgiveness in our family

In one of the display cases lies a piece of linen cloth from the tenth century. Someone wrapped it around the bones of a woman who was murdered by her own family.

That woman was named Ludmila — my distant relative, who lived some thirteen generations before me. She married Bořivoj, who was baptized in Moravia in the eighties of the ninth century, thus becoming the first Christian duke in our dynasty. Ludmila accepted baptism with him, and thus stood at the very beginning.

They killed her at Tetín in September of the year nine hundred and twenty-one; they strangled her with her own veil. The murder was ordered by her daughter-in-law, Duchess Drahomíra — the mother of Wenceslas, later revered as a saint, who wished to raise her son in her own way and free him from Ludmila's influence. Wenceslas was about fourteen at the time.

Four years later, in the year nine hundred and twenty-five, this same Wenceslas had Ludmila's bones transferred from Tetín to the Basilica of Saint George at Prague Castle. And it was most likely in the linen cloth that now lies behind the glass before you that they wrapped the body of the saint for this final journey.

A convent was subsequently founded there over her remains, its first abbess being Mlada — the daughter of Boleslaus, the duke who murdered his brother Wenceslas. Mlada's father was therefore a fratricide; her grandmother was Drahomíra, who had her mother-in-law removed from the world. And it was precisely over Ludmila's grave that Mlada now served.

Three generations thus came together in a single convent, above a single burial ground.

Such was forgiveness in our family.

The belated victory of those who initially lost

The Rotunda of Saint Catherine in Znojmo was commissioned to be painted around the year eleven hundred and thirty-four by my distant relative, Conrad II of Znojmo.

Conrad held an appanage in the south of Moravia — as a cadet branch of the family — but he wanted more. He longed to acquire Prague, the main center of the Duchy of Bohemia. Soběslav I was already aging, and Conrad prepared to take his place. However, instead of a sword, he reached for a brush. On the walls of his ceremonial chapel, he had his entire family tree painted — from the mythical ploughman Přemysl down to himself and his wife, Maria of Serbia.

The election of the successor, however, turned out differently; Vladislaus II won. Conrad rebelled and then evaded capture for four years, before they finally reconciled in the year eleven hundred and forty-six, but he never obtained the Prague throne.

Eight hundred years later, I look at that wall with you. I see Přemysl the Ploughman here, the ancient founder of my house, summoned from the plough to rule. The figures with cloaks perhaps represent the Dukes of Prague, those without cloaks the Dukes of Moravia. I also recognize the old symbols of ducal power — the banners and shields that the dukes grip in their hands. Another figure that I, too, can reliably recognize today is King Vratislaus — by his crown.

Conrad lost his election. Yet subsequent generations of the family — myself included — completed that family tree for him.

And therein lies the belated victory of those who lost for so long.

Agnes and the Velvet Revolution

Here you see the document obtained in Basel by my great-grandfather, Ottokar I — the Golden Bull of Sicily of the twenty-sixth of September, twelve hundred and twelve.

This set of four privileges, sealed with the golden Sicilian seal of the future King of the Romans, Frederick II, guaranteed the heredity of the Bohemian crown. The imperial sovereign was henceforth merely to confirm the election of the king by the Bohemian nobility, and the Bohemian king was granted the right to invest the bishops of Prague and Olomouc. It was this very document that culminated Ottokar's fourteen-year effort to secure a hereditary royal title. It transformed regional dukes into a dynasty of European significance. My coronation on the second of June, twelve hundred and ninety-seven, rested upon this parchment. And the ascension of my son to the throne eight years later did as well.

In this room you will also find a section dedicated to my great-aunt Agnes — the daughter of that same great-grandfather who negotiated the Bull. I did not know her personally; she died on the second of March, twelve hundred and eighty-two, a mere year before my return from Brandenburg captivity. I know, however, that she refused marriage to Emperor Frederick II — the sovereign who had sealed the Bull for her father. Instead, she founded the double convent of Na Františku in Prague, where she united the Poor Clares and the Friars Minor under a single administration, alongside the male knightly order of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star. It is the only male order in the world to have been founded by a woman.

On the twelfth of November, nineteen hundred and eighty-nine, seven hundred and seven years after her death, Pope John Paul II declared Agnes a saint. Five days later, the Velvet Revolution began on Národní třída. Although I had been lying in Zbraslav for six hundred and eighty-four years by then, I perceived that day distinctly. Agnes deserved it. And Bohemia did too.

The family I knew was ended by the thrust of a knife

This small octagonal hall forms a deliberate contrast to the spaces before it. Here, in conclusion, the story is told of what came after me.

I died on the twenty-first of June, thirteen hundred and five, of lung fever — you call it tuberculosis today. I was thirty-three. Thirteen months later, on the fourth of August, thirteen hundred and six, my son Wenceslaus was murdered in the bishop's palace in Olomouc. He was not yet seventeen. He had been preparing for a campaign to Poland to assert the royal title he inherited from me; he had previously relinquished the Hungarian crown himself. No one ever discovered the killer's name. With the death of my son ended the main male line — the line that, from Bořivoj through fourteen generations, had bound the Bohemian lands to a single blood.

Following my son, the land was briefly ruled by Rudolf of Habsburg, who married my second wife, Elizabeth Richeza, and Henry of Carinthia, the husband of my daughter Anna. In the year thirteen hundred and ten, John of Luxembourg assumed rule, having married another of my daughters, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Thus, through Elizabeth, my blood continued beneath the Luxembourg name.

Her son was Charles IV, my grandson. He was born ten years after the Olomouc murder and became the Roman Emperor. In the year thirteen hundred and forty-four, he had the Prague bishopric elevated to an archbishopric — which a number of my ancestors had once attempted in vain. In the year thirteen hundred and forty-eight, he founded Charles University, the oldest in Central Europe. He also had the Crown of Saint Wenceslas crafted, and had himself crowned with it on the second of September, thirteen hundred and forty-seven. Bohemian kings subsequently used it for coronations until the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic. Charles thus bore the Přemyslid legacy more profoundly than any of us, his ancestors by the sword.

Then centuries swept past. The Hussite storms, the Habsburgs, and the Estates Uprising culminating in the Battle of White Mountain. The First Republic, the Protectorate, and Communism came. And finally, November nineteen hundred and eighty-nine. Agnes was canonized, five days later demonstrations erupted, and within a year you had a free country. Today it has been thirty-seven years.

My sovereign house was extinguished by the thrust of a knife that day in Olomouc. Yet that which remained after it — the coins, the documents, the kingdom, the cities, and the saints — continues to ask you to this day who you truly are.

Relics of Saint Wenceslas

I went to the helmet of Saint Wenceslas every year. On the twenty-eighth of September, the feast day of my namesake, I would travel to Stará Boleslav, where they killed him, and then to the Cathedral of Saint Vitus, where his bones lie. I approached the helmet then as I would an old acquaintance — I placed my hand upon its iron and lingered there in silence.

Today, it is you who approach this helmet. In the display case is its copy — the original is part of the treasury of Saint Vitus Cathedral. Upon the nasal guard is embossed a figure, which today's experts read as the crucified Christ, rendered, however, by a Nordic hand with the influences of a Viking worldview. The nasal guard and the rim were riveted to the helmet only around the year one thousand under Boleslaus II, which is to say several decades after Wenceslas's death. The skull cap itself, forged from a single piece of iron at the beginning of the tenth century, is older, however. It might have covered the head of my namesake himself, though whether it truly did, not even I know for certain.

The difference between you and me is simple: today you approach the helmet as a museum exhibit, whereas I went to it as a relic. That difference is the work of those seven hundred years.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the anthropologist Emanuel Vlček examined the skull that is housed beside the helmet. He discovered upon it a series of healed injuries from blows by a blunt object as well as slash wounds, and in addition, wounds that occurred in the final hours of Wenceslas's life. The legends portrayed him as a "ruling monk", but reality was different — he led armies. His brother finally killed him just as brothers kill in our family: at the door of a church, on a feast day, and with a few retainers at hand.

You learned this thanks to Emanuel Vlček, but I have known it all along.

The funerary jewels of my father

I commissioned this crown myself. I was twenty-five, and it was the year of my coronation.

It consists of eight riveted parts, where lilies alternate with equal-armed crosses. Belonging to it is a scepter with a pinecone and vine leaves, alongside a smooth orb with a cross. All of gilded silver, the work of a Prague goldsmith's workshop from the year twelve hundred and ninety-seven.

It bears the inscription: "The bones of Ottokar, the noble fifth King of Bohemia."

Of Ottokar. My father.

He fell at Marchfeld on the twenty-sixth of August, twelve hundred and seventy-eight, when I was not yet seven years old. I was then taken to Brandenburg — I spent five years in the captivity of Otto of Brandenburg. My father's body, meanwhile, was kept by the Habsburgs. For eight whole months they displayed it in Vienna, first with the Scottish Benedictines and then with the Friars Minor. It was nothing short of an insult and a desecration. Afterwards, they provisionally interred him in the crypt of the Minorite friary in Znojmo. For nineteen years he dwelled there without a royal grave. Not until the year I was crowned did I finally have his remains transferred to the Basilica of Saint Vitus. Into the coffin with him went these three objects. For the true coronation jewels were inherited within the family — from me to my fifteen-year-old son, after whose death in Olomouc they passed through Elizabeth of Bohemia to the Luxembourgs. These funerary jewels, however, were created for one single moment only.

In the year thirteen hundred and seventy-three, my grandson Charles IV — Elizabeth's son — had my father's body, along with the crown, scepter, and orb, transferred into a Gothic tomb in the Saxon Chapel of Saint Vitus Cathedral. Then, when Vlček opened the tomb in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-six, the crown still lay there. Even the inscription upon it was still legible.

Thus we both survive in silver. He in the dedication, I in the telling.

Sleep well, father. And I shall continue to speak with those who came after us.