King Wengeslas

Southland Times, Issue 21273, 19 December 1930, Page 19

King Wengeslas

HE REIGNED IN BOHEMIA. Every schoolboy knows the tradition according to which the Prince of Wales’s feathers came to England from Bohemia by way of the blind King John, who was killed at the Battle of Crecy. Less generally realized perhaps is the fact that the hero of one of the most popular of English Christmas carols is a king who, in name at all events, is one of the patron saints of Bohemia.

Several kings there were of the country that is now the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia who were named Wenceslas. But one of them was so saintly in his life that he was canonized and was so great a figure in his day that his millenary was celebrated with great pomp at Prague this year. A recent visit to that most beautiful city set the mind wondering whether the Holy Wenceslas of the tenth century and the “Good King Wencelas” of the Christmas carol were one and the same, and if so, how his fame spread to England. . On the spot where, in the fourteenth century, the French architect, Matthew of Arras, began to raise the beautiful Gothic Cathedral of. St. Vitus, which crowns the whole imposing mass of the Hradcany, or former Royal palace, Kin? Wenceslas has built a church. So it is only proper that

in the later edifice one of the features should be a chapel to his memory. Entered through massive gates of bronze and almost semi-barbaric in its magnificence, this belong to a different civilization from that reoresented by the light, towering architecture of Matthew of Arras’s work. Great irregular-shaped slabs of amethyst, agate, and cornelian in glided setting panel the lower parts of the walls, the remainder of which are covered with fourteenth-century paintings depicting scenes from the lite and the' treacherous' murder of Wenceslas by his brother. A massive silver casket containing the King’s armoUr' and helmet stands in the middle of the chapel,- and upon all this dimly lit splendour gazes a bronze statue of King Wenceslas himself. As imagined some five hundred years after his death by, it is said, that great artist of the German Renaissance, Peter Vischer of Nuremberg, he is stout and square bearded—in fact, the prototype of the “Good King Wenceslas” of one’s childhood.

He was a saint as well as a king, and this year’s commemorative fetes took principally the form of great religious ceremonies, which attracted to Prague during the summer thousands of people from all over the country. It was with a view to this millenary celebration that the whole of the cathedral and much of the Hradcany generally have been for some time past in the hands of builders, busy on the work of restoration, reconstruction, and as far as St. Vitus’s itself is concerned, of completion of the hitherto unfinished edificei.