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Monday on November 2nd was an important day in the Catholic Church calendar - and not least in the Czech Republic. Thousands of Czechs placed candles or flowers on the graves of relatives or friends who had died, part of an annual tradition to mark All Souls' Day. The day is also known in Czech by the familiar term "Dusicky" - meaning "little souls" - its roots in Christian Europe go back well over a thousand years, and it is not hard to trace it back to still more distant pagan origins. On the occasion Radio Prague's David Vaughan visited one of the Czech Republic's most famous cemeteries, on Vysehrad, just south of Prague's city centre. There can be few places more atmospheric than the National Cemetery at dusk on All Souls' Day. Candles are flickering on nearly every grave, and the graves of the famous, such as Dvorak, Smetana or Bozena Nemcova, are literally glowing with the light of hundreds of candles. The Czech Republic is not a religious country, but on All Souls' Day most people, believers or not, in some way remember their dead. Prague's Archbishop, Cardinal Vlk, leads a mass in the packed Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, next to the National Cemetery, and he honours the memory both of the famous and the obscure. All Souls' or "Dusicky" is a religious festival, but Jan Kofron, secretary to Prague's assistant Bishop Vaclav Maly, points out that just like many other Christian festivals it does have very much a dual quality. Streaming RA / RA DownloadJan Kofron says that you can prove the point just by going to a cemetery and looking at graves from the communist period. In communist, atheist Czechoslovakia there was virtually a cult of the tombstone, especially in villages, with families vying with each other for the biggest, most monumental, and best kept grave. With the fall of communism the Christian element of All Souls' has made a comeback, and attempts by some would-be Czech Celts to introduce the rather more pagan festival of Hallowe'en have also met with some success. So just like Christmas or Easter the feast survives here as a quirky mixture of the religious, the secular and the pagan. And perhaps we should add that on Monday President Havel laid a wreath at the grave of his first wife Olga, who died of cancer two years ago. Unfortunately not everyone in this country respects the dead - the wreath had disappeared within two hours and this time the spirits are not to blame.
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