Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (18 page)
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Kutna Hora lies some seventy kilometres east of Prague. The ossuary is situated a short way outside the town, in the Chapel of All Saints - it flies a flag sporting a skull and crossbones - dating from around 1400. The cemetery was a popular burial place, after a Cistercian abbot returning from the Crusades had spread a layer of soil from the Holy Land over it, and by the 1500s it had become so crowded that a Cistercian monk was given the task of disinterring the old residents to make way for new applicants. He gathered some 40,000 skeletons. Nearly four centuries later, in 1870, a local woodcarver,
Rindt, was hired, on who knows what ecclesiastical whim, to employ the bones to decorate the inside of All Saints. The result is one of the Czech Republic's more grisly tourist attractions. The centrepiece of the ossuary is a full-sized, working chandelier made from bones. There are bone crucifixion scenes, bone portraits, and a bone coat of arms of the Schwartzenberg family, featuring, if I am not confusing my images, a bone raven plucking a bone eye - a ball joint - from the head of a bone Turk. Not surprisingly, the great Czech animator, Jan Svankmajer, made a short film on the subject, in black and white, featuring a lively jazz score. The Bone Chapel is a place of horrible fascination, and should be pulled down and given a decent burial.
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However, on that last visit to Prague I had a drink at the Slavia if it is changed after its famous interval of renovation I failed to detect the alterations, for good or ill - and afterwards, when I was leaving the cafe, my memory having been jogged, perhaps, by the cold and sleety night, I telephoned my hotel and they sent a car and I went to Slezska Avenue in search of the building where Katefina had
lived, but could not find it. In fact, the avenue was nothing like the grim canyon I thought I remembered, but a rather pretty, not very wide thoroughfare with fine nineteenth-century architecture, and a park running parallel one street down. Yet in my memory I distinctly see that big grey pile, the bare bulb, the big metal door.Sometimes one is led to wonder if memory is a faculty of deception rather than recollection.
The once Danish, now Swedish, island of Hveen, or Hven, or simply Ven - let us choose a middle course and call it Hven - situated in the
southeast of
Hamlet's Elsinore, is 400 miles distant from Prague, as the seagull flies. The name is said to derive from that of Hvenild, maid-in-waiting to the Lady Grimmel, ruler of the island in the times before time, who is reputed to have murdered her two brothers, one of whom had got Hvenild with child. When Ranke, Hve-nild's boy, grew up, he cast his auntie into a dungeon, where she would starve to death, and set himself in her place as the true lord of the isle. Later, in the thirteenth century, a party of Vikings, led by the Monty Pythonesque Eric the Priest-Hater, stopped off at Hven to do some marauding, in the course of which they destroyed four castles, possibly those that Lady Grimmel had built, at Nordburg,
Karlshog and Hammer. Through the following sleepy centuries the island lay at peace save for the violent winter storms that whistled down the Sound. And then, in 1576, there arrived on the rocky shore a large, imposing figure with flowing moustaches and a wedge of silver and gold alloy set into the bridge of his damaged nose, to whom King Frederick of Denmark had granted the island as a gift whereon to build what would become the great observatory of Uraniborg, one of the middling wonders of the Renaissance world.
Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 into the highest reaches of the Danish nobility. The Brahes had been among the first of Denmark's noble families to reject Catholicism in favour of the reformed religion. Tycho's paternal grandfather, Tyge Brahe, died at the siege of Malmo in 1523 defending the Lutheran cause that would bring the Reformation to Denmark, while Tyge's brother Axel had the honour of carrying the sceptre at the coronation of the militant Lutheran King Christian III in 1537. When Tycho Brahe was two years old, he was abducted from his parents' castle at Knudstrup, in what is now southern Sweden, by his uncle
Brahe and his wife Inger Oxe (wives in Denmark then kept their maiden names after marriage). Mysteriously, Ty-cho's parents made scant protest at this piece of inter-family high-handedness, despite the fact that Tycho's twin, a boy, had died at birth;
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it seems that
put it to Tycho's father that since he already had another son, while he and his wife were childless, it was only right that he should share his bounty. Tycho himself in later life was sanguine in the matter, saying only that Jorgen and Inger had supported him generously on their estate at Tostrup and treated him as their own son.
The Brahes were a warrior clan, but happily, through his kidnapping, Tycho came under the influence of a very different family. The Oxes, his Aunt Inger's people, put a high value on learning and culture. Inger Oxe's brother Peder was a man of great influence in Denmark, a kingmaker and member of the Council of the Realm. Inger shared many of her brother's intellectual interests, and was something of a thinker in her own right. For years she conducted a lively correspondence with the sister of the Danish King Frederick, Princess Anne of Denmark/Saxony, noted for her work in alchemy, even though alchemy was an almost exclusively male pursuit, not least because of the danger a woman ran of being accused of witchcraft for dabbling in the dark art.
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No doubt Inger was a strong force in her nephew's education. After grammar school he first of all attended the University of Copenhagen - motto: 'He looks up to the light of heaven' - and after three years there moved on to study at Leipzig. As Tycho's latest biographer Victor E. Thoren puts it, 'When the time came to take the Grand Tour that had become a standard feature of the education of Danish aristocrats, Tycho followed the path of the Billes and Oxes to foreign universities, rather than the path of the Brahes to foreign wars.'
He was also a student for a time at Wittenberg, Luther's Alma Mater, but an outbreak of plague sent him scurrying north for safety to Rostock. It was at Rostock that he witnessed a lunar eclipse, on October 28th, 1566; Tycho, after careful study of the phenomenon, concluded that it presaged the death of the Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Great, and was unwise enough to publish a poem in Latin hexameters announcing the pend- ing event. Shortly afterwards, word came that Suleiman had indeed died - six months before the eclipse. What did follow the eclipse was not a death but a disfigurement. A couple of months later, at a Christmas party, Tycho got into a violent argument with another Danish student staying in Rostock, Manderup Parsberg, a distant cousin of the Brahes, who may well have been mocking Tycho over the embarrassing Suleiman prophecy. The pair went outside to settle the matter with their broadswords. In the duel, Tycho received a blow to the face that hacked a large notch out of the bridge of his nose. He was lucky not to have died, from infection if not the sword cut itself, and spent a painful convalescence. When he returned home to Denmark, he fashioned a prosthesis for himself of gold and silver blended to a flesh colour, kept in place by means of an adhesive salve a supply of which he carried with him always in a little silver box. This precious nosepiece was, it seems, reserved for 'dress' occasions, while a copper one was used for ordinary daywear.