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Good day! Today's internet rabbit hole started with the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for July 24, 2022, above, titled “A Guard at Prague Castle, Prague.” I admired his ornate uniform and noted his very serious demeanor and wondered what his name was and what his story was. His name might be Miloš (pronounced MEE-lowsh), like Czech director Miloš Forman, from whose films I remember a grand total of one word in Czech, which is ahoj. This one is easy to remember, because it is pronounced like “ahoy”, and why, yes, it does mean “hello”. So if you say “Ahoy, Mate”, maybe you're speaking Czech, Australian, and Old-timey Sailor. Anyway, if you're going to know only one word in Czech, that's a useful one.
Since maybe-Miloš's uniform was so splendid and he looked so serious about doing his job, I wanted to get a good look at Prague Castle and learn a bit more about it, because it's clearly a very big deal. Prague Castle, which is located in the Czech Republic, was built in the 9th century. Holy clams, that's old. And just look at this thing – it's so sprawling and fancy:
I wasn't wrong about it being a big deal: it holds a position in The Guinness Book of World Records for being the largest ancient castle in the world, at 750,000 square feet (that's 70,000 square meters for you, uh, rest-of-the-world people). For comparison, Neuschwanstein Castle is a tiny baby ,at 65,000 square feet and a birthdate of 1869. Prague Castle is open to tourists and receives almost two million visitors annually. So no doubt there are many, many more serious and ornately-clad guards like maybe-Miloš.
One of the things they are so serious about guarding is the Bohemian Crown Jewels, which reside in Prague Castle. The Bohemian Crown Jewels are also called the Czech Crown Jewels, but Bohemia sounds more romantic. They are the somewhat standard crown, orb and sceptre, but also contain a gold reliquary cross and the Sword of Saint Wenceslas. Yes, sometimes saints can have swords, mainly if they used to be kings (or dukes, anyway; stay tuned). The crown is also the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, although it was originally made for the coronation of Charles the Fourth in 1347. Clearly Wenceslas was much cooler. Sorry, Chuck.
Now, just in case “king” and “Wenceslas” ring a bell for you, you get a cookie, because this is indeed the Good King Wenceslas about whom the famous Christmas carol (sung surprisingly well by Prime Minister Hugh Grant's driver in the movie Love Actually)was written. And it's no surprise, because you have to be pretty good to become a saint.
Wenceslas (also spelled Wenceslaus, because it's just a transliteration of the original Czech, anyway) wasn't actually a king until after he was dead (we'll get to that). He was the Duke of Bohemia in the 10th century, from AD 921 until about 935 (or possibly 929, because records were a bit spotty back then). He had a younger brother who was known as Boleslaus the Cruel and who was not nearly as popular, not just because of his name but mostly because he was probably responsible for Wenceslas's death in maybe-935 after a quarrel (unsurprisingly, alcohol was thought to be involved).
Wenceslas had much better public relations than Boleslaus, and his legend for awesomeness grew exponentially after his death until he was posthumously made a king and subsequently canonized as a saint and further, made patron saint of the Czech Republic, although of course it wasn't called that at the time. It's amazing what a very catchy carol will do for you (this is possibly the birthplace of the commercial jingle). By the way, the carol in question was not actually a Christmas carol but was written instead for the Catholic feast day of Saint Stephen, which as you can find out here is actually on December 26th (Hence the opening line “Good King Wenceslas looked out/On the Feast of Stephen”), but hey, close enough.
Guard mage from Wikimedia Commons, free use with attribution of the author: By © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113224274
Castle image from Wikimedia Commons, free use with attribution of the author: By Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0
For way more information than I gave you on any of these subjects, please see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Castle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_crown_jewels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslaus_I,_Duke_of_Bohemia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Stephen%27s_Day
