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Wednesday, May 10, 2000



Bohemian fires
From the Iron Age to the New Age, Czechs toe the line between modern Slavs and ancient Celts

By Theodore Schwinke


Lightning cracks the darkening sky. The Celts look up from their fire where they are roasting a pig for the evening feast and cast worried eyes at the stormy heavens. But their holy man, a druid clad in white, reassures those nearby that he has performed a ritual to appease the rain gods: There will be no rain to disturb the annual Beltine celebrations.

Which is good news for the girl in the new Reeboks.

She is among nearly 2,000 people who have gathered this night to celebrate the Celtic holiday Beltine, or Beltane, as it is also known. These Czechs, and many more across the country, are laying claim to Celtic heritage -- and walking away from their Slavic roots.

The night of April 30 is traditionally known in the Czech lands as Carodej-nice, or Witch Night. On the eve of May, Czechs all over the country burn effigies of Morana, "the witch of winter," in bonfires to celebrate the arrival of spring.

The communists discouraged spring revels such as Carodejnice, but the brouhaha has been making a comeback since 1989. And for the past five years, larger and larger numbers of Czechs have been observing the Celtic rite of Beltine on the same night.

Woe to the casual spectator who confuses the two celebrations.

"Carodejnice?" a man with a wizened face asked with a laugh at this year's all-night Beltine festival in Prague. "That's got nothing to do with us. Carodejnice is a Slavic celebration."

Granted, most people identify the Czechs as Slavs. They speak a Slavic language, for one, and they frequently have names such as Ladislav, Miroslav, Vladislav ...

But here is one Vladislav who is having none of it. The man with the wizened face is Vladislav Lukacek, and he is a highlander -- a Czechomoravian highlander, that is, hailing from Zdar nad Sazavou. He is also the deputy director of the Bratrstvo Keltu, the Celtic Brotherhood, and wants Czechs to recognize their Celtic heritage.

Since when do Czechs have a Celtic heritage? "If you stay here until morning," Lukacek says, "you'll find the answer to your question."

"Here" is the site of the fifth annual Beltine festival: Cisarsky ostrov, an island in the Vltava in Prague 7. But in a broader sense, "here" might mean Bohemia. The mountain-ringed valley that comprises the northwestern half of the Czech Republic takes its name from the Boii, a Celtic tribe that lived here from at least 600 B.C. until around the birth of Christ.

Of course, that was a long, long time ago. Why then are there nearly 2,000 Czechs gathering near Troja to celebrate an Iron Age culture usually associated with Ireland? And is it really necessary to stay up all night to witness it?


All mixed up

For a night holding such hedonistic promise -- leaping flames, flowing mead, scantily-clad pagan women -- Beltine is getting off to a tame start.

Holding a large drum between his knees, a man known as Wendy Zulu dances in a bobbing motion to the tribal rhythm his hands are creating. He makes a sustained, low, melodic grunting sound, not entirely unlike a dijeridoo, creating an oddly amorous tableau.

"Civilization calls it 'improvisation,' " Zulu says by way of explanation. As he describes it, his rhythms are not Celtic per se, but rather the result of "the energy coming through me. What you hear is the result."

Likewise, he won't go so far as to say that he is a Celt himself. "There is Celt in me and in the music," he says. "But I feel a lot of different ethnicities in me."

Whatever their ethnicity, scores of people young and old are doing their best to pass as a modern stone-age family. Two Celtic teenagers weave the latest fashions from wool and flax, while a group of people dressed in burlap bags are playing in the mud, making a hovel.

Richard Novy, 44, plays a Celtic tune (which sounds remarkably similar to the love theme from Titanic) on a harp plugged into a Pignose amplifier. He describes himself as "a Celt and a druid," pronouncing the second noun "droid."

Nearby is another druid, Tomas Sychra. The 52-year-old biomedical engineer officiates at a makeshift Celtic altar with flowers and a fire-filled cauldron.

Sychra believes that the Celts never left Bohemia and has a theory he feels proves the Celticness of Czechs. "We have many anthropological similarities to the Irish, which show that we are Celts." He bends down to examine a nearby Czech's sandaled feet. "For example, on our feet, our second and third toes are close together."

Sure enough: the second toe wasn't separated from the third toe by more than a few millimeters. The observation of scores more Czech feet revealed the same toe-to-toe proximity.


Designer genes

The festival of Beltine is celebrated midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. A celebration of spring's return, fire is one of its primary images.

Traditionally, bonfires were lit at gates of villages on Beltine. By passing between the Beltine fires, Celts were protected against disease in the coming warm season.

One Beltine reveler who inoculates himself thusly this evening is the highlander Lukacek. "We aren't Celtic freaks or anything," he says later. For Deputy Director Lukacek and other members of the Celtic Brotherhood, Beltine is simply a joyful festival. Many of the revelers come just to hear the all-night lineup of Celtic-inspired bands. "We want everyone to have a good time, not just people who consider themselves Celts," Lukacek says.

The festival has grown steadily over the five years of its existence, from a modest 500 participants in 1995 to around 2,000 this year. The growing affinity for all things Celtic is due to romanticism, according to Petr Drda, head of the archeological department of the Academy of Science in Prague.

Drda stays away from the Beltine festivals and the "Celtomaniacs," as he calls them. The author of the exhaustive book Celts and Czechs, Drda knows his Celts -- and most of them are dead.

"Essentially, we Czechs are not Celts. We are not a pure race. We're a mix of many different ethnicities," he says. "Take a look in the phone book."

According to archeologists, Celts ceased to be the dominant culture in Bohemia around 25 B.C. After a crushing defeat at the hands of the Dacians -- Drda likens it to genocide -- Celts remaining in Bohemia assimilated into Germanic culture. This society remained dominant until the arrival of the Slavs in the fifth and sixth centuries.

"There is some physical continuity, but we can't say that we are Celts," Drda says. "We may have some Celtic genes, but we are a predominantly Slavic people."

Ironically, it may be their Slavic heritage that is driving Czechs to search for Celtic roots. For most of history, Czechs lived in a society ruled by Germans and Austrians, but communism changed that. "We always identified with Western Europe, and our 'Russian brothers' took that away from us," Drda says. "So it's a normal reaction to reclaim that Western identity."

Identity is what the Celtic question comes down to. Much as the Czechs celebrated the myth of a great Slavic race when building their independent nation, they now look to a different model: one that is Western, but untainted by the past 2,000 years of history.

Facts have seldom stopped or even slowed the process of nation-building. Very few Americans, for example, can claim descent from the passengers of the Mayflower, but the myth that those English pilgrims gave birth to the country is vital to that nation.

And then there's the matter of the toes.
Running helter Celter with the original Bohemians



Theodore Schwinke's e-mail address is tschwinke@praguepost.cz


The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.

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