Page:The Story of Prague (1920).djvu/221

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Walks in Prague

particular, which has been compared to the Bastille and the Tower of London, was the principal State prison of Prague. The leaders of the Protestant movement against Ferdinand I., Bishop Augusta, the head of the Bohemian brethren. the Bohemian leaders who were decapitated in 1621, the partisans of Charles of Bavaria (1743), and many others were imprisoned here.

The Daliborka Tower is very famous in popular legends. It is said to have received its present name from Dalibor of Kozojed, a knight who was imprisoned here during the reign of Vladislav II. The serfs of a neighbouring knight, Adam of Ploskov, had been driven to revolt by the cruelty of their lord, and Dalibor availed himself of this opportunity for seizing Ploskov’s estates. He was, therefore, imprisoned in the tower to which he has given his name, and afterwards decapitated. This somewhat sordid event became the nucleus of legends created by the imaginative Bohemian people. It was said that Dalibor, after spending some years in foreign lands, had returned to Bohemia, and there witnessed the cruelties from which the Bohemian peasants, formerly free men, suffered; for bondage, entirely alien to the ancient customs of Bohemia, was only established there in 1487. Under the influence of Rozvod, an old man who remembered the days of Zizka, Dalibor incited the peasants to rise against their lords. The revolt was rapidly suppressed, and Dalibor imprisoned in the tower on the Hradcany Hill. It was said that while imprisoned he learnt to play the violin to solace his solitude, and that his music attracted crowds to the tower. The great Bohemian musician Smetana has given the name of ‘Dalibor’ to one of his operas, and Dalibor is also the hero of one of the books of the talented Bohemian novelist Wenceslas Vlcek. Among the later prisoners in the Dali-

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