Of Monuments and Memory

Prague’s Marian Column Arises from the Dust Heap of History

I’d been thinking about recent cases of statues in the United States being graffitied, removed, drowned, and/or having their heads cut off when I awakened one recent morning to a message from my friend and colleague, Dr. John Paul Newman. Did I know that Prague’s Marian Column had recently been resurrected? No, I didn’t. I had known that there’d been a small plaque in the pavement of Old Town Square at least since the early aughts. It advocated the return of the Marian column to its long-time home there. Well, up the column had just gone in Old Town Square. And, he had the pictures.

The best-known Marian column may be the one of her as Mary Queen of Heaven on Marienplatz in the center of Munich. The first such column north of the Alps, it was unveiled in 1638 to celebrate the end of Swedish occupation during the Thirty Years’ War

A number of other Marian columns, which can still be found throughout the Bohemian Lands and elsewhere in former Habsburg Central Europe, are part of a Cult of Mary. These columns, and plague columns–they’re sometimes the same thing–are my absolute favorite forms of baroque art.

**The first two statues are northern Bohemia (1997); the last one is Poland on the border with Czech Silesia (2014)**

But to Prague. Some Czechs had vandalized Roman Catholic symbols in the weeks and months after Czechoslovak independence in October 1918, but Prague’s baroque Marian Column seems to have the only one to have been toppled in this period. In the most famous assault on a cultural-religious icon, it was destroyed on November 3, 1918, just a week after the declaration of independence on October 28. Czechs associated many Catholic religious symbols with the Habsburg Monarchy, and some had been the targets of nationalists even before in 1918. The offenses the statues embodied were not only religious, but also national.

Prague’s Marian column had stood on Old Town Square before the Týn Church since 1650. It had shared this location for the previous three years with the Jan Hus monument. The residents of Prague had helped erect the Marian Column in the mid-seventeenth century for some of the same reasons the Marian Column had been constructed in Munich: to mark the Swedish withdrawal from Prague. It also commemorated the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

By the twentieth century, many Prague residents believed the monument had been put up by Emperor Ferdinand III to celebrate the Habsburg-Roman Catholic victory at White Mountain under the leadership of his father, Ferdinand II, and the subsequent execution of the twenty-seven Prague burghers in Old Town Square. Because most Czechs considered Habsburg rule to have been illegitimate since the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Marian Column had become a symbol of both Czech servitude under the Habsburgs and the victory of the Counter Reformation.

On November 3, some 250,000 Czechs participated in the first post-independence celebration at White Mountain, just outside Prague. That evening, anti-clerical, and other Czechs, inflamed by the speeches at White Mountain, converged on the Old Town Square. Egged on by the Czech anarchist Franta Sauer-Kysela, they pulled down the Marian Column, thus removing a foreign/Habsburg/ Catholic/female image from one of the most important public spaces in Prague. The Marian Column was toppled to the sounds of “Kde domov můj” and shouts of “Down with tyranny.” When dawn broke the next day, the Virgin Mary no longer looked benignly down from atop her column upon the Protestant reformer, Jan Hus, with whom she’d shared the square for the past several years. Hus, an important symbol of Czech nationalism, had taken sole possession of the square.

This act of iconoclasm was primarily national-republican, and only secondarily anti-clerical. Moreover, the country’s first president, Tomáš G. Masaryk, who considered the column’s presence on Old Town Square a “political humiliation,” supported its removal. The National Council made arrests for vandalism, but soon dropped criminal charges and merely issued a mild statement of rebuke for the “historic misconception” that had resulted in the destruction of one of the most valuable examples of baroque statuary in Central Europe.

Although the removal of the column had been aimed at the defunct Monarchy, in a country that was three-quarters nominally Roman Catholic, residual hard feelings about this renovation of Old Town Square also belonged to practicing Czech and German, but especially Slovak, Roman Catholics. They decried the attack on the Marian Column following what they deemed the “socialist” demonstration at White Mountain. The toppling of the Marian Column would be added to the growing list of Slovak and Roman Catholic grievances against what many Slovaks considered the disproportionate influence of the small Protestant Slovak élite in the political life of the secular Czechoslovak state.

There had been organized efforts since the Velvet Revolution to resurrect the statue, but they had failed. Until now. More than a century after it was removed, the Marian column has risen again.

**June Days on Old Town Square (Prague, 2020)**

Those in charge of the project have thoughtfully appended a large sign to the hurricane fence surrounding the site, explaining the column’s history. Someone apparently took umbrage at the explanation of the column’s origin and corrected it: “Proof of the humiliation of the Czechs at the hands of the Germans and the aggressiveness of the Catholics.” Same interpretation as Sauer-Kysela and his compatriots a century ago. FWIW, I don’t think these self-proclaimed Czech patriots who pulled down the statue 1918 would have appreciated their removal of the column being called “vandalism.”

Nashville’s Very Own Confederate Private Statue

Unveiled in 1909, the statue of a Confederate private in Nashville’s Centennial Park is not some unknown soldier, but rather according to the Smithsonian, it represents Tennessee’s own Confederate boy hero, Sam Davis. 1909 must have been a busy year for Confederate boy-hero statues in Nashville, because two were unveiled that year, the second on the statehouse lawn. Who was Davis and what was heroic about him, you might ask? Union troops hanged the twenty-one-year-old Davis as a spy in Pulaski, Tennessee, a city named for Warsaw-born Kazimierz Pulaski, the so-called “Father of the American Cavalry.” This town is also where Confederate veterans formed the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan on Christmas Eve, 1865.

**Centennial Park, Nashville (October 2019)**

In another connection to Central Europe, this statue is the work of Hungarian-American sculptor George Julian Zolnay, born Gyula Zsolnay. Married to a southerner, he became known as the “sculptor of the Confederacy.” Not a reputation I’d want. Zolnay’s bronze private, dressed in a Confederate uniform, is sitting on a rock, holding a rifle in one hand, its butt resting on the ground. Zolnay donated toward the cost of the $4,000.00 statue. The United Daughters of the Confederacy provided more than quarter of the funds. Like Confederate memorials elsewhere, the inscriptions on its stone base glorify the service of the private: “Duty Done Honor Won 1861-1865” and “To the Heroism of the Private Confederate Soldier.” A bronze plaque on a third side of the base contains the names of some 540 Confederate veterans.

This statue did not escape the attention of those protesting Confederate monuments in public places across the South and elsewhere during the late teens of this century. In June 2019, someone scrawled the slogan—“They were racists”—in red paint across the base. Quite accurate in my opinion. My picture dates from a few months later, after the paint had been removed, as the protective orange plastic mesh fencing surrounding it reveals. There was discussion about moving the statue to another site in the park during 2020. It came to naught because, of course (!), the monument falls under the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. Thus, it can’t be removed from public property without state approval. I’m hoping suggestions of providing context for this and other Confederate monuments in Nashville comes to fruition, but I’m not holding my breath.

Remembering the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in Western Ukraine

There was plenty of snow on the ground one Saturday in early December 2010 when my friends, Oksana and Viktor, and I decided we needed to go to Kosiv, a town in the Carpathians some fifty miles away from Chernivtsi. This small town on the Rybnytsya River in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is well known as a center of Hutsul culture. So, we would go to the market. (Why, oh, why did no one encourage me to study the Hutsuls when I was in grad school? Best artery-clogging food ever.)

There was only light traffic as we drove toward Kosiv. Then, suddenly, as if it were growing out of the snow-covered ground was a monster white column, a Soviet war memorial. Nothing would do, of course, but for Viktor to pull off the road and let me take pictures.

Part way up the tall white column are busts—gleaming, deep green—one a Red Army soldier, the ubiquitous red star on his helmet, and several others. The Ukrainian-language inscription on the slabs that flank the column is from Soviet poet Olga Berggolts: “Nothing is forgotten, and no one is forgotten.” It is famously inscribed on a monument at Piskarevskoe Cemetery in Leningrad, where hundreds of thousands of those who died during the siege of that city were buried in unmarked graves. According to my friend, the Soviet historian Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, who recently translated and edited Berggolts’ memoir, Daytime Stars, the verses became watchwords of the Soviet war cult.

The deep green faces and the shiny red star on the white column, the white snow against the bright winter-blue sky with the Carpathians in the background; this is what I think Soviet Christmas cards should have looked like. Much more interesting than Ded Moroz, in my opinion.

“Go West”- Cue the Pet Shop Boys

I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had a submachine gun slung across his chest. His right hand held a staff with a furled Soviet flag; the other, a gold Soviet coat of arms. The Soviets unveiled this memorial honoring the Red Army dead from the Vienna offensive of April 1945 the following August. The timing was not coincidental: it occurred just as the other three Allied powers were due to take up their zones of occupation in the Austrian capital. During the decade of Four-Power occupation, the memorial also included a Soviet T-34 tank. Tanks, of course, are another variation of Red Army memorials that could long be found throughout Soviet-occupied eastern Europe. In any case, I forgot about the memorial, because, well, dissertation research. By the time I returned to Vienna in 1995, I was interested in political monuments in public spaces, so I photographed it. For the first of many times.

**Soviet War Memorial, Schwarzenberg Platz, 1995 and 2019**

There’s a similar Red Army monument in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Also unveiled in 1945, it commemorates the 80,000 soldiers who died–some 2,000 are buried on the site–during of the Battle of Berlin in April and early May of that year. The colonnade is constructed of stone from the Reich Chancellery, which was destroyed during the war. The inscription on the pedestal of the twenty-six-foot-tall bronze statue reads “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union.”

**Memorial to Soviet War Dead in Brno Central Cemetery (Mid-1990s)**

I’ve also photographed a third Red Army soldier on a plinth, this one, kneeling. He’s in Brno, the Czech Republic. I came upon him when I was sightseeing, as one does, in the cemetery. Brno’s Central Cemetery is really interesting. In addition to the graves of Brno residents, there is a small section with graves of Nazi war dead. Then there is the large burial ground of the Soviet Army that dates from 1946. The Red Army soldier his submachine gun in hand, kneeling high on a column dominates the site. The burial ground includes a columbarium and other military-burial elements, some of which were added during its reconstruction in 1979-1980. The bodies of 3,364 rank-and-file, some of whom died elsewhere in the fighting across southern Moravia, share a common grave. Officers were cremated, and placed in their own urns, while senior officers got their own, individual graves.

Although the fate of Emperor Joseph II monuments in interwar Czechoslovakia was long my main concern, I still took pictures of all kinds of statues and memorials of historic interest in the Czech Republic, including those of Red Army soldiers. By the mid-1990s, many of these soldier-monuments had had their inscriptions removed. Some had been moved from their original pedestals altogether. These are among the ways Czech authorities deal with inconvenient political/politicized figures in public spaces. Many of these statues can be found in the border regions. What struck me about them was how cheerful, even elated, these men in bronze appear to be, as if they are pleased with themselves to have completed a job well.

The Soviet soldier on the far left stands in a central square of Znojmo in southern Moravia. He’s visible from the road between Prague and Vienna. If you stop to take pictures, make absolutely certain you break no traffic rules. The local police are on the lookout for Prague license plates so they can ticket those uppity city folks. At least they were last time I stopped in a Prague-plated car, which was in late 2011. The second soldier, the one who looks like he’s doing some kind of pilates stretch, is on a main road near Opava. The soldier with both arms up is in Western Bohemia. The imposing soldier on the far right stands in the center of Brno. The foundation stone for this monument was laid in 1946. His raised arm supposedly means stop firing. His original inscription was removed and has since been replaced more than once. Beginning in 1989, vandals have given him the paint treatment.

Of course, Red Army memorials aren’t limited to Vienna and the Czech Republic. Rather they can be found all over the former Warsaw Pact countries insofar as they haven’t been removed. The monuments don’t necessarily look alike, but many share similarities one might expect of victorious war memorials, above all an unnamed rank-and-file Red Army soldier, admittedly sometimes modeled on a well-known local, victorious over the Nazi enemy. These monuments also often mark the graves of dead Soviet soldiers.

The Red Army memorial in Cracow, Poland, still stood in Planty Park near the Barbican when I photographed it in 1995. Although there had been plans to move it and the bodies of Soviet soldiers over which it stood to the local military cemetery as early as 1990, the monument was moved only in 1997.

The Red Army soldier monument in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia in the Baltic, had been a source of controversy between ethnic Estonians and members of the Russian minority since Estonian independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. When I photographed the monument with its 6’-5” bronze soldier in July 2006, it already had a police guard and was surrounded by yellow tape, both of which I avoided in my picture. Neither the Russian residents of Estonia nor the Russians themselves responded well to plans to move it. Both the memorial and the war dead over whom the soldier stood guard were removed to Tallinn’s military cemetery in 2007.

The large Soviet war memorial in Chernivtsi (formerly Chernowitz), the capital of Bukovina, in Ukraine, stands on Sobor (Cathedral) Square in the city center. It is interesting, because it honors the city’s liberation from Axis (Romanian) troops, although Chernivtsi, the capital of provincial Bukovina during the Habsburg Monarchy, had been part of Romania between the world wars. The memorial incorporates a tall stone column, but rather than standing atop it, the bronze soldier, clutching a gun across his chest in one hand and holding a furled flag in the other, stands, like the soldier in Cracow, at the column’s base. On his pedestal are inscribed the dates of the Soviets’ Second World War, “1941-1945.”

My favorite Red Army memorial is also in Bukovina. This soldier in Nedoboistvi is not standing at attention or even at rest. In fact, he isn’t standing at all. Full of demonic energy, he appears to be racing toward some unknown goal, one fist punching forward, submachine gun clutched in his other hand. I mentioned this monument to a Ukrainian friend who told me the soldier was thinking, “Go West.” You know, like the Pet Shop Boys’ song.

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The Venetian Lion of Castello di Gorizia

I first visited Gorizia/Gorica, which is located just on the Italian side of the Italian-Slovenian border, when my Slovenian colleagues agreed to take me to try to find an historic brothel building near the military barracks. (I’d written about the brothel in book on prostitution during the Habsburg Monarchy and wanted to see if it was still there.) We think, but aren’t absolutely positive, that we found it. What we did find—new to me, but not to them—was the large, somber-looking Venetian lion above the Gorizia Castle (Castello di Gorizia) gate. The lion arrived with the Venetians in 1508, when they occupied the city for thirteen months, after which Gorizia returned to Habsburg rule. The lion was then removed, and subsequently seems to have disappeared from history for some four centuries. Italian forces found him in the lapidary of the Provincial Museum when they occupied Gorizia in 1916 during the sixth Battle of Isonzo. Following the end of hostilities, Gorizia became part of Italy. Employing the lion as a symbol of the mixed national—Italian and Slovene—city’s Italian character (italianità), Italian officials placed it over the castle gate.

My Search for Venetian Lions in Istria

The maritime Republic of Venice or La Serenissima, dates from 697 CE. The height of its empire was about 1206 to 1450. An economic and military powerhouse, Venice expanded throughout northern Italy and assumed control over much of the northeastern Adriatic and Dalmatia by the fifteenth century. The Stato da Màr, the name given to Venice’s maritime and overseas possessions, included Istria, a region today divided between Croatia and Slovenia, on the northeastern Adriatic. By 1797, Venetian control of this region had receded, but Venice left its imprint in the built environment, in the small towns and cities that dot the region. Among the most ubiquitous traces of the Venice’s one-time span are the winged lions of St. Mark that can be found on public, and other, buildings.

Venetian lions are recognizable by their wings and the book on which one of their paws rests. Although the books in my lion pictures are open, not all of them are. There is an entire discourse about the meaning of the open and closed books, and other symbols of Saint Mark that can accompany these lions. If you’re interested, I suggest looking at https://medium.com/history-fragments/of-lions-and-books-and-swords-a0a5dc1f164.

For the most part, these winged lions are simply part of Istria’s rich historic heritage. They are most often interesting architectural details insofar as people notice them at all. It wasn’t always been that way during the twentieth century elsewhere in Croatia or in nearby Gorizia, Italy, about which more later. At the end of the Great war, many Italians and Croatians in the northern Adriatic region considered the Venetian lion as a symbol of the Italian character (italianità) in nationally mixed areas. The result was sometimes these stone creatures’ destruction as in Trogir, a small city on the Dalmatian coast, which had become part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia from 1929) after the First World War. In December 1932, Croatian nationalists damaged/destroyed removed some eight Venetian lions on public buildings there. They considered the lions, formerly Renaissance symbols of historical heritage, threatening representatives of italianità.

But, on to the Slovenian Riviera, that is, coastal Istria. Slovenia has some thirty miles of coastline along the Mediterranean. I first became interested in Venetian lions about a decade ago when I was in Koper/Capodistria, a former island-city just south of Trieste on the Italian-Slovenian border that became part of the Venetian Republic in 1278. Part of Italy until the end of the Second World War, it is the second-largest city in Istria. There are plenty of Venetian lions in Koper. The first one I noticed was on the Taverna wall near the harbor. When the Taverna was designed–it was a disused fifteenth-century salt warehouse–the bas relief of this Venetian Lion dating from 1412 was integrated into the building. Rumor has it that the lion was formerly on the Isola Gate (Porta Isolana). Like occasional other Venetian lions I have seen, this one has a bemused expression on its face.

I also became friendly with the large, fierce, and majestic sixteenth-century lion on the faded-rose colored wall of the Totto Palace on Kidričeva ulica that I passed every day as I walked up to the history faculty at the University of Primorska. His paw rests on an open book revealing the standard Italian-language text for any good Venetian lion: Pax tibi Marce evangelista mevs./Peace be with you, Mark my Evangelist. The Italian-language inscription below the lion dates from 1924.

But, the best place to seen Venetian Lions in Koper is on the front wall of the fifteenth-century Viennese-Gothic Praetorian Palace. On south side of Koper’s main square, Titov Trg/Tito Square, it now houses Koper town hall. There is literally a pride of Venetian lions of various sizes and shapes on the facade.

Some of the Venetian Lions on the exterior of the Praetorian Palace, Koper (2018)

What is the best way to observe these lions? I vote for sitting in the Loggia directly across the square, drinking a cup of coffee. Fact: Coffee is better south of the Alps. It simply is. It’s no surprise that among my first Slovene words were “bela kava” (white coffee). “Velika modra riba” (big blue fish) were the others, but that’s another story.

To the left of the Loggia in the image above is the Koper Cathedral (Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary^/Stolna cerkev Marijinega vnebovzetja). There is a Venetian Lion on one of the interior walls.

Among the many kind things my Slovene colleagues have done when I have been in Koper is cart me around the Slovenian Riviera so I could search out more Venetian lions. It is about ten miles from Koper southwest to Piran/Pirano, with Isola/Izola between. I got rather good at finding the expected ones (municipal buildings) and even the occasional unexpected one. There is a lion on the nineteenth-century municipal building in Izola, like Koper, formerly a walled island city.

Following their arrival in Piran, the Venetians placed lions on most of the city buildings they constructed. Some are still to be seen. When the thirteenth-century city hall was replaced in the late 1870s, the majestic Venetian lion from the original building was placed on the façade above the center second-floor window of the new city hall.

**Bird’s-Eye View of Piran with City Hall at the Center; Venetian Lion on the 1870s City Hall (both 2013)**

Among the Venetian lions of Piran is one on the wall of a building on Carnkarjevo nabrežje, the quay that runs along edge of the port. He’s a pacific-looking lion.

There are also Venetian lions in the formerly Italian hilltop towns, some of which have been abandoned altogether, of Croatian Istria. Lions can be found not only in Motuvun, one of largest and best-known of these towns. The very images below are from two of the smaller hilltop towns. I’ve never seen a front-facing Venetian lion, but it’s carved into the stone rather than a bas-relief. The lion on the right is at the bottom of a building, a detail I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Venetian Lions in Croatian Istria (2014)

I daydream about making an interactive map with the locations of Venetian lions throughout Istria. I suspect, however, that like so many of the best-laid plans of mice and (wo-)men, this will also go astray.

The Battle of Zborov, the Czechs, and Their Two-Tailed Lion

Following the First World War, the leaders of Czechoslovakia created new holidays, among them, one celebrating the Battle of Zborov (“Army Day”) on July 2. Together with October 28, the day the Czechoslovak Republic was declared in Prague, Zborov was the main commemorative site on Czechoslovakia’s national-patriotic calendar. Because it was only one of many great battles of the First World War, Zborov was long little mentioned in most Western-language studies of the war. This 1917 battle, however, occupied a central place in the national mythology that surrounded the foundation of the Czechoslovak state in October 1918.

One of my favorite aspects of the formation of the First Czechoslovak Republic is how its leaders managed to get the Entente countries to recognize the nascent state as an ally. This, although the majority of those from would become Czechoslovakia who were mobilized during the Great War fought in the Austro-Hungarian military. I’ve always considered it a major diplomatic tour de force. The Battle of Zborov is one reason why. So, what was the Battle of Zborov, and how was it important, you might ask. Let me explain. Almost from the beginning of the war, Czechs, and a few Slovaks, had deserted from the multinational Habsburg army. Many of them surrendered to their fellow Slavs, the Russians, on the Eastern Front. Some 40,000 of these POWs went on to form the Czechoslovak brigade in Russia. And, many fought at Zborov, which was part of the Russians’ last summer offensive along the Eastern Front in what was then eastern Galicia, today Ukraine. In the July 1917 offensive, the Czechoslovak brigade attacked the positions of the more numerous regiments of the Habsburg army. The brigade breached the Habsburg line taking numerous officers and enlisted men, most of whom were Czechs. It was the success of the Czechoslovak brigade that brought the Czechs and Slovaks to the attention of the Entente, strengthening the demands of their diplomats for an independent state. It was also the first time in three hundred years the Czechs had taken up arms against the Habsburg Monarchy and they had been victorious. The battle soon became legend. Emblematic of the Czech national revolution, it became part of the country’s heroic national military cult, one that included historic figures reinterpreted to fit the needs of the new state, among them, the late medieval church reformer Jan Hus and the one-eyed, later, blind, Hussite general, Jan Žižka.

While other countries ceremonially reburied disinterred bodies of unknown dead on November 11, the anniversary of the Armistice, this was not the case in Czechoslovakia. Rather, a body from a mass grave near Zborov was ritually reburied in the capital on July 1, 1922, in connection with the fifth anniversary of Zborov. Its location in the chapel of city hall on Old Town Square in Prague, long the site of gatherings to affirm the Czech nation, confirmed the body as that of an unknown Czech (-oslovak) soldier.

**On the Road from Prague to Vienna in Southern Moravia (2003)**

Honoring the wartime diplomatic deeds of politicians at home and abroad, especially President-Liberator Tomáš G. Masaryk, and the Legionnaires took a variety of forms after 1918. Czechoslovakia participated in the worldwide era of monument construction, mania, even, that followed the war. Monuments were unveiled across Czechoslovakia between the wars. They were often columns, obelisks and other simple forms, often providing only dates, 1914 – 1918, above a list of local war dead. Common variations on the inscription were dedications to those who fell in the war (padlým ve válce) or to the victims of the war (obětem války).

The old market town, Kácov, some sixty kilometers southeast of Prague, has two First World War monuments. One, in the Račiněves district, is a plaque attached to a mound of rough stones. The inscription reads “Victims of War.” Below are the names of fourteen local war dead. The first name is that of a Russian Legionnaire, the rest follow in alphabetical order. Their photographs are incorporated vertically on both sides of the plaque. Bas relief images of Masaryk, Hus, and Žižka surround the plaque on three sides. Photographs of war dead is not uncommon on Czech monuments: I noticed similar images on monument in the nearby village, Zdebuzeves.

A bas relief of two soldiers, one carrying a banner, the other carrying a wounded, or dead, comrade, dominates the main memorial, which stands in the center of town before the local church. Below them are the dates of the war, 1914-1918. To the left is a freestanding statue of a woman, mourning the war dead, whose names are listed on a plaque below her. A second plaque honors victims of the Second World War.

My personal favorite of Czech war memorials is in eastern Bohemia. It is the roaring, larger-than-life-sized two-tailed Bohemian lion standing victoriously on a double-headed Austrian eagle, dead as a doornail. Although there are other monuments of the lion stomping the double-headed eagle, this one appears particularly gleeful. Spoiler: I’ve sort of liked the Bohemian lion since I discovered him while doing research on the Badeni Language Ordinances. He regularly got into it with Deutscher Michel. You can find pictures of him doing battle with the sleepy German on political postcards of the era. In any case, back to the statue. The inscription on the column, which is topped by an eternal flame reads; “Because we laid down our lives, you have given us your love.” The names of the dead are on the column. Two other plaques commemorate the victims of Nazism and Red Army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945.

But, make no mistake about it. This is a different kind of a war memorial. The sentiment may be mourning the local war dead—they are listed on the column—but the mourning is secondary. The memorial really celebrating the defeat, the decimation even, of Austria-Hungary. This monument, and the others like it, reveal in stone, how difficult it was for the members of the country’s minorities, Germans, Hungarians, and Poles, many of whom fought loyally in the Habsburg military, to participate in Czechoslovakia’s national-patriotic holidays.

Addendum

So, I’d been going on about the lion above to my friend and collaborator, Dr. Dagmar Hájková, a Czech historian who lives in Prague, and she sent me another image of a roaring Bohemian lion, paws placed firmly on the corpse of the poor double-headed eagle. This one from Březiny, a really small village in central Bohemia, includes a bas relief of a weeping woman. The names of the war dead are listed below. I assume the bouquet of plastic flowers beribboned in the national colors dates from the October 28 holiday. There’s still another ferocious Bohemian lion triumphantly standing atop the corpse of a double-headed eagle in Vilémov, another really small village, this one about seven miles from Olomouc in central Moravia.

“The Doughboy he went over the top”

Like the three-quarter-size Statues-of-Liberty that the Boy Scouts unveiled in the 1950s, and many of the Joseph II statues unveiled across the Bohemian Lands and Lower Austria in the 1880s, sculptor Ernest Moore Viquesney’s First World War statues, “The Spirit of the American Doughboy,” that dot the American landscape are production-line products. The sculptor carefully replicated the gear each American soldier carried into the trenches in his slightly-larger-than-life-sized statues. Produced in Chicago, most of the statues are made of sheet bronze. Viquesney, quite the artist-entrepreneur, also produced lamps and statuettes.

I didn’t know anything about Visquesney or his work when, in September 2017, I encountered the doughboy statue that stands in a park before the city office building in Oakley, a small town (population 2098 in 2016) in Western Kansas. I just figured the war memorial was fairly random. I mean, how many people live in all of Logan County, Kansas? How many war dead could there have been? Eight names are listed on the statue’s base. What I particularly noticed about the statue was the grenade in the doughboy’s right hand. I’d only ever seen a First World War soldier-statue with a hand-grenade in Sciacca, Sicily. Also, that the dates on the monument were 1914 to 1920. Then I didn’t think too much more about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I dragged my husband out to look at autumn leaves in the Ozarks. When we drove through Sedalia, Missouri, I realized Sedalia was a county seat, which meant a courthouse, which meant monuments on the courthouse lawn. The Pettis County courthouse did not disappoint. I saw another First World War monument: the doughboy waving a rifle in one hand and holding high a hand grenade in the other. In addition to the names of the First World War dead on its base, the Sedalia statue contains the names of the Korean and Second World War dead. It was the grenade that made me realize this statue—like the one in Oakley—were part of a chain of almost 150 doughboy statues that were unveiled across the United States between the world wars. Many of them still stand in public places.

My interest in the statues owes, in part, to the fact that they are part of a worldwide program of First World War monuments that honor those who died in the hostilities, irrespective of rank. People who are interested in the doughboys in their various iterations can visit this website: https://doughboysearcher.weebly.com/e-m-viquesney-sculptor.html

Alvin Cullum York, American Hero of the First World War

I’d never heard of Alvin Cullum York until I visited Nashville, Tennessee. Fascinated as I am by First World War monuments, I headed straight for the larger-than-life-sized bronze figure with bayonet drawn on corner of the capitol lawn. York, a pacifist, was born in a log cabin some 125 miles east of Nashville, in central-ish Tennessee. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading an October 1918 attack on a German machine gun nest during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, part of the successful Entente effort to breach the Hindenburg line.

**Statue of Alvin C. York on the Grounds of the Tennessee Capitol Building (2019)**

York, then in his fifties, volunteered for the Second World War, is a character. He’s worth reading about. Or you can see him, played by Gary Cooper, in Howard Hawks’ 1941 film, “Sergeant York.” My brother-in-law, a major film buff, recommends it.

You’re Judged by the Company You Keep

The Tennessee state house is an imposing Greek Revival building, sitting as it does atop a hill in Nashville. Like other state capitols and courthouses across the country, its lawn is dotted with monuments.

**Side View of Tennessee State Capitol from the Sidewalk Below (2019)**

They include statues of two of Tennessee’s three presidents: a bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson (it is one of three identical statues; the other two are in New Orleans and Washington, DC) and a full-length statue of Andrew Johnson. Tennessee’s third president, James K. Polk, together with his wife, is buried on the lawn. Other monuments include a Holocaust memorial and a full-size statue of First World War hero Alvin C. York, lunging forward, bayonet drawn. More about him in another blog post.

**Equestrian Statue of Andrew Jackson, Unveiled in 1880 (2019)**

Although streets named for civil rights luminaries Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa L. Parks cross at one corner of the capitol property, there are still plenty of remnants of the Civil War here. They include a bronze statue of Sam Davis that was unveiled in 1909 on the southwest corner of the lawn. Union soldiers executed this “boy hero of the Confederacy,” as a spy in 1863. A bust of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader before the Civil War, and a Ku Klux Klan leader afterward, was unveiled in the capital building in 1978. There have been suggestions that both be removed and the boy hero has been the focus of recent protests.

What interests me the most, however, is the plaque commemorating the 75th anniversary of the founding in 1894 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Nashville. This particular plaque, which dates from 1969, is affixed to a retaining wall in the Capitol’s East Garden. The plaque, and others like it, receive less attention than do the statues, some of them funded by the UDC, dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of the Confederacy. Indeed, the dedication at the bottom of the plaque reads, “The story of the glory of the men who wore the gray.” I don’t think of this hereditary organization of white southern women is value-neutral and I’d be happy enough to see explanation of the role its genteel racist members played in founding/propagating the so-called “Confederate tradition” accompany such plaques.