During the reign of Emperor Rudolph II, the Lion’s Court came alive with the roars of exotic beasts intended to demonstrate the monarch’s power and passion for the mysterious. However, the lions were tended by a keeper whose heart was not as pure as his intentions. He secretly sold the meat intended for the beasts to Prague citizens, leaving the poor animals often suffering from hunger. Punishment for this greed was not long in coming. When an exhausted foreign quack arrived in Prague and took his last breath near the Lion’s Court, the keeper decided to dispose of the body in the most cruel way—he threw it into the lions’ cage.

However, since the quack was not buried in sacred ground, his soul found no peace. It is said that to this day, in the spaces of the Lion’s Court, the spectral figure of an exhausted man in a traveling cloak appears at the hour when the beasts were fed. He silently wanders about, reminding everyone that the sin of dishonesty and disrespect for the dead cannot be buried even in the stomachs of wild animals. The legendary relationship between the lion and the emperor was then completed on the day of Rudolph’s death, when even his favorite lion breathed its last, as if linked to its master’s fate by an invisible bond of magic.