Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the streets of Prague were still bathed in the darkness of oil lamps and the echoes of horses’ hooves resounded on the cobblestones, something happened in Prague’s Old Town that forever marked the soul of this royal city. The year was sixteen twenty-one, and a heavy cloud of defeat, despair, and revenge hung over the Czech land. After the unfortunate Battle of White Mountain, where the fate of the Czech Estates’ Uprising was sealed, the cruel imperial hand reigned in Prague, ready to punish with relentless severity those who dared to raise their voice against Habsburg power.

Many of those who stood for the freedom of the land were captured and imprisoned. Some spent long weeks in the cold cells of the White Tower at Prague Castle, contemplating their fate. The judicial tribunal convened in the Carolinum, and its chairman was none other than Prince Karl I of Liechtenstein, whose name became a symbol of harshness and uncompromising resolve. Sentences fell like heavy stones – imprisonment, confiscation of property, and for the highest-ranking, the bravest, the death sentence. Twenty-seven men, the flower of the Czech Estates, were condemned to the supreme penalty. Three lords, seven knights, and seventeen burghers.

The night before the execution, the longest and darkest of all nights, the condemned spent in the chambers of the Old Town Hall. In the silence, broken only by the whisper of prayers and the distant sound of guards, each of them came to terms with their inevitable end. Some prayed, others wrote last letters to their loved ones, still others just stared silently into space, their faces etched with weariness and hopelessness. They knew that in the morning, a journey to the execution site awaited them, which had been under construction since early morning in the Old Town Square.

And then came that terrible day, the twenty-first of June in the year sixteen twenty-one. The morning spread over Prague with a strange, unhealthy clarity. The sun shone, but its rays seemed cold and cruel. The Old Town Square was filled with crowds of people. They stood silently, their eyes fixed on the wooden scaffold with the gallows and the executioner’s block, which towered in the center. The air was heavy, permeated with fear, sorrow, but also curiosity. Few dared to speak aloud; everyone felt the weight of the moment.

From the Town Hall, where they had spent their last hours, the condemned were led out one by one. At the head of the procession stood Jáchym Ondřej Šlik, followed by Václav Budovec z Budova, Kryštof Harant z Polžic a Bezdružic, Kašpar Kaplíř ze Sulevic, and Doctor Jan Jessenius, the university rector, whose learned mind was to be silenced. Their steps were firm, though their faces were pale. Among them also appeared those who were condemned to be hanged, and for whom a provisional gallows had been prepared from the windows of the Town Hall. The executioner, who was to carry out this bloody verdict, was the feared Jan Mydlář, whose name was then whispered in Prague with both respect and horror.

The execution proceeded for long hours, in a dreadful silence broken only by the blows of the axe and muffled sobs. Head after head fell under Mydlář’s sharp blade. Blood soaked into the cobblestones of the Old Town Square, staining it forever. And as if that were not enough, fate also demanded posthumous revenge. Martin Fruwein z Podolí, one of the leaders of the uprising, escaped execution by suicide, but his dead body was nevertheless beheaded and his head displayed in the Horse Market, today’s Wenceslas Square, as a warning to all.

When the deed was done, the square was deserted, left in a pool of blood and bitterness. But the horror did not end there. Twelve heads, those of the most prominent victims, were impaled on iron spikes and displayed on the Old Town Bridge Tower. For ten long years, they looked down from above upon the flowing Vltava and the city they loved and for which they laid down their lives. They were silent witnesses to suffering and humiliation, until in 1631, after the Saxon invasion of Prague, a preacher of the Lutheran congregation secretly buried them. It is said that their remains found peace in the Church of St. Salvator. The wood from the execution site reportedly ended up in the Monastery of the Merciful Brothers, where it was used to heat the Na Františku hospital, as if even in the most terrible instrument of death something useful could be found. In the Old Town Square, twenty-seven crosses, etched into the paving, still commemorate this tragic event, a silent memorial to the brave men.

However, legend has it that the souls of these twenty-seven men did not find peace. Every year, as the twenty-first of June approaches again, and the sun begins to set, the shadows of the past come alive. Precisely on the anniversary of the execution, all twenty-seven executed men return to the Old Town Square. They emerge from the dark corners of old houses, translucent and silent, and gather at the spot where the execution site once stood, where their lives ended.

Like a procession of ghosts, they then slowly and solemnly proceed to the southern facade of the Old Town Hall. There, beneath the majestic tower, where the old Prague astronomical clock measures time, they stop. Silently, with their eyes fixed on the astronomical dial, they observe its movement. Every turn of a wheel, every movement of the figures, every chime of a bell is a message to them from the living world.

If the astronomical clock runs correctly and precisely, without the slightest deviation, it is a sign for them that the Czech nation is doing well, that it is walking the path of prosperity and freedom. Then their translucent figures disperse peacefully, with quiet hope in their eyes, and return to their eternal rest, to return again in a year. But woe, if the slightest malfunction, delay, or even, God forbid, a complete stop appears in the clock’s operation! Then the faces of the ghosts contort with pain and disappointment. It is a bad omen for the nation, a harbinger of troubles, hardships, and unfreedom. And then their departure is accompanied by a silent but deep lament, a warning heard only by sensitive souls, which hovers over Prague like an invisible shadow. And so, to this day, these dead heroes guard the fate of the land for which they laid down their lives, and their silent vigil at the astronomical clock is an eternal reminder that freedom and justice are never free.