Legend · České Budějovice
The black dog
Between the Cathedral of St Nicholas and the deanery in České Budějovice there used to be a cemetery, and the shortest way from Kněžská street to the square led across it. One night a widow ran that way for medicine for her dying daughter. At the chapel a great black dog barred her path and laid its paws on her shoulders.
One night the daughter of a poor widow from Kněžská street fell gravely ill. The summoned doctor prescribed a medicine that had to be fetched at once from the pharmacy. The widow had no one to send and had to go herself.
She hurried the shortest way to the square across the old cemetery by St Nicholas’s church, between today’s cathedral and the deanery. At the chapel a great black dog barred her path. She stepped aside to go round it. At that the dog reared and leapt with its forepaws onto her shoulders. The woman tried to draw back, but it held her fast. She could not take a step. She struggled to free herself, to loosen its grip — and could not.
Only when she spoke a prayer, the legend says, did the dog drop away and vanish among the graves. She ran on for the medicine. Her daughter lived. From that night the widow never again crossed the cemetery after dark — and told everyone why.
How it really was
The cemetery by St Nicholas’s church in České Budějovice existed from the Middle Ages until 1784; the black-dog legend belongs to the Budějovice trio of night hauntings with the headless rider and the hearse.
That cemetery was there. The cemetery by St Nicholas’s church existed from the Middle Ages until 1784. On the side toward today’s Hroznová street it was closed by the deanery and a boundary wall into which the Black Tower was later built. The open ground you cross in twenty seconds today was a burial ground.
The chapel is attested too. The black dog belongs with the hearse and headless rider among stories that kept people off night paths across sacred ground.
Where to follow the legend
The open ground between St Nicholas Cathedral and the deanery, České Budějovice. Kněžská street, from which the widow set out, leads straight to it.
Where we know it from
- Encyklopedie Českých Budějovic, hesla hřbitovy, kaple svatého Jakuba, pověsti
- KOVÁŘ, Daniel; THOMOVÁ, Zuzana. Výsledky záchranného archeologického výzkumu hřbitova a kostela sv. Mikuláše v Českých Budějovicích. Archaeologia historica 42/2, 2017, s. 617–649
- Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch, heslo Friedhof / freithof
- AMBROŽ, Václav. Ze starých Českých Budějovic. České Budějovice: Stráž lidu, 1921
Version without embellishment
Obvykle se vypráví jako historka o strašidelném psovi. Tady jde o ženu, které doma umírá dcera a která neví, kolik času jí zbývá.
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