Easter Monday or, The Day They Beat Jana

Another Easter has come and gone, and like every year I have to remember the day I learned about the odd tradition that is the favourite of many Czechs – male and female alike. I’ll always remember it as “the day they beat Jana”.

As happens most anywhere, when I first came to Prague I found a whole new set of customs that I’d had no inkling of, and Czech Easter Monday was introduced to me by shock method a month after I arrived in 1998. I was teaching English at the time, and I asked my beginner-level class how they had spent their long weekend. Jana answered first, in laconic, dictionary English:

“It was normal. Some men they come to my house, they beat me with stick, I give them alcohol they go away.”

There was an awkward silence as the class looked at me coolly and I went into crisis management mode.

“Why did they do that to you, Jana?” I asked. “It’s normal,” she repeated, to which another poker-faced girl added “Yes this is normal in Czech Republic.”

Through ten minutes of horrified investigation I eventually discovered that all of the girls in the class had been, “beaten with sticks”– “special sticks”, no less – and they were glad for it moreover, for had this not occurred they would – according to the dictionary – have wilted.

The reality of the custom is of course far less dastardly when presented in clear English. For the uninitiated then, this is the deciphered Easter Monday ritual: Males are expected to rise early (or at least remain awake from the night before), take up their “pomlázka” – that is, the dread “stick” of plaited fresh willow twigs – and go from door to door, visiting light swishes upon the legs of women and girls while chanting a rhyme. In exchange for their good deed, they must receive a “thank you” from the girl, a painted egg, and have a ribbon tied on to the tips of their whips. Many a variation can be found around the country, most of them involving buckets of water, but this is the gist of it. The revelry traditionally ends at noon, and spring has begun.

In keeping with the modern tradition of bastardising tradition, the eggs nowadays have been largely replaced by one or more shots of plum brandy and in rare and brazen cases the whip may be exchanged for a wooden cooking spoon. But in any case, all the vital elements of what is very much a pagan celebration of the vernal equinox remain in a rite of seasonal passage that has been diluted by little more than brandy in a thousand years. The whip is of course is none other than a phallic implement of fertilisation and springtide renewal intended to transfer the freshness of its twigs upon its beneficiaries, while the eggs of course are symbols of vitality, fertility, and birth.

And so my initial horror has long since been replaced by enchanted appreciation for this ancient commemoration of femininity, regeneration, springtime courtship, and plumb brandy. And what became of Jana? Obviously the “beatings” persisted, and bore fruit, as I found her just a few years later, full of freshness in a tram, with a bumbling wee boy in tow.