Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Designed in the 1920s as a memorial to Žižka, and to the soldiers who had fought
for Czechoslovak independence in WWI, the National Monument was still under con-
struction in 1939 when the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany made the
'Monument to National Liberation', as it was then called, seem like a sick joke.
After 1948 the Communist Party appropriated the story of Jan Žižka and the Hus-
sites for propaganda purposes, extolling them as shining examples of Czech peasant
power. The communists completed the National Monument with the installation of the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
and Bohumil Kafka's gargantuan bronze statue of
Žižka. But they didn't stop there.
In 1953 the monument's mausoleum - originally intended to hold the remains of
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's founding father - received the embalmed
body of the recently deceased Klement Gottwald, displayed to the public in a refriger-
ated glass chamber, just like his more illustrious comrade Lenin in Moscow's Red
Square.
After 1989, the remains of Gottwald and other communist dignitaries were re-
moved, and the building lay closed for 20 years. However, after a two-year renovation
project it reopened to the public in 2009 as a museum of Czechoslovak history from
1918 to 1992.
Museum
The monument's central hall - once home to a dozen marble sarcophagi bearing the
remains of communist luminaries - houses a moving
war memorial
with sculptures
by Jan Sturša. There are exhibits recording the founding of the Czechoslovak Repub-
lic in 1918, WWII, the 1948 coup, the Soviet invasion of 1968 - poignant newsreel
footage and a handful of personal possessions record the tragic story of Jan Palach,
who set himself alight to protest the Soviet invasion - and the Velvet Revolution of
1989. Steps lead down to the columbarium, where the ashes of prominent Czechs
were once stored.
But the most grimly fascinating part of the museum is the Frankenstein-like
labor-
atory
beneath the Liberation Hall, where scientists once battled to prevent Klement
Gottwald's corpse from decomposing. On display in a glass-walled sarcophagus by
day, his body was lowered into this white-tiled crypt every night for another frantic
round of maintenance and repair. In the corner is the refrigerated chamber where Got-
twald spent his nights (now occupied by the shattered remains of his sarcophagus),
and in the adjoining room is a phalanx of 1950s control panels, switches and instru-
ments that once monitored the great leader's temperature and humidity.
