Tabor (or) Hurrah, Go and Get Them!

Artist Marie Brozova's recollections of her public drawing event in the historic city of Tabor.

Tabor is the city of warriors. The moment you drive to the main Zizka Square and try to turn back to the gateway (no matter that you have a legal permission to do it), you are attacked by a granny threatening you with her cane. She reminds you loudly that you could have run over a little girl. Where is that little girl? Well, she is not here at all, but suppose what could have happened if she had been there?

If you manage to overcome the preliminary difficulties without the bloodshed, you have a great chance, that Tabor-proud people will be open with you, let you in their proud soul and share their deep wisdom and experience.

But to be sure, don’t go there unarmed.

My only weapon was a set of sharpened colored pencils and my aim was quite audacious – I decided to draw a portrait of the famous Tabor warrior, Jan Zizka, who fought against secularized Catholic Church in 15th century. And because I was born in the Prague quarter, Zizkov, just under the huge statue of this warrior, and because he was the biggest hero of my childhood, I could cope with this task successfully. And I had a large army of admirers by my side. They looked after everything that belonged to me, and warned other visitors not to harm a hair of my head.

We realized that it was possible to spread the faith with a sword in Tabor. We were visited by a young, self-appointed preacher; obviously from far away, his posture burdened by a mission. He slowly walked up to my easel surrounded by many enthusiastic visitors. And then he roared: I bless your doing! Zizka was feared by Satan himself! Jesus, Satan, cried appalled witnesses and started to run away from this wandering preacher.

It took only a little while and a few words of his impassioned speech, and we stayed all alone with him. Me and my husband were experienced enough to know that the easiest way to get rid of him, was by making no remarks. So we patiently listened to very long quotations from the Bible, and because we succeeded in holding our tongues, he parted after twenty minutes with the feeling of a successful mission and he blessed my work again, because he didn’t find a trace of Satan’s influence in my drawings.

And for completeness and for a woman from Jistebnice, near Tabor, who asked me to correct the resulting Zizka portrait, I am going to explain once more Zizka’s lost-eye mystery. I pictured Zizka with his left eye covered, unlike his statue in the square, where he stands with his right eye covered. I worked according to the skull found in Caslav, which is said to belong to Zizka. The internationally known expert Dr. Emanuel Vlcek examined it and determined, that Zizka lost his left eye in early childhood, and the right eye as an adult. This theory is backed up by the earliest portraits of Zizka, one of them is well known from the famous blue twenty-crown banknote from the communist era. Zizka with his right eye covered was pictured in later portraits. To those who are interested in this mystery, I recommend the second volume of Wanderings in Czech History by Petr Hora Horejs.

But in spite of huge history of the Hussite movement that you encounter on every step in Tabor, you mustn’t take it too seriously, and that’s why I committed several jokes in the drawing, especially in the pendulous treetop of the hundred year-old oak, where you find whole army of acorns armed to the teeth – Hussite warriors – or you can see an apostate acorn walking alone in the grass. Zizka is smiling into his sleeve, because I imagine him as a brilliant strategist who hadn’t lost a battle. He must have been a humorous man.

The drawing Zizka’s Oak is one of my favorite, (it is hanging in our living room), even though it was created during the unsettled times. Especially the last few days of my public drawing, when it became a part of the famous Middle Ages Festival and Zizka Square changed into a great tumult of several thousand people.

Sometimes I had to protect my drawing with my own body against everyone (all those cunning rascals with cotton candy, or worse, with a glass of beer). But at the same time The Defense of Colored Pencils was visited by the record number of people thus far.