Why do people touch the statue of St John of Nepomuk on the Charles Bridge?

What do people touch: the statue or the cross?

Both, and it's worth telling them apart. The statue is the oldest on the bridge: it was finished in 1683, before any of the other figures that crowd it today. You'll recognise it by the halo of five stars above the saint's head. On its pedestal are some bronze plaques that a great many hands have touched. Why people touch those plaques, none of the sources we've read explains.

The custom that is on record belongs to the cross. You'll find it in the stone of the parapet, close to the statue. It's an archbishop's cross, the kind with two crossbars, made of brass and with five stars. Tradition has it that it marks the spot from which the saint was thrown into the water.

Why do people touch the cross?

The recipe is short: hand on the cross, one finger on each star, and a wish. Czech public radio describes it with a careful "it's said". How long has it been going on? Nobody knows. We haven't been able to trace its earliest mention: it's a travellers' custom, the kind that grows up on its own. What you wish for is up to you; the cross offers no written guarantee.

The interesting part isn't the wish, though. It's the cross. To understand why it marks that spot, you need to meet the man on the statue, and the two ways of telling how he died.

Who was St John of Nepomuk?

John of Pomuk, Jan Nepomucký in Czech, was vicar general to the Archbishop of Prague at the end of the fourteenth century: his right-hand man. He died in March 1393, thrown into the Vltava from the bridge. Everyone agrees on that much. Why it happened is another matter.

The legend: the queen's confessor

Tradition has it that John heard the queen's confession. King Wenceslas IV, a jealous man, demanded that John reveal his wife's confessions. John kept silent, and the king, in a rage, had him thrown into the river. That's why he's venerated as the patron saint of the seal of confession, and he's also called on against floods and as the patron of a good name.

When did the legend begin?

About fifty years after his death. The first written account comes from an Austrian chronicler, Thomas Ebendorfer, sometime between 1445 and 1451. He writes that Wenceslas ordered the drowning of the man who heard the queen's confessions, and he gives two reasons: that the confessor had said only a king who rules well deserves the title and, with some caution, that "it's said" he refused to reveal what he'd heard. A Czech scholar believes Ebendorfer didn't make it up, but wrote down what people in Prague were already saying.

The chronicles closest to John's death don't even mention the queen. All they say is that "Doctor Johánek", the archbishop's vicar, was thrown from the bridge and drowned in 1393, and they record a great drought that same year "in memory of that doctor". One Latin chronicle adds that the river fell so low you could cross it at Podskalí without getting your feet wet, that the water turned green, and that people had to cook with water from their wells.

In 1541 the chronicler Václav Hájek went one step further: he turned John into two people. One, the confessor, drowned in 1383 for keeping the secret. The other, the vicar, drowned in 1393 over a question of power. When the Church canonised him in 1729, the papal bull accepted 1383 and the seal of confession.

Why was he really killed?

Because of a power struggle between the king and the archbishop. On 10 March 1393, acting as vicar general, John confirmed the new abbot of the monastery at Kladruby, against the king's plans. On Thursday 20 March the king and the archbishop met in the morning beside the bridge tower on the Malá Strana side to seal an agreement. The meeting ended with the king beside himself with fury.

The archbishop got away. John didn't. He was arrested, interrogated and tortured, with the king looking on. At around nine that night he was thrown into the river from the bridge. One historian believes he was already dead by then; no one can say for certain. A note in the margin of the vicars' records sums it up: his last day came to an end on the 20th. The river gave up his body about a month later, and his remains ended up in St Vitus Cathedral.

So the saint of the secret actually died for doing his job, caught in the middle of a quarrel between powerful men.

And the five stars?

They come from the same chronicler who invented the two Johns. According to Hájek, lights were seen above the body in the water. Over time, those lights became stars around the saint's head. No image of him with stars is known from before 1641.

The statue on the bridge arrived in 1683. Do the sum: exactly three hundred years after 1383, Hájek's wrong date. Coincidence or anniversary? Careful, though: that sum is ours, and no document from 1683 that we've seen says the year was chosen for that reason. But the coincidence is there.

The tongue that wasn't a tongue

There's one last twist. When his tomb was opened in 1719, something was found that people took to be his tongue, uncorrupted, and it was accepted as one of the miracles for his canonisation. In 1973 a team of scientists examined it and concluded that it was brain tissue. By then the saint of the secret had been on the altars for almost two and a half centuries.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: John of Pomuk, the archbishop's vicar general, died on 20 March 1393, thrown into the river from the bridge after a power struggle between the king and the archbishop. The statue dates from 1683 and is the oldest on the bridge. The brass cross in the parapet is real.
• Legend: that he died for keeping the queen's confession secret (told since the mid-fifteenth century); the two Johns (1541); the "uncorrupted tongue", which was brain tissue.
• Custom of unknown date: touching the cross with one finger on each star to make a wish. That the cross marks the exact spot of his fall is tradition.
• Our own sum, with no document: that the statue marked three hundred years since a wrong date.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "Prague Legends: from the Old Town to the Charles Bridge", eleven stops that ask when each legend began. In front of the statue, the stop "The saint with the wrong date" tells the legend and how it was born. From the same spot, "Five stars and a tongue" brings your eyes down to the cross, the stars and the tongue. And the last stop, "The twentieth of March", takes you to the far end of the bridge, where it all began.

Prague's free route, "The Old Town: from the Powder Tower to the Astronomical Clock", takes you through the Old Town in ten stops, ending at the astronomical clock. And if you're planning your trip, our Prague guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Marie Jandásková, Svatý Jan Nepomucký: Legenda a antilegenda v české literatuře, bachelor's thesis, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, 2013 (in Czech): https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/54434/130091394.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
• Radio Praha (archive), "Karlův most – Galerie pod širým nebem (sochy)" (in Czech): https://archiv.radio.cz/cz/static/karluv-most/sochy
• Christnet.eu (with ČTK), "Objev jazyka Nepomuckého byl před 300 lety považován za zázrak" (in Czech): https://www.christnet.eu/zpravy/29625/objev_jazyka_nepomuckeho_byl_pred_300_lety_povazovan_za_zazrak.url