Funerary Practices in the Czech Republic

Olga Nešporová

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789731118
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Death in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers the first comprehensive study of Czech funerary practices to be published in English. It provides an in-depth account of the historical development of funeral traditions and customs in the Czech Lands from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.
Czech funerary practice is today characterised by a very high cremation rate, the predominance of secular funerals and the increasing popularity of cremation with no funeral ceremony. Combining investigation of both long-term developments and recent changes, this book places these contemporary practices in their wider historical context, highlighting the complicated religious, political and cultural factors that have influenced funeral traditions over time. Nešporová draws attention to the extent to which the turbulent political background of the 20th century shaped funerary culture, focusing particularly on the cremation movement and the increase in popularity of civil funerals during the Communist era. The book explores the contemporary legal framework of Czech funerary practices, the typical funeral, burial sites and commemorative practices and recent developments in Czech funerary practice.
The book will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience, including those working in the fields of cultural anthropology, history, sociology and architecture.

1

Introduction

The Czech Republic, a land-locked state in Central Europe, formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 when the new state of Czechoslovakia was established. The present-day Czech Republic made up the western and most developed part of the new country, the extensive German minority of which was expelled after the Second World War. The eastern part of the state consisted of today's Slovakia which, prior to the Second World War, also included Carpathian Ruthenia (which today forms part of Ukraine). In the second part of the twentieth century (1948–1989) Czechoslovakia formed part of the Eastern Bloc with a Communist government and a command economy. The Czech Republic in its present form came into existence in 1993 following the peaceful separation of Slovakia from Czechoslovakia as the result of a political decision agreed by parliament.

Due to its history and geographical location, the Czech Republic is one of the most advanced and economically stable states of the former Communist Bloc. It has been a member of the European Union since 2004. Nevertheless, the Communist regime exerted a huge influence on the funeral culture, the legacy of which remains strong. The Czech Republic is made up of three main regions, Bohemia in the west, Moravia in the east and Czech Silesia in the north-east. The inhabitants of all three parts of the country use the Czech language. The total population is just over 10 million inhabitants, more than one million of whom live in the capital city, Prague (Praha). A further one million inhabitants live in the next five largest cities, each with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Two fifths (39%) of the population live in towns with more than 5,000 and less than 100,000 inhabitants and the same proportion live in towns and villages with less than 5,000 inhabitants. ¹ With the exception of Prague, there are no major sociocultural differences between the urban and rural populations. The last three decades have seen the significant growth of suburban settlements surrounding the country's largest cities, while more remote areas are witnessing depopulation due to a lack of employment opportunities.

The Czech economy has been dependent on foreign financial capital, innovation and technology for the past 30 years or so following the post-communist transformation from a centrally planned state economy to a market economy in the early 1990s. From the outset, the labour market strategy was based on a low-wage, low-unemployment trade-off designed to maintain relatively full employment in the economy. Unemployment reached a maximum of 9% of the labour force in 2000 and increased once more during the economic recession of 2010–2013, to around 7% of the labour force. ² Following the end of the recession, the economy has enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and the Czech Republic had the lowest unemployment rate of any OECD country at 2% of the labour force in Q2 2019. ³ However, despite the favourable macroeconomic conditions and constant wage growth, wage levels continue to be well below those of Western European countries. The welfare system is based on the compulsory payment of social and health insurance contributions and is considered to be relatively generous. The Czech Republic has one of the lowest levels of poverty in the OECD. ⁴

The Czech Republic is a multi-party democracy led by the President, Prime Minister and Parliament. As of 2020, a total of nine parliamentary political parties were represented in the Parliament, which consists of two chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The Czech Republic is divided into 14 self-governing regions which are further divided into around 6,200 partly self-governing municipalities. Both municipalities and regions are administrated by democratically elected councils.

Events during and after the Second World War and the closure of the country's borders during the Communist era led to the formation of a homogeneous Czech population with a very low proportion of foreign minorities. Czechs (including Moravians and Silesians) form around 97% of the population according to the last census of 2011; the rest of the population is made up of Slovaks (2%) and other minorities, the largest of which consist of Ukrainians, Poles, Vietnamese, Germans and Russians. ⁵

The Czech Republic is one of the most secularised countries in the world. Only one-fifth of the population declared any type of religious faith in the census of 2011, while slightly more than one-third stated that they were atheists. Just under half the population – 45% – declined to answer the question on religion. ⁶ The degree of secularity of the Czech nation, which was high as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century, was encouraged under Communist Party rule in the second half of the century. The Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest church in the country, currently has around 1.1 million members while the second and third largest churches (both Protestant), the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, had 52,000 and 39,000 believers respectively according to the 2011 census. ⁷ The eastern part of the Czech Republic (Moravia and Silesia) has a higher proportion of Christians than Bohemia and is also more traditional with respect to funerary practices. The number of Jews is a mere 4,000 or so, while other non-Christian denominations have memberships of several hundred at most. Many Czechs feel an aversion to organised churches, and belief without belonging to a church is common.

1ČSÚ (2016). Počet obyvatel v obcích ČR – k 1. 1. 2016 [Population of municipalities – 1 January 2016]. Praha: Czech Statistical Office https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/pocet-obyvatel-v-obcich, acc. 4 Oct 2019.

2ČSÚ (2019). Základní charakteristiky ekonomického postavení obyvatelstva ve věku 15 a více let [Basic characteristics of activity status of population aged 15 or more]. Praha: Czech Statistical Office. https://vdb.czso.cz/vdbvo2/faces/cs/index.jsf?page=vystup-objekt&pvo=ZAM01-B&skupId=426&katalog=30853&pvo=ZAM01-B&str=v467&u=v413__VUZEMI__97__19, acc. 22 Sep 2019.

3OECD (2019). Unemployment rate (indicator). doi: 10.1787/997c8750-en, acc. 22 Sep 2019.

4OECD (2019). Poverty rate (indicator). doi: 10.1787/0fe1315d-en, acc. 22 Sep 2019.

5ČSÚ (2014). Sčítání lidu, domů a bytů 2011 [Population and housing Census 2011]. Praha: Czech Statistical Office. https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/scitani-lidu-domu-a-bytu-2011, acc. 4 Oct 2019.

6ČSÚ (2014). Sčítání lidu, domů a bytů 2011.

7ČSÚ (2014). Sčítání lidu, domů a bytů 2011.

2

History

2.1 The Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed the introduction of new regulations governing the disposal of the body that were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment movement through its emphasis on both rationality and the importance of hygiene. Reforms were put in place by Queen Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. The implementation of many of their regulations and decrees into practice was slow, often taking a number of decades. Some even had to be abolished due to strong popular opposition. ¹

A distinct line was drawn between the living and the dead during the nineteenth century with the emergence of a new ‘medicalised’ approach to death aimed at banishing the dead from the world of the living to specially created places for the deceased. At the same time, secularising tendencies were emerging in society which acted to both weaken the Christian emphasis on the salvation of the soul and strengthen the significance of the body. Despite enlightened attempts to encourage the population to see the body principally as ‘dangerously unclean’ and to introduce practical measures that respected this approach, evidence suggests that the beginning of the nineteenth century was a period in which the majority of the ordinary population began for the first time to see the body itself as important. The level of sensitivity concerning the remains of important persons as well as close relatives and loved ones increased significantly. It was the century that saw the flourishing both of a new funerary culture and a view of cemeteries as the focus of an emerging cult of death. The popular funerary culture began to follow a totally different path to that imposed upon society by the Enlightenment movement with its overriding emphasis on hygiene. ²

Dying itself became more secularised as documented by a study of last wills written at the end of the nineteenth century which reveals that they had ceased to take the form of acts of reconciliation with God and had assumed a purely legal character. The rites that traditionally accompanied dying such as the farewell gathering and the last blessing were largely abandoned and children were excluded from the dying process for the first time. The location of death also became less important and dying in hospital was no longer considered to be degrading. ³

The social dimension of death was declining together with the establishment of a new funeral industry which replaced traditional funeral guilds and religious funeral fraternities (see Section 2.1.3). ⁴ Only the Jewish community maintained its funeral fraternities (Chevra kadiša) up to the twentieth century. ⁵

2.1.1 Demography and Epidemiology

From the epidemiological point of view, the nineteenth century has been characterised as the Age of Receding Pandemics, during which life expectancy at birth increased steadily from around 30 to almost 50 years. ⁶ A significant fall in the incidence of epidemics and the elimination of certain diseases was accompanied by a substantial decrease in infant mortality in the final decade of nineteenth century in the Czech Lands. Life expectancy at birth of 33 years for men and 36 years for women in 1875 had increased to 39 and 44 respectively by 1900 and exceeded the important threshold of 50 years in 1920s (see Table 2.1). Despite the improvements, however, the Czech Lands significantly lagged behind the industrialised societies of Western Europe with regard to infant mortality, which remained high for most of the nineteenth century at between 250 and 280 per 1,000 live births for infants under one year. ⁷ Moreover, in spite of an improvement at the end of the century, in 1900 the mortality rate per 1,000 live births stood at 225 for infants under one year in the Czech Lands compared to 154 in England and Wales. ⁸ The incidence of infant mortality was higher in the expanding cities, especially Prague, than in the countryside. ⁹

Table 2.1. Average Life Expectancy at Birth by Gender From 1875 to 1980.

	1875	1900	1910	1920	1930	1950	1960	1970	1980
Men	33	39	43	47	54	62	68	66	67
Women	36	44	46	50	58	67	73	73	74

Note: The data concerns only the population of today's Czech Republic. While it is known that the mortality rate in Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia was much higher, very few statistics are available from these areas.

Sources: Pavlík, Rychtaříková, and Šubrtová (1986), 188; ČSÚ (2018).

Czech historian Eduard Maur argues that the high infant mortality rate exerted a signific...