{"id":84821,"date":"2015-04-15T12:43:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T16:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84821"},"modified":"2015-04-15T12:54:51","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T16:54:51","slug":"farewell-to-meat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/15\/farewell-to-meat\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell to Meat"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Masopust, the Czech festival for spring.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"IMG_0805\"<\/a>

Photo: Carleen Coulter<\/p><\/div>\n

In February, I took the night bus to Prague for Masopust, the old spring festival\u2014abandoned under Communism\u2014that has made a steady resurgence in the Czech Republic in recent years. The bus pulled into a neighborhood adjacent to the Vltava, north of Old Town, late on a Thursday evening. According to centuries-old tradition, Czech farmers would have slaughtered pigs earlier in the day to make blood sausages, headcheese, and other treyf<\/em> dishes for the coming feasts. At the bus station, though, there was only a Burger King, a McDonald\u2019s, and, beyond them, the famous Prague spires. Pill-shaped tramcars rumbled along the quiet streets, their interiors as bright as roadside diners.<\/p>\n

Saturday morning, I boarded a local bus bound for \u00dan\u011btice, a village about five miles outside the city. With its muddy streets and modest Brueghelian cottages clustered alongside a wide, frozen lake, \u00dan\u011btice presents a fairy tale, or at least preindustrial, vision of Central Bohemia. It was bright and cold, the streets still empty save a few Lycra-clad joggers puffing out steam\u2014Brueghel\u2019s rotund peasants, slimmed down for the new millennium. Cracked and faded village walls suggested an attentively maintained desuetude, and the local tavern was selling strong black beer brewed locally for the occasion. Inside the tavern, I found the tables full of locals eating little open-faced sandwiches called chleb\u00ed\u010dky<\/em> and waiting for the festival to start. <\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican?\u201d A sturdy man appraised me, frowning, while a shot of green spirits quivered between his thumb and forefinger. The locals were more accustomed to Brits and Australians coming from Prague, where ESL instruction is a popular vocation among expats. The arrival of an American was apparently disturbing; we augured a new species of tourist. He was comforted, or pretended to be, when I explained that I lived in Berlin, but we both glanced down at the orange notebook I was holding, as though it contained some prophecy or verdict meant for him.<\/p>\n

Like Mardi Gras and Carnival, Masopust is an old pagan holiday transformed by centuries of Christian theology. In addition to its bawdy fertility rituals and attempts to drive out winter with hot blasts of licentiousness, Masopust marks the multiday buildup from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. The name translates literally to \u201cMeat Fast\u201d or \u201cFarewell to Meat,\u201d an etymology it shares with Carnival. (Carne <\/em>and vale<\/em> are translations, respectively, of maso <\/em>and pust<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

In earlier decades, the holiday had been one of the casualties of the country\u2019s rapid modernization and reform under Soviet rule. In the seventies and eighties, after the Prague Spring, party officials pursued a policy of militant atheism alongside the purges and censorship known as \u201cnormalization.\u201d Any celebrations that took place were conducted quietly, mostly in small villages in the south, or in Moravia, the country\u2019s eastern region, where the festival is sometimes called Fa\u0161ank.<\/p>\n

In the years since the Velvet Revolution, though, Czechs in Moravia and Bohemia alike have resurrected Masopust, not as a religious ceremony\u2014the Czech Republic remains one of the least religious countries in the world\u2014but as a holiday hearkening back to the jubilant mood of its pre-Christian origins.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0691\"<\/a>

Photo: Carleen Coulter<\/p><\/div>

\"IMG_0759\"<\/a>

Photo: Carleen Coulter<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

I tracked down Vladim\u00edr Vytiska, \u00dan\u011btice\u2019s mayor of twenty-three years, who, that morning, was corralling citizens outside the tavern in a sibylline white mask and robe. Here was a stout man more in the Brueghel vein\u2014if Brueghel had been Czech. What did the festival mean to him?<\/p>\n

Vytiska didn\u2019t quite know how to answer that, and anyway he was busy. But later he wrote me: \u201cThe sense of the festival was always to give hope to people in the middle of the winter, to remove for one day the social differences between people, and to allegorize human deficiency.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe Communists didn\u2019t like it, of course,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Lately, foreigners have started to infiltrate Masopust\u2019s orgies of feasting, drinking, and dancing. Nightclubs in Prague\u2019s hipper neighborhoods host masquerade balls that range from the elegant to the debauched, even as the city\u2019s English-language newspaper continues to compare the event to \u201ca cross between Halloween and a cold-weather picnic.\u201d Vytiska was ambivalent about \u00dan\u011btice\u2019s own minor but growing popularity among tourists. \u201cOn the one hand, it\u2019s interesting to be famous, and our entrepreneurs have profited from it. But on the other hand, it looks now like some tourist product\u2014and it\u2019s opposed to the original sense of Masopust, as a village festival.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0728\"<\/a>

Photo: Carleen Coulter<\/p><\/div>\n

By noon, a congregation of revelers had amassed outside the tavern, looking very much a village festival. Among them were a cross-dressing bride and a zombie groom, a large bear (the vice mayor in disguise), and a seven-foot-tall skeletal Death, inside of which stood a young man shrouded in white linen. Others came dressed as clowns, demons, long-tongued beasts, and girls with brooms to sweep out all the muck from human life. With the mayor\u2019s blessing, these revelers began to dance their way across the village in the processional that was the weekend\u2019s main event. Periodically, we would stop before a house and a brass band would play traditional waltzes and mazurkas for the families within, who emerged with pastries and liquor to share. At some point, a plastic shot glass was passed my way. The smallest children were often tasked with filling these, and so I bowed to a miniature Snow White who approached with the bottle of Jameson, and she gladly refilled it. I lost count of how many times I exchanged a na zdravi<\/em> with a neighbor and threw my head back.<\/p>\n

Despite Vytiska\u2019s reservations, such intermingling between locals and strangers was part of the design of Masopust\u2019s return. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the new logic of market capitalism threatened the health of many small villages. Those that weren\u2019t self-sufficient sometimes turned to tourism, and a few have successfully marketed their Masopust festivals as regional attractions. As a result, the holiday has come to serve both as a vision of a mythologized European past and as a hopeful celebration of its cosmopolitan future, where the urban and rural\u2014and, increasingly, the foreigner\u2014fruitfully commingle.<\/p>\n

Not all the remnants of Europe\u2019s past on display were innocuous, however. An hour into the processional, I made out a jolly man wearing a fake beard, hat, and round-frame glasses that together would not have looked out of place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I asked what his costume was. He looked at me, incredulous: \u201cWhy, I\u2019m a Jew!\u201d He held up a change purse guarded by a small, stuffed rodent. \u201cNeed any money?\u201d<\/p>\n

I later read in a dictionary of Czech culture that, in a traditional Masopust festival, \u201cpopular costumes were of bears, Jews, horses, and Turks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"masopust1\"<\/a>

Photo: Carleen Coulter<\/p><\/div>\n

The sun was perched along the town\u2019s chimney line as we marched the half mile from the village to a large meadow, dotted with sheep dung, where the day\u2019s climax would take place. From the other side of the dusky field, the neighboring village of Roztoky approached, several hundred strong, to the beat of martial drums. The rivalry between the towns has been loudly advertised to all newcomers. Now a stage was formed and the villages\u2019 respective bears performed a competitive ritual dance. The mayors delivered impassioned speeches urging peace between the villages while puppets throttled one another in the background. With a spirit of reconciliation, we linked arms to form a circle of more than a thousand souls and grape-vined about the field until we were dizzy. Death filled my shot glass with something strong. Finally, the traditional \u201cmare\u201d\u2014two celebrants in a horse costume\u2014was sacrificed by faux gunshot, its flanks divvied up.<\/p>\n

Then came the Masopust miracle: the halves rejoined, and the mare was alive once again. It led everyone back to \u00dan\u011btice\u2019s local brewery, past a cemetery that Death was committed by tradition to haunt into the night while we danced nearby to folky jazz.<\/p>\n

I returned to Prague by the last bus, which was so packed with the drunk and tired I couldn\u2019t raise my arms. The next day was Sunday. A friend invited me to a small Masopust gathering at a watering hole in \u017di\u017ekov, just beneath the huge equestrian statue of the famous one-eyed Hussite general who, like Alexander the Great, is said to have never lost a battle. The party was a quiet, understated affair in keeping with the drizzly afternoon. There was a brass band and purple goulash that cured my hangover. At the table across from us, a woman fed sips of beer to the large white rat\u2014a pet, we hoped\u2014that was nestled against her neck like a stole.<\/p>\n

I sent an e-mail to Vytiska asking him to explain the rivalry I\u2019d witnessed between the towns, a grudge that I imagined dated back many misty centuries. No, he said. They\u2019d decided to start it up in 1999.<\/p>\n

Ben Mauk lives in Berlin, where he is currently a Fulbright scholar.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Masopust, the Czech festival for spring. In February, I took the night bus to Prague for Masopust, the old spring festival\u2014abandoned under Communism\u2014that has made a steady resurgence in the Czech Republic in recent years. The bus pulled into a neighborhood adjacent to the Vltava, north of Old Town, late on a Thursday evening. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":782,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12508],"tags":[16746,3169,1286,17764,17767,17663,17763,17769,17765,3665,1786,17766,6525,10608,17768],"class_list":["post-84821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-travel","tag-anti-semitism","tag-carnival","tag-celebration","tag-czech-republic","tag-fasank","tag-lent","tag-masopust","tag-meat-fast","tag-paganism","tag-prague","tag-religion","tag-rivalry","tag-spring","tag-tourism","tag-unetice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFarewell to Meat: At Masopust, the Czech Festival of Spring<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ben Mauk travels to \u00dan\u011btice, a village in the Czech Republic, to join in their Spring carnival.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/15\/farewell-to-meat\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Farewell to Meat by Ben Mauk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 15, 2015 \u2013 At Masopust, the Czech festival for spring. 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