In English, the swinging iron part of a bell is known as the hammer. In Czech, it's called the heart.

On June 15, the 450-kilogram, soft baroque iron heart broke free from Saint Vitus Cathedral's 16-ton bell Zikmund. It fell, splintering through a wooden deck and crashed onto Vitus tower's internal neo-gothic vaulting. The usual quarter hour in June when joyous bells would normally celebrate Saint Vitus Day was funeral silent.

At first, people joked that the break served as a forshadowing of some greater cataclysm. The Pravo newspaper analyzed the results of the June election with the bell as a metaphor, and wondered if the heart of Europe had been broken. Nobody anticipated the floods.

People still wonder what happened, and concern has grown as if the whole country anticipates open-heart surgery. Most interested are a small group of bell ringers, who have been keeping Saint Vitus' bells alive since the tone-deaf Husák regime left the Prague castle over a decade ago.

The Bells

Zikmund, the largest bell in central Europe, sits below three other equally grand 16th century bells, all of which were created after a fire destroyed previous ones.

The bells ring most often on Sunday mornings. As Saint Vitus Cathedral exchanges tourists with worshipers entering for morning service, a group of twenty discretely slip into the church and climb up the tower's 196 steps to participate in their own ritual. Most gather in a tower chamber above Zikmund, where the tower's the three other bells are located: John the Baptist, Vaclav & Joseph. There they discuss in animated tones the finer details of ringing.

Amidst the conversation, one person minds the time. "Five minutes. Four minutes..." At precisely 9:15, someone starts tugging on John the Baptist's single rope, leading towards a resounding high C. Two minutes later, two people begin to slowly rock Vaclav until it roars out C one octave lower. The two bells, with uneven size and irregular hearts, alternate ringing together and in opposition. Joseph, called a funeral bell, leads the chorus at noon on Sundays with its dissonant D-minor.

Zikmund, the masterpiece cast by Brno gun-maker Tomap Jaros in 1549, rests silently one floor below, suspended in a steel cage and illuminated by morning sunlight through a Rudolfine, gold-latticed window. Zikmund's heart is unlocked only on special occasions. It sat silent during the communist era, and first rang to sound out the general strike in 1989. It rang again for the presidential elections and the Pope's first visit in 1990. It was also rung for the Dalai Lama.

When Zikmund was swung in honor of 2000's Czech hockey victory, critics attacked the judgment of the ringers. However, last year on September 11th, nobody questioned the spontaneous decision of the ringers to sound out in solidarity with the U.S. after the terrorist attacks.

On such occasions, people gather to take turns pulling four thick hemp ropes dangling from Zikmund's crown, and begin to lightly rock the colossus. When a man shouts "Let go!" the heavy heart is released to swing freely and silently until it reaches the giant bell rim. As the bell reaches its full height, the four people tugging the ropes are alternately lifted off the ground by as much as a meter. The soft iron crashes against hard bronze, and 600 years of history resounds with a low freight-train G-tone groan.

The few visitors allowed in are greeted with this deafening, enchanting noise. Some are able to catch the fluttering of distant harmonics. Many are so overwhelmed by the mosaic of sound that they burst into tears.

Prague's Pabitels

The volunteer guardians of the heart of Europe are caught in what seems a no-man's land between the authority of church hierarchy and the Prague Castle Administration bureaucracy. The Castle owns the building and the Catholic Church holds the lease. The bells function for both. These bell enthusiasts have, over the last decade, improvised and evolved into what amounts to a medieval guild with its own code, behavior and internal structure. A cross-section of Czech society, a typical Sunday ringing always includes a variety of people: librarians, translators, musicians, firemen, bakers, nuns, students, retired people. They frequently address each other with nicknames like Hippo, Stump, ET, Potato, Earthworm, and Lapwing.

Among them is Pavla Jungmannova, a municipal librarian who came to Saint Vitus with friends from the Society for Old Prague. When not ringing Vaclav, she edits a magazine devoted to the bell-ringer's craft, called Katedrala.

Lubos Antonin, a former bell swinger, described Zikmund's ring as something so massive it cannot be heard, only felt in the bones. He described the Saint Vitus bell ringers using author Bohumil Hrabal's label for people who appreciate life's obscure details with particular joy. "They're pabitels." Vit Molík, an automobile mechanic, is a regular at the tower. Molík shares many ringers' worry that they will one day be replaced by motors, activated by remote control by the priests. He said the Saint Vitus bells should be respected not just as antique relics, but also as musical instruments.

"Bell ringing is part of the ritual of life," said Molík. "They could replace us 'bio-motors' with machines," he continued. "Then again, they could replace the priest downstairs, and the congregation too."

The heart's breaking affected the ringers in different ways. Jiri Dostal became a ringer in retirement and has been dedicated for ten years. On the day the heart broke, he had spontaneously and inexplicably embraced it just before the ringing.

"I've never done that before," Dostal said. "And I can't think of why it occurred to me just then. I was admiring the heart's craftsmanship, and gazing at the date 1795, engraved with markings, and then I hugged it."

Without knowing it, he'd just said farewell to the beautiful heart.

"The bell was ringing normally, briefly, and then there was a slightly weaker thud," he said, describing the fall. "There was nothing immediately out of the ordinary, but a larger sound was expected. Then there was a large crunching noise, and then silence."

One of the oldest ringers at Saint Vitus, Jaroslav Sehnal, is a retired engineer. He was on the ground floor resting when he heard the heart's loud thud as it slammed onto the limestone archway above him. He sped up the stone spiral staircase and beheld the heart as a severed slab of iron lying amidst a cloud of dust.

Jaroslav Tomápek, who runs a medical sample-testing company, came to bell ringing as a member of the very exclusive Tyn bell ringers' club. For him, bell ringing is a wonderful form of exercise. "It's better than swimming," he said.

Tomápek was upstairs swinging John the Baptist's 3640 kilograms of 16th century bronze when he heard Zikmund's crash below. Like everyone, he was relieved that nobody was hurt, but added that there's nothing mysterious about the break. "Old material ages," he declared. "These are the laws of nature."

The bell had swung about six times before it broke, explained Tomap Starecky. An aircraft engineer and publisher of an astronomy magazine, Starecky founded the Saint Vitus bell ringers' association with his mother and the bell-maker Petr Rudolf Manoupek ten years ago. Years earlier as a photography student, he'd discovered the cathedral's disused bells. As the one who was ringing Zikmund on June 15, Starecky categorically dismissed superstition about the break. "These are ideas invented by humans," he said. He explained that all bell hearts crack after about half a century. Zikmund's heart has broken several times - such as in 1760, just prior to Jan Amos Komensky's death, or in 1789, shortly before soldiers were sent to fight in Italy. Many note that the bell's heart remained intact throughout all major wars in modern history - at times when most other Prague bells were being melted down and recast as gun-metal. The heart apparently broke not because political events, but because a 200 year-old manufacturing flaw allowed rust from within to slowly open a crack.

Pavel Stross, a bell ringer for seven years who works at one of Prague's many tea rooms, sees Zikmund as the center of a cathedral owned collectively by the Czech nation.

"The bell is a point between heaven and earth," Stross said. "Zikmund has always been the summoner of news, be it good or bad. A broken heart will be a sign of something, somehow."

The calm center of most activity spinning within and around the Saint Vitus tower is bell maker Petr Manoupek. Like Tarkovsky's bell-maker from Andrei Rublev, Manoupek stepped into his father's shoes to find immediate command of a craft he'd hitherto only observed. Part of that family tradition includes maintaining and restoring the Saint Vitus bells.

There is no lack of optimism that Zikmund will ring when expected on September 28th - Saint Vaclav's Day. Specialist Vratislav Hruby had already quietly finished the job of crafting a new heart before the floods poured in. Indeed, those waters nearly destroyed his workshop in Zbraslav.

After floor-to-ceiling waters receded, bell parts lay asunder in a lunar landscape of junk. Among the flotsam was uncovered Zikmund's broken heart.

William Hollister can be reached at letters@pill.cz


This content originally appeared in the alternative weekly The Prague Pill. Launched in December 2001 by Micah Jayne and Alexander Zaitchik, the paper ceased publication in June 2003.