A scary story inspired by the macabre minutes of a village council meeting.*



Once upon time, there was a rich merchant who lived in Prague. His name was Moran, which in ancient Aramaic, the language of the early Christians, was the name given to Our Lord. But this rich merchant was known as Black Moran.

This is the story of how Moran blackened his own name.

Moran had not always been rich. But one day, he met and married a daughter of one of the king’s favourites. And as a wedding present, he had been granted a monopoly on the sale of all candles in the land. That means that everyone in the land had to buy candles only from him.

In those days, there was no electricity. And candles were expensive. So most people, unless they were rich or in the case of children, very naughty, went straight to bed when it got dark. But there were special days, such as All Souls and All Saints, when even the poorest people would buy a candle to light at the graves of their loved ones, to wish them good speed on their journey to Heaven.

Now Moran, like many rich men, was greedy. Every year he put up the price of candles, and so fewer and fewer people were able to afford candles at all, even on All Souls and All Saints. He became very unpopular, especially at Christmas time, when every family likes to have one or two candles burning in their window in celebration of the birth of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Time passed. Moran grew richer and richer, his candles became dearer and dearer, and more and more people started to call him Black Moran because of the darkness he forced upon them and the graves of their loved ones.

Moran knew that he was not liked. And so he built himself a large house on a hill outside the city, and around it he built a very high wall. On this wall he placed hundreds and hundreds of candles which burnt all night long. This was so that he could see if someone had climbed over the wall to hurt him.

Moran grew more and more afraid of the dark. And the more he was afraid of the dark, the more candles he placed upon his high wall at night, which could now be seen from far, far away, so great was the light. And the greater the light around his house, the darker seemed the houses and the graves of the poor.

Then one day, Moran started to think about his own death. He decided to build for himself a family tomb in the cemetery of the village church that stood in a forest across the valley from his house, a beautiful, peaceful place overlooking the river. And because he was rich and powerful, he decided that his family tomb must be bigger than any other in the cemetery.

But when he told the village people about his wish, they said that there was no place for such a large tomb in the cemetery.

Now, every cemetery has its own mortuary. A mortuary is a little stone house that stands on the edge of the cemetery. It is used to place dead bodies in for a while when the ground is too hard to dig a grave.

When Moran was told that there was no room for his tomb in the cemetery, he got angry, and he said that he would knock the mortuary down to make room. The people were very cross when they heard this. Their mortuary, which had stood there for over a hundred years, was as old as the cemetery itself. They tried to stop Moran. But he was rich and powerful, and used to having his own way. And so the mortuary was knocked down and his tomb, which was as black as his name, took its place.

Time passed and Moran died, as we all must. His body was placed in a fine black coffin and carried up through the forest to the cemetery in a carriage pulled by six shining black Old Kladrubs with fine Roman noses, where it was laid in the black tomb.

But a strange thing happened that day. However hard they might try to light the candles around the tomb, the pall-bearers –those are the men that carry the coffin, could not get the candles to stay alight for more than a moment or two. And so the tomb, which stands there to this day, came to be known as the Mortuary of Black Moran.

If you are brave enough to walk up to the cemetery after dark, and you look out through the trees and across the valley to the south-west, you will see the house surrounded by its high wall, all lit up in the far distance –which is strange because the place has stood empty ever since Moran died all those years ago.

*The minutes of a meeting of the local council of Praha-Velká Chuchle reveal that a certain Mrs R. requests to be allowed to demolish the old mortuary in the village cemetery, and to erect a family tomb in its place. The request was denied on the grounds that the mortuary had stood there for as long as the cemetery itself. Click here for more details

The FOTOTORST edition of Vladimír Jindřich Bufka's photographs has a fine candlelit image of the mortuary in the Chuchle cemetery taken in 1912. It looks no different today.