Thanks to the wisdom of its village council, a corner of an old Prague cemetery remains as it was when V.J. Bufka photographed it in 1912.



Two weeks ago, I posted a spooky story entitled “The Mortuary of Black Moran”. The story was inspired by an item on the agenda of a meeting two years ago of the Praha-Velká Chuchle village council. A certain Mrs R had asked to be allowed to demolish the old mortuary in the village cemetery, and in its place to erect a very large family tomb.

The council, in its wisdom, denied her request on the grounds that the mortuary had always been there and should remain an integral part of the cemetery. It offered Mrs R another space in the new part of the cemetery into which she might squeeze her oversized tomb.

The space offered to Mrs R has now been filled –by a vast black anthracite cube measuring some 30 cubic metres belonging to the Family Roman. The old mortuary was to have made way for this.

The other day, I was given a monograph of photographs by Vladimír Jindřich Bufka (1887–1916), the early twentieth-century art photographer working in Prague who excelled in taking atmospheric photographs at night. The monograph is published by Fototorst and to my delight, includes a beautiful colour plate of the mortuary in the Chuchle cemetery taken 100 years ago, at night. I reproduce the plate with the kind permission of Fototorst.

Thanks to its village council, this corner at least of the Chuchle cemetery remains just as it was when V.J. Bufka photographed it in 1912.