Mermaids are a feature of most culture’s mythology (Have you read my article about Warsaw yet?) but Prague is slightly unique in that it has a story of a merman, not a mermaid.
Mermaids and merman are common legends in north-central Europe. I wrote about the prehistoric Funnel Beaker culture which occupied this region too. We don’t know if these legends date back to this culture or not, because we don’t know what language they would have spoken.
Just south of the city centre and close to the old castle of Vysehrad, there is a house which has a striking statue of a merman. The building is a well maintained structure in the middle of a nondescript street, set in the shadow of the old castle. The facade clearly shows that it was built in 1906 so the statue is a recent addition. Maybe the owner had children and added this for them?
The statue sits on top of a bay window that’s on the fourth floor so it is not obvious from street level. Had I not been aware of it, I doubt I would have seen it.
Looking at it, the features seem simian in nature. Czech legends hold that this is a water sprite1, a type of merman.
In central European mythology, water sprites live under water keeping the souls of the drowned hidden in jars. The typical image of a sprite is a human form with webbed fingers and greenish skin, giving him a half-toad, half-man appearance.
This area of Prague is a village called Podskali that is connected to the river (Indeed, the water’s edge is only 20 metres away). Legend has it that these sprites used to lure children to their death in the river. One day, this merman drowned a fisherman’s son. The fisherman’s wife was so upset that she decided to get even. She hunted the mer-children until the merman promised to stop attacking the children of the village.
The legend is similar to the Pied Piper of Hamelin and other similar stories that blame third-parties for children’s death. Perhaps these stories were a way for people to accept the high rate of infant mortality in those days.
There is another legend connecting water sprites to Czechia. The story tells of a sprite that captured a young woman and shut her up in a palace under the water. She bore this merman a daughter and lived there for many years. Longing to go back and see her family she managed to convince him that she would only be gone for a day but she ended up staying back home with her parents. Furious at having been deceived, he whipped up a storm that dumped the body of their child on her doorstep.
A horrible story, I’m sure you’ll agree.
The more traditional story in Slavic legends is the one that Czech composer Antonin Dvorak based his opera Rusalka on. The plot2 is almost identical to Disney’s Little Mermaid and this is certainly a more cheerful story.
Have you got any mermen related stories to tell?