The Tombstones Walked On upon the Bridge

On 6 August 1786 the Bethlehem Chapel began to be pulled down. Until then the pulpit was still well preserved there from which Master Jan Hus had preached the word of God. All the inhabitants of the Prague towns mourned that irreplaceable loss; indeed the Emperor Joseph II himself is said to have been greatly angered that no report had been made to him about that memorable church, so that he might have preserved so weighty a monument for the Bohemians. And a further wickedness was committed, in that the marble gravestones with their memorial inscriptions were destroyed and, sad to say, were shamefully used to pave the footways of the Prague Bridge. Only a very few of them have survived.