Lost Bohumír and the Priest from the Statue

Many years ago the house called U Vunšviců, which still stands on what is now Wenceslas Square, belonged to a family of wealthy gentlemen of that name. Matyáš Vunšvic, a very pious man and a particular devotee of Saint John of Nepomuk, one day lost his seven-year-old son Bohumír. They searched for him in vain, and in vain the grieving father prayed to his saint; the child was not found. Only after a year did the lost boy suddenly return, wasted thin and in strange foreign clothes, and told how a gypsy woman had stolen him and carried him as far as the land of the Turks, where she sold him into slavery. He suffered much, very much, there, until one night he dreamed that a venerable man in priestly vestments took him by the hand and led him out of the prison where he slept — and when he woke he was at home, on the square directly in front of his father's house. His parents marvelled, the kinsfolk gathered, and soon all Prague was speaking of the miracle. The very next day the father went with his son up to Hradčany to give thanks to Saint John at his tomb. A statue of the saint stood then on the Stone Bridge, but only a wooden one; and as they walked towards it Bohumír cried out: “This is the priest who led me out of prison.” By this the father knew all the more clearly that Saint John had given him back his only son, and he resolved to set the wooden statue up in his house as an everlasting memorial and to place another one, of metal, on the bridge. Both were permitted him, and when the celebrated artist Jan Brokoff had made the new statue, cast in bronze at Nuremberg, Vunšvic set the wooden one in his house and built a fine chapel for it on the ground floor. All Prague came running, and great was the ceremony when the two statues were carried to their places.