The cult of St. John of Nepomuk, patron saint of rivers and protector of the unjustly judged (not only in Moravian Wallachia)
The Museum of the Moravian Wallachia Region invites you to the Kinský Castle on Friday, May 16, for an interesting lecture by Jakub Ivánek from the Center for Regional Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava. He will talk about Midsummer devotions and matters of the cult of St. John of Nepomuk not only in Moravian Wallachia in the 18th and 19th centuries. The lecture by Jakub Ivánek from the Center for Regional Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava will be devoted to Midsummer devotions, in which songs written in honor of this saint played an important role. These represent one of the most extensive thematic areas of 18th-century hymnography and were passed down primarily through so-called peddlers' prints. The lecture will also include a joint singing of some of these songs. There will also be a dedication of a statue of St. John of Nepomuk – just as our ancestors did for centuries on the eve of his feast day. After a more general outline of the form of St. John's devotions, we will look at the development of the St. John cult in Moravian Wallachia, where it developed in the early stages before the official canonization of the saint. We will not only imagine the role of the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia in the spread of this cult, but we will also discuss the preserved manuscript hymnals from northern Wallachia, namely the hymnal of J. Mžik from Vsetín from 1731–1734 and the purely St. John's hymnal of the Rožnov rector František Volek from 1792. Attention will of course also be paid to the statues of St. John of Nepomuk in Moravian Wallachia, where the above-mentioned devotions most often took place.