The Gryll Sect

At the end of the eighteenth century, the farmer Václav Gryll founded a sect here named after him. His followers wanted to place him on the throne as King of Bohemia. First they elected him their ruler. In his farmyard, he fastened a cartwheel to a sturdy oak along with a red and a white scarf. The wheel signified that a peasant had become king; the oak represented the strength of his kingdom, the white scarf purity and blamelessness, and the red one the people’s joy. Eventually the farmers took Gryll towards Hradec Králové on a cart as their king. They were dispersed on the way and Gryll was arrested. Václav Gryll, or Kryl, came from Černilov, where he was born in 1738 in house no. 96. He claimed direct descent from the House of David and said that the name Gryll, or Kryl, really meant “king”. He held messianic ideas and had about fifty families of followers. He was later denounced and spent four years in an asylum. He died in 1804. Karel Skalický was the sect’s most radical figure at that time, but it dissolved in the early nineteenth century. Books of other faiths were ceremonially burned here on a pyre. On a hill near today’s church of St Stephen, children gathered around the “heretical” books and were made to dance and sing beside the burning pile.