Hans Heiling

He is the region’s prince of spirits and the best-known figure in local myth. According to legend, a farmer found him as an infant on Chrudim hill, or, in another account, where the high altar of the Slavkov church now stands, and took him to Loket Castle, where he was raised. A fairy from the Ohře taught him secret arts; another version says he was her son. Folk imagination embodied its longing for miracles in him. He possessed supernatural power and, with the help of spirits, built the world’s largest and most beautiful city in the Loket area. Later he ordered it demolished. Its remains are the granite rocks rising above the left bank of the Ohře: Hans Heiling Felsen, or Svatošské skály. In another version the rocks are Hans Heiling’s petrified wedding procession, or the petrified wedding of his beloved. Heiling turned the wedding into rocks in this order: the Capuchin, the Altar Boys, the Bridal Couple, the Wedding Procession, the Musicians, the Mother-in-Law and the Château. Finally Hans Heiling, or Jan Svatoš, asked his mother to strip him of his magical abilities. Fighting a bear as an ordinary man, he was torn apart and buried by water fairies in the depths of the Ohře. The well-known German Gothic novelist Ch. H. Spiess collected and published his story as Hans Heiling, the Fourth and Last Prince of the Spirits of Earth, Water, Air and Fire. T. Körner recorded different parts of the myth, which the Brothers Grimm then adopted from him. An old surviving fragment of Loket’s estate register mentions that the meadow by Svatošské skály was once called Holy Meadow, Heilige Wiese. This has led to the suggestion that the Heiling legends may have arisen from that name.