09/21/2026
π 133 years ago this Saturday, a few hundred Czech farmers in Bohemia did something no one in the world had done before.
On September 26, 1893, the people of Bohemia dedicated a twelve-foot Vermont granite statue of Jan Hus in the Union Cemetery on Church Street β the first standalone monument to Hus anywhere in the world. Not Prague. Not Vienna. Here, on Long Island, in a farming village of a few hundred people.
Jan Hus (c. 1369β1415) was a Czech priest and rector of Charles University in Prague who preached against corruption in the Church and anticipated the Protestant Reformation by a full century. Promised safe passage to the Council of Constance, he was tried for heresy instead and burned at the stake on July 6, 1415. He refused to recant. His words β Pravda vΓtΔzΓ, "Truth Prevails" β became the rallying cry of a people, and for Czechs living under Austro-Hungarian rule, Hus was never only a religious figure. He was the proof that you could refuse.
That's what the settlers of Bohemia carried across the ocean with them, and that's what they put up in granite.
It wasn't easy money. The monument cost just over $1,000 at a time when that represented years of wages. The ΔSPS Benevolent Society contributed $327.00. The remaining $710.36 came from neighbors, dollar by dollar, over four years of fundraising chaired by Joseph Jedlicka.
Dedication day was extraordinary. Special trains were chartered out of Long Island City, and somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 people came β more than triple the entire population of Bohemia at the time. Look closely at the statue and you'll see the chalice he holds: the Utraquist symbol, the demand that ordinary people receive communion in both kinds. Even the posture is an argument. He is not pleading. He is standing his ground.
In July 1977, vandals used a stolen rope to pull the 800-pound figure from its base. The community put him back. On the centennial, September 26, 1993, a time capsule was buried at his feet β still waiting there tonight.
He has stood on that hill for 133 years, through storms, through vandalism, through generations of Bohemians who came to the cemetery to visit their own. Truth prevails.
π Read the full history: bohemiahistoricalsocietyny.org/statue-of-jan-hus/
Have a photo or a family memory connected to the Hus statue? Share it in the comments β we'd love to add it to the archive.
