Abyss

80 miles from Halenkov, the village that the Fridels emigrated from, is the Macocha gorge, the deepest sinkhole in central Europe. Macocha is a collapsed cavern exposing a section of the Moravian Karst cave system to sunlight, with a deep lake at its bottom. There are many variations on a eponymous myth (Macocha comes from the Czech word for ‘Stepmother’). The story is usually described as being based on true events. A stepmother throws her stepson into the abyss, either for her son’s inheritance, or in stories where her husband is poor (how could he not be poor?), for some magical link between the health of her own sickly son and her healthy stepson. The stepson survives, dangling from a ledge or a tree. The stepmother either kills herself from guilt, or the death of her own son, or the village comes together to kill her when the stepson is rescued.

It is little known that F. J. Schwoy introduced into literature in his 2nd volume of Topography on pp. 211-212 the legend of Macoš, which is still described and told in the Moravian Karst: “A woman cunningly threw her stepson into an abyss, and when he remained unharmed and returned home, the stepmother was thrown there by the locals as punishment.” Compared to the previous version given by Visgius, this legend of Macoš is already “definitive”. Here is the topos of inheritance that drives violence, a blended family with internal conflicts, an attempted murder justified by imagined future generations, moravian peasantry, the hellmouth leading to neverending caverns. This is a fairy tale about violence that leads from the frontier to the dungeon.