Nine Crosses

The musical Nine Crosses, written especially for our theater, tells an old Moravian legend about a cruel act that, according to chronicles, took place around 1540 in a small village near Velká Bíteš. A landowner from Hluboké finds the lifeless body of a man on his way home from the market in Bíteš. He takes it home, and the young foreigner - a Hungarian horse trader - recovers after a while. He falls in love with the landowner's daughter Eliška, but the father does not even want to hear about dowries. The stranger binds Eliška with a promise of loyalty and leaves to sell his estates in Hungary and return with the money for his bride. However, time passes and Luka does not return. Eliška thus succumbs to the insistence of her father and others to marry the miller's son. On the wedding day, Luka returns from Hungary and soon learns about the revelry. Crazy with rage, he swears revenge, which he will eventually carry out together with the gamekeeper Kudla. Together they wait for the wedding procession on the road near Hluboký and end the lives of the wedding guests, including the landowner, Eliška and others. In the end, he takes his mate and himself out of the world. When the other wedding guests catch up, they see a horrible scene. Nine dead bodies. In their memory, nine crosses will be erected at the site of the terrible crime, so that this story of great love and great grudge will never fade from the soil of the Highlands.