Prague fixer. Jan Piperger was from a family of executioners, he carried out 50 executions
Describing to today’s reader the soul of one of the main executioners of the Austrian opera, Jan Piperger, is not easy. Fortunately, a report from 1888 was preserved by the young Prague journalist Karel Ladislav Kukla, who traced the executioner to the only place where he went among people – the Černé Pivovar on Prague’s Charles Square, where beer had been brewed since the Middle Ages.
“Chills ran through my body when people claimed that Piperger snapped their necks and turned their heads into their bodies as a joke,” wrote 24-year-old Kukla at the time. He saw the executioner in the pub, fear did not allow him to address him. However, he soon made his way to his apartment in Platnéřská Street near the Old Town Square. “An unpleasant feeling filled my chest as I entered the old dilapidated building, in which the dark long corridors and low vaults seemed to be catacombs,” the reporter described.
On the first floor, he knocked on a door with a black inscription: “Jan Křtitel Piperger, master executioner of the Kingdom of Bohemia!”. From inside the room thundered a noisy, “Next.” He entered, but a square, thin, sickly-looking man advanced to meet him. “What do you want?” thundered the executioner and the journalist spilled out whether it was true that the day after tomorrow, January 12, 1888, he would execute Augustin August and Karel Přenosil in Kutná Hora for the murder of the young gendarme Melichar from Větrné Jeníkov.
Instead of answering, the resident of the longing apartment full of ops went to the closet, where there was an open yellow tourist bag of pulleys, hooks and horse ropes twisted in a colorful mixture.
“There will be an execution,” he pointed, noting how Kukla shivered. “Do not worry! These are my essentials. The toilet of my Kutnohorsk clients will die. Journalist and be afraid! Yuck. That’s a shame,” Piperger said with a wry smile. He sat the young man on a couch and began to tell a story.
A family curse brings death
First of all, about the fact that the tradition of executioners was founded by his great-grandfather from Saxony. He used to be a rich nobleman, after the murder of his lover’s seducer he fled to Pest, where he hid in an execution house and eventually married the daughter of the local executioner. The craft began to be passed down. “When I was born in Graz in 1838 to the local executioner Bedřich Piperger. My father was just taking an exam with a modern gallows, because in the same year a law was passed abolishing the previous executions with a sword and an axe,” the executioner said.
At the same time, he opened the black chest and took out a double-edged broadsword. “This is the instrument with which my father carried out the last bloody vindication. A nice family memento,” he added dryly.
He remembered his two sisters, who became actresses, and sixteen brothers who practiced the sad craft of executioners in all corners of the empire – in Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, Pest, Szeged, Osek, Graz, Venice and Mantua. “I’m the only one alive,” he added sadly, adding that the brothers had been murdered, lynched or died of disease.
Jan wanted to escape the family curse, so he trained as an upholsterer in Bratislava. But his deathly ill brother Antonín obliged him to take his place. “I executed the first convict at the age of 24,” added the executioner, who had himself transferred to Prague in 1865. During his 23 years of service, he sent 50 convicts to life, including Jan Janeček in 1871, which was the last public execution in the Czech lands before World War II.
The room darkened with twilight. At that moment, Piperger’s face jumped up, and only strange, terrible eyes shone from his sunken eyes, the pupils of which shone with a green light in the half-darkness. “I have been suffering from a heart defect for a long time and I know that I will die soon. This is not a coincidence, I know that my dark hunch will come true.’
With that Kukla left. It was Tuesday, January 10. On Thursday, the execution followed in Kutná Hora, after which Piperger felt suffocating pressure in his left sinus. He hurried back to Prague, the next day he died suddenly of a stroke one hour before midnight. It was Friday, January 13, 1888.