Collecting Coins in the Pub

I am always fascinated by the social and political aspects of the pub, perhaps more so even that the beery ones. Pubs, beer halls, biergartens, are all inherently social and political spaces, because they are places where humans get together and talk about the things that are important to them, or at least on their minds. Sure, folks can prattle on about not talking about politics or religion in polite society, but the pub, beer hall, or biergarten are not necessarily polite spaces, and so it is no surprise when you dig into the role such places have played in history that you learn interesting things...such as this story from the "Kuryer Lwowski" - that's Lemberger Courier for the non Polish speakers amongst us...

As you can probably tell from the highlighted sections, I was doing a search on the legendary Prague beer hall, U Fleků, but this story from May 4th 1893 has nothing to do with black beer, or any other shade of booze, rather it comes from a story titled "How Czechs Collect Donations". For historical reference, at this point in time, the Polish people were divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empire. There was no independent Polish state, Gdansk was in the German Empire, Krakow in Austro-Hungary, and Warsaw in the Russian Empire.

In the 45 years since the popular nationalist uprisings of 1848, many of the national minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire has asserted their identities as distinct from their German or Hungarian speaking overlords, and none more so arguably that the Czechs. This assertion of national identity often took the form of civic society projects, such as the building of a national theatre dedicated to performing only in the Czech language - which the Czech had to do twice because the original building suffered a catastrophic fire just a couple of months are first opening. If I remember rightly, the Imperial crown refused to provide funds for such an independent Czech cultural institution, and so the money was raised from the people themselves.

How did they manage to raise the kind of money needed to buy the saltworks upon which the theatre was built, and then to actually build the thing? One way was that people asked for donations in places like U Fleků. People like the shoemaker, Mr Bílek in the story above, would collect small amounts in popular places, and where is more popular in Central Europe than the beer hall? By collecting loose change, Mr Bílek raised 14,000 Złoty (as Poles in the Empire referred to the Austro-Hungarian Krone), or about $90,000/£65,000/€75,000. According to the story in the Kuryer Lwowski, having done his rounds Mr Bílek would put the donations in a box, the keys to which were held by two other people, and thus he collected such a sizeable sum for the "People's School Society".

The writer of the Kuryer Lwowski article finishes off their piece recommending that the people of the province of Galicia, which included much of modern western Ukraine, take lessons from the Czechs and likewise raise their own money for similar projects.

I wonder what else I will find about U Fleků in the archives...