Death
Gottwald died on 14 March 1953, just five days after attending Stalin's funeral in Moscow on 9 March. His death, due to a burst artery brought about by prolonged heart disease, was heavily affected by other factors: syphilis and alcoholism.
His body was initially displayed in a mausoleum at the site of the Jan Žižka monument in the district of Žižkov, Prague. In 1962 the personality cult ended and it was no longer possible to show Gottwald's body. So that year his body was cremated, the ashes returned to the Žižka Monument and placed in a sarcophagus. After the end of the communist period, Gottwald's ashes were removed from the Žižka Monument and placed in a common grave at Prague's Olšany Cemetery, together with the ashes of about 20 other communist leaders which had also originally been placed in the Žižka Monument. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia is now maintaining that common grave. There are accounts that in 1962 Gottwald's body had blackened and was decomposing due to a botched embalming, although other witnesses have disputed this.
Read more about this topic: Klement Gottwald
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
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“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)