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:
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“‘Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes,—thou hast got an hundred enemies; and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)