Nine Crosses

The musical Nine Crosses, written especially for our theatre, 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 a lifeless body of a man on his way home from the market in Bíteš. He takes him home and the young stranger – a Hungarian horse trader – recovers after a while. He falls in love with the landowner's daughter Eliška, but his father does not want to hear about the marriage. The stranger binds Eliška with a promise of fidelity 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 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 merrymaking. Mad with rage, he swears revenge, which he eventually carries out together with the gamekeeper Kudla. Together they wait for the wedding procession on the road near Hluboké and end the lives of the wedding guests, including the landowner, Eliška and others. In the end, he sees his companion and himself out of the world. When the other wedding guests run up, they see a terrible scene. Nine dead bodies.