Published in Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl (Greenwood Publishing, 2008)

The Czech Republic Carp Festival has its roots in the Middle Ages, when the land then known as Bohemia strictly adhered to the dietary dictates of the Catholic church and the devout abstained from eating meat during religious events. The festival occurs each year on December 20, just in time for Christmas. On this date street corners and town squares around the Czech Republic fill with tubs of live Cyprinus carpio, common carp grown in and exported from the southern lakes and ponds of Bohemia. Throngs of holiday shoppers stand in line for hours to purchase the land-locked country’s popular, hardy fish. It, in turn, will be served as the main course at the customary Christmas Eve dinner.

If the fish mongers do not gut the carp on the spot, the live fish are carried home in plastic bags and released into water-filled bathtubs. There they will swim around, reputedly cleaning themselves out, for four days. On December 24 their reprieve ends as the carp are removed from the bathtub, killed, and cleaned. The best pieces are coated in flour, then dipped in egg, dusted with bread crumbs and pan fried. They are served alongside potato salad and followed by hot tea and decorative jam-and-sugar cookies.

Many soft-hearted citizens refrain from disposing of their bathtub-dwelling fish. Instead, droves of bag-toting families transport the carp to Prague’s Vlatava River and other tributaries and release them into the chilly water on Christmas Eve. While the citizens possess nothing but the best of intentions, the carp rarely benefit from this liberation. The river water is simply too cold for the fish and they perish nonetheless.