What Pavel Was Pointing At

~ Monday, June 8, 2026 ~

I have all three marks. Three families, three centuries, three different kinds of custody — a merchant family in Prague who asked for the sign, a monastic succession at Sázava that passed the mark from abbot to abbot for seven hundred years, a Protestant household in the Kokořín sandstone that survived everything and buried its last member with the symbol fixed to the rock above the grave. I have them. I have the photographs. I have the sketches. I do not know what to do with them.

I had read Pavel’s December notes in April, at Bishop’s kitchen table in Honolulu, the night before my flight. I had not understood them. I read them again.

What Pavel wrote in December

The December 2022 pages are the last in the notebook before the handwriting stops. They are different in character from the rest — less methodical, more compressed, the line of the letters tightened in a way that suggests someone writing quickly or writing against something. Pavel had been precise throughout the notebook. In December he was still precise, but the precision had a different quality. He had stopped caring about whether the notes made sense to anyone reading them later.

Most of the section covers what the marks are not: not texts, not instructions, not symbols that carry meaning in isolation. They are a key to reading something else. Something that predates the keeper families, predates the reconversion campaign, predates the Reformation. Pavel had been working toward it for two years and he had found it, and then he wrote the letter to his attorney.

I had read all of this in April. I had read it as a conclusion — here is what Pavel found — and moved on into the earlier pages of the notebook, where the research was documented, the archives, the families, the chain. The December pages felt like an ending. They were not the section I was looking for when I came to Bohemia.

What I had not read carefully enough was the margin.

Five words and a Roman numeral

In the left margin of the page, next to a passage about the three marks as a key to reading something larger, Pavel had written five words and a Roman numeral in pencil. The pencil was lighter than the ink of the main text. It could have been added later, or written at speed while the main text was still drying.

XX. Ab porta regni.

Twenty. From the gate of the kingdom.

In April I had read it as a theological notation — the kingdom of God, some Petrine reference to keys and gates, the kind of shorthand Bishop uses in his drafts. I did not know enough to connect it to anything specific. I moved on.

In June, after six weeks in Bohemia working through estate records and monastery dissolution documents and the secondary literature on Czech religious history from the ninth century to the twentieth, things read differently. Porta regni rang against something. I looked it up.

The road from Strahov

The Říšská brána — the Gate of the Kingdom in old Prague — stood near Strahov Monastery at the city’s western edge, marking the point where Prague ended and the pilgrimage roads began. Pavel had worked at Strahov. He had spent years there before he left his position in 2020. The library, the archive, the accumulated material of a Premonstratensian house that had survived the Hussite wars and the Thirty Years’ War and the Josephine suppressions and the Nazi occupation and the communist nationalisation and had come out the other side still holding most of what it had been given to hold.

There is one historical pilgrim route that begins near Strahov and is marked by exactly twenty chapels. The route runs west, out through the city boundary, a few kilometres into the country, to a Franciscan pilgrimage monastery in the forest. The twenty wayside chapels were built between 1720 and 1724 by the master mason František Fortýn. They mark every stage of the route from the gate to the monastery. I counted the historical record. Twenty.

Pavel had worked at Strahov. The road from Strahov leads west. Twenty marks. From the gate.

The second thread was in the wartime archive records. During the Nazi occupation, 1939 to 1945, the Franciscan monastery at the end of the road served as a depository for the Archiv Země české — the Archive of the Bohemian Land — and for records transferred from other religious institutions whose own archives were at risk. Material came from institutions across Bohemia to be held there. Some was returned after the war. Some was not. The transfer records are incomplete. The inventories are partial. The standard condition of archives in a country that has been occupied twice in one century.

On the night of April 13 to 14, 1950, state security forces raided every male monastery in Czechoslovakia simultaneously. This operation — Akce K — was coordinated, overnight, without public announcement. The Franciscan house at the end of the pilgrimage road was among those seized. The friars had hours. Some of what was held there was distributed to trusted families in the surrounding area before the StB arrived. This is documented in testimony from returned religious, published in journals after 1989. It is not unusual. It is what happened at monasteries across the country when the orders were given.

Across the road

I drove it on the morning of the eighth. The road runs west from Strahov through the city’s outer districts — housing blocks, light industry, a road surface that has been repaired and re-repaired until the original line of it is entirely buried under municipal maintenance. The chapels begin at the city edge. Some are restored, with fresh render and relocked iron grilles. Some have been through decades of neglect and are held together by the habit of not quite falling. Most of them are easy to miss from a car. I stopped at several of them.

The city ends and the forest begins within a few hundred metres of each other. The road continues through the trees for a short distance and then opens onto a clearing. A monastery on one side — Baroque, walled, a tower visible above the trees. Across the road from the monastery gate: a pub.

The owner’s family has been there four generations. It is the kind of establishment where nothing has been replaced that was not broken, and some things that were broken have been kept anyway. Cyclists stop here. The beer is consistently good. The clock on the wall stopped at some point in the previous century and nobody has found a reason to correct it.

I went in and asked whether anyone had come in the past few years asking about old documents from the monastery. The owner looked at me for a moment. Then said: yes. A man named Pavel, about three years ago.

What the owner kept

The owner’s grandfather received the parchment from a friar on the night of the Akce K raid. No explanation was given. The friar said only: keep this until we return. It was April 1950. The friar was not old. He had perhaps twenty years ahead of him, if the camp did not shorten them.

The friars returned to the monastery in 1990, after forty years. The friar who had given the parchment to the owner’s grandfather was dead. The members of the restored community had no record of the transfer. The owner’s family had kept the parchment because they had been asked to keep it, and because the kind of family that keeps a pub across from a monastery gate for four generations is the kind of family that honours what it is asked to honour without requiring reasons.

The owner brought it out from behind the bar. He did not know what it was. He knew only that Pavel had come, spent an afternoon looking at it, photographed it carefully, and asked him to keep it a little longer.

I photographed it. I asked the owner the same thing. He agreed, with a patience that did not appear to be annoyed at being asked twice by two different people from abroad within the space of three years.

I am staying in the area. I will write about what the parchment is when I have looked at it long enough. I needed a night first.

Pavel had found all three marks. He had found the parchment. He wrote the letter to his attorney and stopped. I have found everything he found. I do not know yet if I will do better.

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