Large crowd attends funeral of dissident poet Jirous

Kostelni Vydri, South Bohemia, Nov 19 (CTK) - About 1,000 people Saturday attended the funeral of Czech dissident poet Ivan Martin Jirous who died, aged 67, on November 10.

The crowd included Defence Minister Alexandr Vondra, Protestant priest Svatopluk Karasek and chairman of the association Salomoun John Bok, all of them Jirous's friends from the dissident movement.

A prayer for Jirous was said by Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

"For all of us, he was a very important man. Without him, it would have been much more difficult for us in the difficult times," Vondra said.

"He was independent, working as a semaphore that only shows the red and green lights. There was no place for orange in him," Vondra said.

Jirous was one of the most outstanding personalities of the Czech underground literature and music under the communist regime.

He cooperated with the Plastic People of the Universe rock band that was banned in the mid-1970s. From 1967 he was the band's artistic leader.

In 1976 four band members, including Jirous, were given prison sentences from eight to 18 months.

The whole case was one of the reasons initiating the Charter 77 human rights manifesto that turned into a long-lasting dissident movement. Jirous was one of its signatories.

Jirous was repeatedly imprisoned in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly for "rioting." He spent a total of eight years, five months and three days behind bars. He was released from prison only in November 1989 when the communist regime collapsed in the then Czechoslovakia.

Jirous studied art history at university. However, he rather called himself a journalist and he wrote many articles on art mainly in the 1960s.

His "Report on the Third Music Revival" from 1975, which was published abroad, became "a policy statement" of the Czech underground.

Jirous, dubbed for his unorthodox ways "Loony," is a holder of the Tom Stoppard Prize for his poetry book Loony's Swan Songs and the 2006 Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his lifelong work as a poet.