by Adrian Barek

If you celebrate Christmas, you’ll probably spend the 24th of December feasting on some delectable dish or other in the company of close friends and family. Roast turkey or ham with all the fixings immediately comes to mind as the sort of meal you might enjoy; however, neither are likely to be served in Czech households over the holiday season. The country has its own traditional meal, and, while appetizers and side dishes vary, the main entrÈe is most often carp.

You might not think of carp as a particular delicacy and, if you were to ask, it’s doubtful you’d find that many Czechs consider it as much either. Alas, eating carp as the main dish of the Christmas meal is an old and well-established tradition in the country.

Throughout the year, carp are farmed in artificial lakes in south Bohemia. The lakes, as well as the methods used to farm carp, date several centuries and have changed little. Before they are sold, carp must spend several weeks in filtered aquariums to cleanse the muddy taste from their flesh. This step is essential because, as a bottom feeder, the carp spends the better part of its life swimming along the lake bottom and sucking up whatever decaying organic matter it can find. 

A few weeks before Christmas, carp vendors begin popping up on street corners and in markets throughout the country. Staffed by grubby men in rubber overalls, these stands sell live carp from huge tubs of water. If you happen across a carp vendor in the morning before they’ve sold many fish, look into the tubs and you’ll find you almost can’t see the water for the churning mass of carp.

Perhaps the most striking element of Christmas carp commerce is that the fish are slaughtered and cleaned on the street corner for all to see. Just like eating lobster at a fancy seafood restaurant, the customer at the carp vendor selects the specific carp they want from the many swimming in the tubs. The carp is then fished out of the water, placed on an oversized cutting board and promptly bludgeoned to death without ceremony. With fins still twitching and gills gasping, the carp is sliced open, its innards removed and head cut off. Lastly, the thick scales of the fish are removed using a tool that bears a vague resemblance to a carrot peeler. Carp are no minnows, and the man scaling them has to put considerable force into his work—the result is that scales tend to fly off the fish with surprising velocity, often landing with a slimy plop onto unsuspecting passersby. 

A little sympathy is granted if foreigners find this ritual a tad gruesome. To watch a carp vendor in full swing is to witness a bloody mess of Wes Craven proportions. In addition to the gruesome sight of a carp being bludgeoned to death—which is to say nothing of the nauseating sound of their skulls being crushed—everything about the scene, from the blood-dripping knives to the buckets overflowing with severed fish heads, fairly wreaks of mass murder.

Animal rights activists fear not, it is sometimes the carp that has the last laugh. A carp’s flesh is riddled with bones to such an extent that eating it requires extreme caution. Carp are so bony, in fact, that hospitals are required to fully staff their emergency rooms around Christmas Eve to cope with the influx of choking victims with carp bones stuck in their throats.

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