1618 The Third Defenestration of Prague
When political turmoil grips the Canadian people, the government responds by appointing a Royal Commission, and in the years it takes to issue a final report, the brouhaha always dies down. In times of national crisis, Czechs are wont to throw people out of windows.
The First Prague Defenestration (from the Latin fenestra, and thus the German das Fenster and the French la fenêtre) took place in 1419 when angry Hussites tossed the burgomaster and civic councillors out of a window in the Town Hall to their deaths on the cobblestones below. In 1483 religious quarrels again led to the fatal hurling of the Prague burgomaster and his colleagues through windows.
In May, 1618 sectarian hostility led to a confrontation in the Bohemian Chancellory between four Catholic regents and a group of Protestant noblemen. The latter demanded to know whether the regents had played a part in provoking the King Ferdinand II to issue harsh anti-Protestant decrees. Two of the regents accepted responsibility for supporting those moves, whereupon they and their secretary were propelled out the window 70′ above the ground. Their survival was attributed by the Catholic faction to a miraculous intercession of the Virgin Mary and by the Protestants to a fortuitous soft landing in a dung heap. The Thirty Years War soon erupted.