Praying to St. Vitus
Interior of the grotto of Saint Vitus above Saverne. Lithograph by Engelmann. One fear, originating from a Christian church legend, was that if anyone provoked the wrath of Saint Vitus, a Sicilian martyred in 303 A.D., he would send down plagues of compulsive dancing. It was to this cave, just beneath the summit of a small mountain overlooking the Alsatian Plain, that the crazed dancers of 1518 were brought to pray before icons of St. Vitus.