LOCATIONS — 233/262 — Grund
The village was founded by miners sometime in the mid-13th century, when silver ore began to be mined in the area. In the 1270s, according to records, 300 miners and their families were already permanently settled on the nearby Kuklík hill. Legends say that when King Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia went to battle and needed horses for his army, he took 500 of them from Kuklík alone, which interrupted mining for a while and the miners had to leave. Under Wenceslas II, new silver veins were discovered, which attracted new miners. The village began to expand and the German name for it became ‘Grunt in Mariae’ (Valley or Mine of the Virgin Mary, abbreviated to Grunta in Czech). In addition to residential houses, infrastructure for processing the extracted ore also began to appear, as well as facilities for sorting, crushing or smelting. The waste from mining was enormous, so the remaining tailings and slag began to be exported around the area and new landforms were created. In the village there is also the Church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. Already in records from 1305 it is written that it was dilapidated, so it is not surprising that in 1367 a new church was built by local miners and townspeople of Kuttenberg. The mining and smelting premises operated here intermittently until the 15th century, when silver reserves were almost exhausted (it is estimated that 80% of the ore was mined here in less than three centuries).
TRIVIA
— 100,000 tons of ore are said to have been mined around Grunta in 200 to 250 different mines. The area was so rich of silver that it even featured in a prophecy on the location of the silver wealth of the Czech lands, ascribed to Libuše, the mythical ancestor of the Přemyslid dynasty and the Czech people and a fortune teller. The excessive mining, however, did not only produce wealth, but also immense amounts of waste, estimated at up to 120,000 tons of slag material that were heaped up to mountains at the southwestern edge of the village between the 14th and 16th centuries. Some of that waste was later used for the construction of roads, other heaps were repurposed and covered with agricultural land. Despite its importance for silver, Grunta shrunk to a small settlement over the centuries, also in part due to a fire that burned down the entire village in 1612, said to have been caused by an oven in which cakes for a feast were baked. Right after, the Thirty Years' War devastated the country and only one homestead survived. Over its long history, Grunta has owned three different churches on the same site, all dedicated to the Virgin Mary, making the place a destination for pilgrimages and processions from nearby Kaňek and Kolín on the Feast of the Visitation. The current Church of the Assumption of the Virign Mary, built between 1905 and 1908 in the style of a pseudo-Romanesque basilica, still holds some remains of the former 14th century church, such as three tombstones of the Lords of Libenice and the old bell, made around 1495 by Kutná Hora bellmaker Ondřej Ptáček. Together with master bellmaker Bartoš of Prague, Ondřej Ptáček was also involved in the casting of a bell for St. Vitus Cathedral, which was the biggest bell of its time, and so big in fact that for the transport a part of the Prague castle wall had to be torn down to fit the bell through the gate.
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