The former gold-mining town of Jilove

In this week's Spotlight, we visit the little town of Jilove, some 20 kilometres south of Prague, along the lower Sazava River. Despite being a small town with a population of a little under 3,500, Jilove is known to most Czechs because it was a gold-mining town until as recently as 1968. Throughout its gold-mining history, over eleven tonnes of the precious metal were extracted in the region.

The former gold-mining town of Jilove

Town Hall

Jilove was a significant gold mining area in Europe from the reign of Wenceslas I up to the time of Charles IV. At around 1350, Charles IV issued a charter of privilege that confirmed Jilove as a royal town. Although it is generally believed that the town dates back to the 13th century, the oldest written record of it is from the early 14th century. Some parts of the town's history, though, are little documented as many records were destroyed by frequent fires in the town.

The painting of St. Florian

"My name is Stanislava Tejckova and I'm a curator at the Jilove Museum. We are now standing in front of House No. 1, today's Town Hall, on the main square. It used to be called the Tower, it's in the Baroque style and dates back to the 14th century. The chief magistrate used to live here and later the mayor and his town councillors. The painting on the building's façade depicts St. Florian, the patron saint of fire fighters. But, St. Florian is also the patron saint of the town's residents because Jilove has suffered much damage from a number of fires throughout its history. Many houses were burnt down at least once every century."

Besides the Town Hall, there are three other buildings that date to the late Middle Ages. The oldest is St. Adalbert's Church and was erected on the site of a wooden church in the first half of the 13th century. The church interior, especially its stately Gothic altarpiece, impressed Czech-born film director Milos Forman so much that he featured it in Amadeus - the scene in which the character Salieri prays to God to become a great composer. An unusual feature of the church is that the tower is located at the point where the presbytery, the nave and the transept meet. The church suffered great damage during a fire on May 30, 1567, that raged over almost the entire town. Reconstruction began almost immediately but a lack of money meant that it dragged on until the mid nineteenth century. Father Stanislav Hosek:

St. Adalbert's Church

"Since Jilove was a gold mining town, there are wooden sculptures of miners on the altars. They say that the miners who worked in the gold mines in the surrounding area built underground passages that led to the church. They had to work on Sundays and built the passages to be able to get to mass as fast as possible. They were only a kilometre or two long and so they saved quite a bit of time as the walk above ground was some five kilometres. But this was not confirmed and no passage has been found yet."

The town's inhabitants were mostly protestant but the battle of White Mountain on November 8th 1620 - which saw the defeat of the Protestants of the Bohemian Estates' army by Austrian Imperial and Catholic forces, began a process of re-Catholicisation. Part of this process was the foundation of a Minorite Order monastery in 1623. Almost all inhabitants declared themselves Catholics by the 18th century. The monastery was closed down in 1785, as one of the last under Joseph II, during his sweeping reforms to the church in Austria-Hungary. But following forty years of Communist rule, Father Hosek says the town's residents today show little appreciation of their church:

"We hold mass every Sunday and attendance is about that of the rest of the country, meaning some 1-1.5 percent of the population. The number of people who come to mass is actually declining because the older residents are dying and the younger ones have all kinds of other interests nowadays. The situation is a little better further south and towards the East in Moravia. There, people are more religious and therefore more attend mass. But here, around Prague and in the northern region, we have the worst situation. Not many people come."

A cemetery used to surround the church but was moved to a different location in the late 19th century. A park was established on its site. Opposite the church is the town's third oldest building - the Mince House, translating into either coin or mint. Curator Stanislava Tejckova:

"The building is called Mince because it used to house the Royal Master in the mid-14th century, whose task was to collect tax from miners in the form of gold. Another, less likely, explanation is that the building used to house a mint. This has never been confirmed by historians. Charles IV was on the throne at the time and he had his mint in Prague. So it seems unlikely that there was another one in nearby Jilove."

Mince House

One of the owners of the Mince House was Edward Kelly, the famous Irish alchemist who moved to the Czech lands in the sixteenth century, where he died in the court of Rudolph II. Attracted by the gold, he acquired several estates in the Jilove region in 1590. Among the houses he bought in the town was the Mince House:

"He wasn't very popular among the town residents because he behaved like a pompous uncultured person and was after the gold. Legend has it that he hired a few miners under the pretence of building him a cellar. But the miners soon realised that they were building a tunnel. So, they built another parallel one that bordered with the neighbouring house. Through a window that they created, they had the maid from the neighbouring household carry away the gold in a special compartment in the bottom of a bucket. Whenever the miners left for the day, Mr Kelly secretly checked the walls of the tunnel for gold and was very disappointed to find very little of it. He decided to close it down. Today, whenever we can't find something at the museum, we say that Mr Kelly's ghost who is still wandering about the building, has hidden it."

The archaeological excavations

Since 1958, the Mince House has been home to the town museum, which was established in the late 19th century thanks to local resident Leopold Cihak. Leopold Cihak was a merchant and the town's first historian. He had a large collection of some 400 objects and several hundred documents depicting the region's history and offered it to the town in December 1891 on the condition that it would establish a museum.

Today, mainly thanks to donations, the museum has some 65,000 exhibits. Visitors learn all about the history of the region through archaeological findings, some of which are 250,000 years old, documenting pre-historic settlements. Another permanent exhibition shows excavations from the dissolved Benedictine monastery on nearby Ostrov Island in the middle of the Vltava River. Concerts of chamber music and choral singing are also held in the summer in the museum's courtyard.

But the museum mainly focuses on the region's gold-mining history. Museum director Marketa Nesporova:

The gold from Jilove

"Our permanent exhibition on gold mining shows how gold is used and what purposes it can serve. It also takes you through the history of gold mining - what it was like in the Middle Ages, how the Celts acquired gold through panning, because there was a lot of it then. We also have a collection of lamps and other lighting equipment that was used in the mines, and there's a collection of minerals from the Jilove region. In the museum's courtyard, visitors can try for themselves what it was like to pan gold."

[Panning gold in the museum's courtyard] "Okay, we're in the museum's courtyard, shovelling what looks like gravel to me onto a pan. The director of the museum, Marketa Nesporova has volunteered to wash the gold in the freezing water - and she's looking like quite a professional there...although looking at how fast she's going, I'm a little worried that most of the gold will spill over the pan into the water...okay, apparently that won't happen because the gold is heavy and moves down toward the bottom of the pan, while the lighter material flows over the sides. Looks like a relatively easy process...and one that's brought a result - we've actually found particles of gold or rather gold dust"!

In Bohemia alone, gold was found on the surface or underground at over 700 places. Today, however, it is no longer mined in the Czech Republic for several reasons; it is no longer profitable in most places and the environmental costs are also considered too high. So, almost forty years after the last gold mines were closed down, Jilove is today a quiet country town. Visitors now come for a day out in the country - bus lines to and from Prague are integrated into the city's public transport network. And should you be in the area, you should certainly stop by - the beautiful countryside with thick forests and hills is ideal for hiking - or just visit the town museum and take your chance at getting rich by trying out a bit of gold panning...