Silver made Kutná Hora the second city of medieval Bohemia
A struggling monastery in Bohemia got lucky: silver was found nearby. Miners and settlers poured in, and within decades the new town of Kutná Hora was striking the kingdom's coins and rivalling Prague in wealth. When the ore ran out, it was left with a Gothic cathedral built to show off that fortune.
Cistercian monks from Bavaria founded Sedlec Abbey in 1142, the first house of their order in Bohemia. Its money troubles ended when silver turned up close by, drawing settlers largely from neighbouring German-speaking lands, and systematic mining began in 1260. The town first appears in writing in 1289. Its name comes from the mountain it grew on, and although legend links it to monks' hooded robes, a Middle High German word for a pit is the likelier root. Silver working here was not new, though: silver coins from about 985 to 995 have been found in a village now inside the town, and Celts had smelted copper ores on a nearby hill two millennia earlier.
In 1300 King Wenceslaus II issued a royal mining code setting out the legal and technical rules for running mines, and shortly afterwards the town became home to the central mint producing the Prague groschen. It grew into Bohemia's financial hub and its most important town after Prague. The mint operated in the Italian Court, a Gothic complex begun in 1260 that also served as a royal residence.
Wealth fuelled ambition. The Church of Saint Barbara, begun in 1385 to a design by Peter Parler, was meant to compete with the cathedral at Sedlec and even St Vitus in Prague, and it is now counted among Europe's great Gothic churches. Mining also disrupted water supplies, so in 1495 a large twelve-sided stone fountain was built as a drinking reservoir.
Decline set in over centuries. Flooding in the deepest shafts and poorer ore cut output in the 1530s, groschen production ended in 1547, the Thirty Years' War halted mining, and the mint shut for good in 1727. The legacy survived: the old centre, with Sedlec Abbey and its ossuary, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, and today tobacco and electronics factories sit alongside the tourist trade.
Source: Kutná Hora
