Krzemionki Prehistoric Striped Flint Mining Region
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How it came to be
Krzemionki lies about 8 km north-east of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski in the Świętokrzyskie region of south-eastern Poland. From about 3900 BCE to about 1600 BCE people mined banded Jurassic flint here, mostly to make axes.
The miners belonged to the Funnelbeaker, Globular Amphora and Mierzanowice cultures, and work peaked between about 2500 and 2000 BCE. Along a belt 4.5 km long there are more than 4,000 shafts and pits, up to 9 metres deep, and Neolithic drawings are engraved on the walls of some galleries. Axes made from this flint travelled hundreds of kilometres.
The geologist Jan Samsonowicz found the mines in 1922, and the archaeologist Stefan Krukowski began excavating in 1923. The area became an archaeological reserve in 1967, and an underground visitor route opened on 11 June 1985. It was made a national historic monument in 1994 and inscribed as a World Heritage site on 6 July 2019.
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