Seven centuries of mining beneath one town

Miedzianka in the Rudawy Janowickie mountains, a few kilometres from Kowary, was a mining town from the Middle Ages. The first mention of mining at this site comes from 1311, recorded in Latin as "cupri fodina", a copper mine. The settlement's name changed with successive waves of settlers and owners: Kupferberg in German, Polonised after the war to Miedzianka. The town received municipal rights in 1519.

At its peak, falling in the 16th century, according to historical accounts more than 160 shafts and adits were in operation in and around Miedzianka, extracting silver, tin and copper. The mining boom faded at the end of the 16th century, when the extraction techniques of the time could no longer keep up with the depth of the deposits. The town carried on, though without the grandeur of earlier centuries, and over time it also gained a reputation as one of the most beautifully situated places in the region.

The Russians return for uranium

After the Second World War it turned out that, alongside the old metal deposits, uranium ore also lay beneath Miedzianka. The area was taken over in complete secrecy by the Red Army, and extraction was carried out under the cover of an ordinary industrial plant, officially described as a paper factory. According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, around 600 tonnes of uranium were sent from Miedzianka to the USSR in 1949-1950.

The extraction was of a plunder-mining kind: it was carried out without shoring up the tunnels and without any regard for what lay above them, namely the town itself. Polskie Radio, citing the accounts of residents and regional historians, describes this directly as extraction carried out with no regard for the consequences for the buildings on the surface.

Houses that cracked before people's eyes

The effects of the plunder mining were visible to the naked eye. Over the years, cracks began to appear in walls in Miedzianka, along with subsidence of parts of the ground and damage to foundations, described in Polskie Radio material as a situation in which houses cracked before the eyes of the residents and walls fell away in whole sheets. The Russians withdrew from Miedzianka in 1952, flooding the exhausted tunnels with water, but the damage to the ground beneath the town remained.

The authorities did not decide to repair the cracking buildings. From the end of the 1960s, a process began in Miedzianka that local history remembers as the planned liquidation of the town: permits for renovations were stopped, and one building after another was declared at risk of collapse and demolished. What had for centuries been a mining town was turning, step by step, into a demolition site.

Resettlement and disappearance from the map

Residents were resettled gradually, as one house after another was declared unfit for habitation. According to Wikipedia, most of them ended up, around 1972, in nearby Jelenia Góra. Polskie Radio frames the timing differently, indicating that the town disappeared from the maps some twenty years after the Russians withdrew in 1952, which gives a similarly pivotal period in the early 1970s. The sources therefore differ on the exact date of the final liquidation, but they agree on the mechanism: it was not a single decision and a single resettlement action, but a process of demolishing house after house, stretched out over time.

Miedzianka itself formally lost its municipal rights and its status as an independent town, and most of its buildings ceased to exist. To this day, an account circulates among residents of the surrounding villages that unsecured, flooded corridors of the old mines still run beneath the former market square, though this is an oral account, not a confirmed geological or official fact.

What remains on the site today

Where a town several hundred years old once stood, today only a handful of buildings remain. Among the surviving structures are the ruins of a brewery and a few individual houses, now surrounded mostly by meadows and forest at the foot of the Rudawy Janowickie mountains. The area itself today serves mainly as a destination for sightseeing trips and a starting point for further trails in the Rudawy Janowickie and the Karkonosze (Giant Mountains), rather than as a town in the former sense of the word.

The history of Miedzianka is sometimes cited in the region as an example of how post-war uranium extraction carried out in secret in the Sudetes could literally change the landscape. Unlike neighbouring Kowary, where similar workings were opened to tourists after years, in Miedzianka the mining left behind mainly traces in the landscape and the memory of the resettled residents.