The Lost City Found in a Polish Lake!

0:00 A Discovery
2:39 The Lusatian Urnfield Culture
4:53 Bronze Age Biskupin
8:25 The Site Today

The Lost City Found in a Polish Lake!

In 1933 one of the greatest archaeological sites ever uncovered in Poland was first discovered in the central part of the country by a schoolteacher by the name of Walenty Szwajcer. He came across it quite fortuitously. Some of Szwajcer’s students noticed wooden remnants sticking out of a watery marsh near the village of Biskupin in the floodplain of Lake Biskupin. They brought it to their teacher’s attention, who was knowledgeable enough about archaeology and history to realise from an initial inspection of the site that this was potentially a major historical site.

Sources:

Karol Dzięgielewski, ‘The Rise and Fall of Biskupin and its Counterparts’, in Aleksandra Rzeszotarska Nowakiewicz, et al. (eds.), The Past Societies: Polish Lands from the First Evidence of Human Presence to the Early Middle Ages (Warsaw, 2017), pp. 341–366.

J. Kostrewski, ‘Biskupin: An Early Iron Age Village in Western Poland’, in Antiquity, Vol. 12, No. 47 (September, 1938), pp. 311–317.

J. Kostrewski, ‘Biskupin’, in Scientific American, Vol. 160, No. 3 (March, 1939), pp. 154–156.

Danuta Piotrowska, ‘Biskupin 1933–1996: Archaeology, Politics and Nationalism’, in Archaeologia Polona, Vols. 35–36 (1997/98), pp. 255–285.