Stone wonders of the Czech Republic: Glass from a shooting star, crystal drops of blood and alchemy for export

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Czech Republic is famous not only for beer and medieval wars, but also for its magic glass, heavenly origin with the Vltavin stone and a special depth of color with pomegranate. Indeed, this is a country in which there is something to build crystal castles - but the material on them is still being sold for souvenirs, without even thinking that the stones that have fallen from the sky will not be enough forever and the miracle will end one day.

Vltavin, heavenly stone

The Czech Republic is the only place on earth where the vltavin is mined, a semi-precious stone that shimmers with shades of green commonly seen in bottle glass. To many, this stone seems even more beautiful untreated - it has gas bubbles inside, and the surface goes with smoothed wrinkles. It is impossible to find the vltavin anywhere else under any circumstances, since these are fragments of a meteorite that fell into the Czech Republic fifteen million years ago. Literally pieces of a shooting star.

The vltavin gained wide popularity after the international exhibition in Prague in 1891, at which products from it were shown, but it was first described a hundred years earlier. The Czech professor Josef Mayer erroneously classified the vltavin as a green chrysolite of volcanic origin. Only later did scientists recognize tektite in the stone, that is, melted meteorite silicate glass. There are many tektites on the ground, but they are always black or brown stones. Vltavin is a unique case of brightly colored tektite.

At the same time, the composition of the stone is rather boring: eighty percent of silica and ten percent of aluminum. In addition to color, gas bubbles inside make it unique: these are rare gases that usually live at an altitude of twenty-five kilometers from the surface of the earth. It is believed that in the Czech Republic there is still a vltavin of about three thousand tons, and that's all - in small fragments no more than three centimeters at the widest point.

People on the Czech land made jewelry from the vltavin back in the Stone Age. Around him is full of beliefs. It scares away evil spirits, helps to fall into a trance and foresee the future, relieves constant headaches and drives away fear.

A variety of Czech cheese with herbs is named in honor of the Vltavin, and a piece of rough stone adorns the crown presented by the Czechs for the tenth anniversary of the reign of Elizabeth II.

Czech garnets

Garnet is a stone that, unlike vltavin, can be mined in many countries of the world. Czech is distinguished by a particularly clear and deep dark red color. Czech jewelry with pomegranate is very much appreciated by lovers of the vampire theme all over the world: they seem to be made from frozen drops of blood.

Surprisingly, pomegranates are mined exactly in the same place as the Vltavin - on the Vltava River. Perhaps it is the reflection of the mystery of the heavenly stone that falls on the Czech garnet, giving it a mystical halo.

I must say that garnets are different: precious and semi-precious. Czech is considered precious. From the point of view of geology, it is pyrope, while the semiprecious garnet is almandine.

In the eighteenth century, Empress Maria Theresa, the ruler of Bohemia, Austria and Hungary, decided that the pomegranate from the Vltava should be a national treasure and banned the export of stones. All decorations from it were to be made within her lands.

When the elderly Goethe, having come to the water for treatment, fell in love with a young girl and wanted to impress her, he not only wrote poetry to her, but also ordered a set of almost half a thousand of the purest Czech pomegranates. Almost all more or less large jewelry with the Vltava pomegranate contains many small stones - exactly in pieces no more than eight millimeters, as if the drops of blood had suddenly turned to stone, and it lies in the river sand and earth around the river.

Unlike vltavin, Czech garnet is cut. He plays in the light with wonderful shades of red, so mesmerizing that he, like a vltavina, is sometimes credited with mystical properties. For example, even in the days of Goethe, it was recommended to wear it on oneself in order to calm the melancholy or … to kindle a passion for love. That is probably why Goethe chose jewelry with a pomegranate as a present for the girl.

Now tourists are often trying to sell African almandine instead of local pomegranate, which is much cheaper. There are several ways to understand that a piece of jewelry is not made from the Vltava pomegranate. First, the size is too large. Secondly, there is a small number of faces - fifty-six are traditionally applied to a grain of Czech garnet, and only twelve to almandine. Thirdly, a special certificate is attached to Czech garnet jewelry, and something more specific than just the word “garnet” will be indicated there.

Magic glass

The Czech Republic is known not only for starry, but also for man-made glass - colored Bohemian and crystal, repeating the properties of natural rock crystal. Colored Bohemian glass has long competed in beauty with Italian designs. The Czechs imported milky white (with tin), ruby red (with gold), purple (with manganese), yellow (with silver), blue (with cobalt), blue (with copper), green (with iron) and black (with chrome) glass. One list of the main coloring ingredients sounds like a list from an alchemist's laboratory! And when the Czechs were hiding the secret of production, many suspected that they were indeed resorting to alchemy. Moreover, it was much stronger than its Venetian counterpart. Isn't it magic?

Czech colored glass was bought for stained-glass windows by half of the European powers. Now, dishes and interior elements are often made from it. Sometimes - vintage art deco jewelry.

Italians began to call glass crystal in ancient times. This title was awarded only to one variety - which does not have a natural greenish tint for glass. The Italians kept the secret of making perfectly transparent hand-made crystal to themselves, but in the seventeenth century the Czech glassblower Michael Müller managed to invent the same. Only, as it turned out later, his recipe was different: he continued the "alchemical" list of colored Bohemian glass. Müller used lead as one of the ingredients.

Lead not only made the glass perfectly transparent, but also increased its plasticity during processing, so that it became possible to create products according to the most complex patterns. Hand-made Czech crystal emitted the purest ringing at any light blow. The rays of the sun passing through it were refracted by multi-colored glare. Finally, the lead made the glass noticeably heavier than usual. These properties are characteristic of Czech crystal to this day.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that the founder of the Swarovski company, whose rhinestones are distinguished by a special play of light and are valued on a par with precious jewelry, once emerged from the family of crystal crafts of the master.

There are many more miracles in the Czech Republic. The secret of the Czech Jihlava dungeons: Who dug these catacombs, and why today many are afraid to go down in them.