17th C. Water System Discovered at Polish Monastery

KIELCE, POLAND—Archaeologists have found a water system dating to the seventeenth century at the twelfth-century Swiety Krzyz monastery on Holy Cross Mountain. In a central courtyard of the monastery, they found the upper part of a cistern that had been carved from the rock. It collected rainwater and groundwater for the use of the monks and their garden, and it would have provided enough water to sustain them during a drought. In the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a brick reservoir was added to the system. “We have uncovered the system for collecting and storing water, expanded over three centuries. Similar solutions have never been discovered anywhere else,” said archaeologist Czeslaw Hadamik.