SOUTH BOHEMIA, CZECH REPUBLIC—Radio Prague International reports that archaeologists found a secret corridor while creating a 3-D scan of the Premonstratensian Monastery in the town of Milevsko. “We squeezed through the corridor with speleologists and at the end we found a sort of extended space,” said researcher Jiři Šindelář. “When we put all the facts together, the only explanation is that it is a corridor with a safe.” First constructed in the twelfth century, the monastery was burned down in the early fifteenth century during the Hussite Wars. Tradition indicates that the abbot of the monastery had hidden its valuables before the attack at Přibĕnice Castle, but the items went missing when the castle was also conquered. The researchers suggest some of those items may be found hidden in the rubble-filled secret corridor. Timbers in the corridor have been dated to the fifteenth century. The archaeologists also found a passageway with a staircase within a surviving twelfth-century wall, a niche with its original decorations, and illusory paintings of gothic windows. To read about the skeleton of a warrior that has long been at the center of conflicts over Czechoslovakia's national identity, go to "The Man in Prague Castle."
