„Archeologiczny kilometr Wisły”. Dziedzictwo narodowe wydobyte z Wisły w ramach interdyscyplinarnych badań

In August 1656 a transport filled with marble stolen from Villa Regia (now Casimir Palace) sailed away from Warsaw. Around two and a half kilometres later, due to low water level in the Vistula river, the boats ran aground. This event as well as a threat of attack from John Casimir’s army entering Warsaw triggered a decision on sinking the load. Some pieces of marble were thrown into the water, some were left on sandy islands. A couple of days later, the representatives of Warsaw authorities already began safeguarding the abandoned items. Some objects were hoisted from the Vistula’s bed and buried at the river bank. The area for studies has been determined on the basis of 17th-century reports and archive materials from the beginning of the 20th century. The National Heritage Board of Poland joined the research in 2011. In sum, during archaeological works, nearly 20 tons of sculpted architectural decorations have been extracted. These objects were removed from the bottom in the area of several hundred square metres. We can suppose that hundreds of priceless monuments still remain in the delimited area. Due to the specificity of the bottom of the examined area, we presume that plenty of objects rest at a depth between several dozen centimetres and several metres. The research area corresponds to a natural stone reef and clay-stone thresholds, which means that a part of the sunk transport is found in a layer mixed with stones, gravel and sand. It results from previous studies that locating the above mentioned objects requires technologies that are unfortunately not available yet. However, what is important is the fact that parts of the same transport that were buried at the bank or in 17th-century sand patches can become naturally exposed by the flowing water. Taking into account the previous archaeological studies around the 517th kilometre of the Vistula river and the presence of a number of incidental national heritage objects, it seems legitimate to claim that a new archaeological site needs to be established in this very area. A Vistula reef along with stone thresholds creates a natural sieve in this place, which retains objects that definitely must include monuments that are priceless to our culture. In this place, during a three-day battle, hundreds of soldiers lost their lives and hundreds of military items, fragments of armament or cannons with their instrumentation were brought to rest on the bottom. It seems immensely important to safeguard protection to this “archaeological” kilometre of the river for the next decades.