History

Silver was discovered near Freiberg in 1168, triggering the first great medieval mining rush in Central Europe. Within decades, Freiberg had grown into a major city. The region’s silver financed the Wettin dynasty (rulers of Saxony) and later the Holy Roman Emperors. At peak production in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Erzgebirge supplied a significant fraction of all the silver circulating in Europe.

In 1516, an enormous silver deposit was discovered at Joachimsthal (today’s Jáchymov) on the Bohemian side of the mountains. The local lords began minting large silver coins there in 1519 — called Joachimsthaler. The name was shortened to Thaler, which then became Daler in Dutch and Scandinavian usage and eventually dollar in English. Every time someone uses the word dollar, they are speaking the echo of this mountain valley.

The Erzgebirge miners developed extraordinary technical solutions to the challenge of deep mining: ventilation systems, drainage tunnels (Stolln) kilometres long, and the Revierwasserlaufanstalt — a 100 km network of channels, ponds, and water wheels that harnessed the mountain streams to power pumping and crushing machinery across the entire region. This system, built from the 16th to 19th centuries, is one of the most sophisticated pre-industrial hydraulic engineering works in the world.

When the silver ran out in the 17th century, the miners turned to other ores — tin, cobalt, bismuth — and to cottage industries. Cut off from agricultural lowlands by the mountains, mining families developed intricate woodcarving and lace-making traditions through the long winter months. These crafts produced the carved wooden Christmas figures — pyramids with rotating blades, nutcrackers, smoking men — that exported worldwide from the 18th century and are now the globally recognised symbols of Christmas.

In the 20th century, Jáchymov’s uranium deposits (which had supplied Marie Curie’s research) made the Czech side strategically vital: after 1945, the Soviets ran forced-labour camps there mining uranium for nuclear weapons. This dark history layers over the centuries of silver and craft.