Miloš Dudáš
The monuments of Žilina and its surroundings
Next year commemorates the 800th anniversary of the
first written document about Žilina, a town situated in northwest Slovakia. The
chronicle of the Nitra district administrator of 1208 mentions a smaller
settlement area entitled Terra de Selinan. The first reference about Žilina as a
town dates from 1312, although the original was lost. Probably the most famous
document, which in the Middle Ages solved national disputes over the city
council membership between the German and Slovak ethnicities, was the
Privilegium pro Slavis issued by the Hungarian King Louis I the Great in 1381.
The historical core of Žilina is the quadratic
Mariánske Square with a network of streets, which began to develop in the 13th
century. The market square with a customary built-up area came about after the
German settlers arrived at the beginning of the 13th and 14th centuries. The
square is framed with storied houses with saddle roofs and brick shields. Open
arcades (the so-called laubne) can be found on the ground floor of the houses,
which sometimes run together in two side streets, creating an unforgettable
genius loci. The construction of a Jesuit monastery and church in the middle of
the 18th century partially violated the original medieval urban landscape of the
square, but on the other hand, it enriched its architecture with a new dominant
feature. The baroque sculpture of the Virgin Mary (Immaculata), erected in the
middle of the square in 1738, celebrates the successful end of
re-catholicisation. Its base features a relief of St. Florian, who was there to
protect the town from frequent and destructive fires. The fires in the 19th
century, especially the one in 1886, caused architectural changes in the style
of the period’s eclecticism. The first third of the 20th century witnessed a
significant alteration to the square with functionalist buildings. More
important changes followed in the 1990s.
The sacral buildings in the town’s historical core
include the parish Roman Catholic church of the Holy Trinity, St. Paul’s
Conversion church and St. Barbara’s church. A bit further from the centre, a
younger building of the former Jewish synagogue can be found, a functionalist
evangelical church of Augsburg confession and only one and a half kilometres
distant is the oldest town building, the church of St. Stephen the King. The
rare wooden church of St. George, which is the westernmost wooden sacral
building in Slovak territory, stands in the town’s suburb of Trnové.
There are quite a few medieval castles to be found,
several kilometres from Žilina, all being among the most attractive monuments of
the upper Považie. The castle ruins of Varín and Strečno, which stand on the
former border between the Trenčín and Turiec districts, are the gate to Žilina’s
hollow basin. Protruding high above the river Váh and overseeing the narrow
Strečno canyon, they used to guard an important business route. Budatín Castle
is one of Žilina’s important architectural monuments. The nearby ford crossing,
at the crossroad of business routes from Hungary to Silesia, determined its
strategic position on the confluence of the rivers Váh and Kysuca. A watch- and
later residential-tower dominated the castle at the end of the 12th century,
around which stood buildings serving accommodation and representative purposes.
Two farmhouses and a naturally landscaped park completed the existing area.
Today’s neo-renaissance look of the castle is the result of a complex
reconstruction after the First World War. Lietava Castle was one of the largest
castles of the former Upper Hungary. This romantic ruin, built on the verge of
the 13th and 14th centuries, is one of the most beautiful medieval fortified
monuments in Slovak territory. Several kilometres in a beeline from Lietava are
the two ruins of smaller medieval castles – Súľov and Hričov. Their
architecture, however, is difficult to ascertain due to the surrounding rock
terrain.
Jozef Moravčík
New archaeological discoveries in
Žilina
Much archaeological research, helping to clarify the
oldest history of Žilina, has taken place in recent years. Between 1995 and 2005
the Corpus Christi chapel in the St. Stephen the King church was gradually
researched, as was the church itself and Mariánske Square, where several brick
and wooden items were found. Also the parish church of the Holy Trinity and the
medieval ditch surrounding the historical centre of the town were explored. The
Žilina chronicle recorded a lot of news on the Corpus Christi chapel in 1423,
1489 and 1508, but until recently nothing was known about its location. The
terrain adjustments performed south of the St. Stephen the King church disrupted
a building measuring 5 by 4.8 metres, with a small apse on the western side (2
by 1.6 m). They identified 80 graves under the building’s foundations and in the
vicinity and estimated the building’s origin to be between the 14th and 15th
century. It most probably existed until the first half of the 16th century. When
they pulled it down, they used its material to build a new chapel, which is
standing there even now. A unique bronze ring with a Latin text from the 12-13th
century was found in one of the graves. The chapel’s inner space was filled in
with skeleton remains from other disrupted graves; they had been placed there at
least from the beginning of the 13th century up to the beginning of the 20th
century.
The St. Stephen the King church is one of the oldest
sacral buildings. Archaeological researches date it to the beginning of the 13th
century, which corresponds to the first written record about Žilina from 1208.
The church was built in Romanesque style and survived without great change until
the middle of the 18th century (1762), when the large Baroque reconstruction
took place. The entrance was shifted from the original southern to western side
and the initial flat ceiling was replaced with a baroque vaulting. The
Romanesque windows remained walled under today’s roof and have been substituted
with large windows. In the church’s nave, mainly its northern half where the
research took place, only graves from the 18th century were found. The St.
Stephen the King church is situated in Dolné Rudiny. Six or seven medieval
settlements, dated by ceramic findings between the 10th and 13th centuries, were
found in its surroundings at a range of between 0.8 and 2.3 km.
During the archaeological research of the town’s
historical core in 1995, three bricked buildings were discovered right in the
centre of Mariánske Square. At least five other wooden items, which probably
served the foreign salesmen for storing their goods, were found around them. The
Žilina citizens had been granted the right to organise regular markets (fairs)
since 1357. Therefore, there can be no doubt that the objects discovered at
Mariánske Square served those participating in the markets. Also a system of
water distribution that was built in 1613, using wooden pipes, was discovered.
After it was broken, the citizens built two wells in the square, which worked
until the beginning of the 20th century. During the square research, two levels
of the original paving made of flat river stones were detected. It can be
assumed that by the end of the first third of the 18th century, in connection
with erecting the Immaculata sculpture (1738) at least part of the square was
paved.
The church of the Holy Trinity is situated east of
Žilina’s historical core. The first written document comes from 1423. The
archaeologists searched the construction phases of the older church, which had a
square presbytery. Sixty-three graves, dated by coins from the beginning of the
17th and the end of the 18th centuries, were examined around the detected
foundations. The current church is a three-nave basilica with a polygonal
presbytery, the northern side of which features lilies from the time when the
Anjous held power in Hungary (1308 – 1387). It is possible that the church had
already stood there in the 14th century, even though it is specifically
mentioned in the first third of the 15th century.
Richard Marsina
Žilina in the Middle
Ages
It can be assumed that there has been a settlement
in Žilina since the period between the 5th and the 6th centuries, which is some
seven centuries earlier than the oldest authentic written record that has been
preserved. One cannot exclude the possibility that the continuous settlement is
even older because of the preserved pre-Slavic name of the region. When looking
at Žilina’s geographic location, this consideration comes as no surprise. Žilina
lies on the confluence of one big river (Váh) and two smaller rivers (Kysuca and
Žilinka), which join at Žilina’s regional border. The water flow is
interconnected through peaks and troughs but in the main with the large massif
of Hradisko. The road network has developed there since ancient times; Žilina
serving as a natural junction from four different directions. Historians
consider St. Stephen the King church, with its late-Roman and early-Gothic
elements from the first third of the 13th century, to be the oldest historical
evidence of Žilina. Nevertheless, it has been proved that the northern part of
the medieval town had been continuously settled in since before the beginning of
the 13th century. Back then the Old Žilina had already been the centre of the
region, and most probably also a market place. The boundary customs stations of
the Hungarian kingdom were built at that time and one of them was situated near
the border with Silesia in the wider Žilina area, another one being found at
Budatín. In the 13th century, the settlement of southern Silesia (the Tešín
area) thickened, which increased the frequency of movement on the old route
joining the Hungarian kingdom with Silesia, making it more significant
economically.
New settlers came this way to Žilina with German
(Magdeburg) rights from the Tešín area, including the heredity reeve. At the
beginning of the 14th century Žilina functioned as a town and the town court
already worked as an appellate court for older as well as newly established
villages, which followed Žilina (initially Tešín) rights. Along with the
heredity reeve, there was the community of townsmen, who received first rights
from the King Charles I of Hungary (also called Charles Robert, Carobert and
Charles I Robert) on July 12, 1321, during his stay in Žilina. Apart from
economic privileges, such as freeing the town from paying road tax, craftsmen
and fishermen were granted the mileage privilege, which was still a rare thing
in Slovakia. Wealthy Žilina townsmen worked as locators – founders of new
villages. Following the ban by the Hungarian King, Luis I, to use Tešín as an
appellate jurisdiction, their battle ended with Queen Mary’s Privilege issued on
June 2, 1384, stating that Žilina was to use the appellate jurisdiction of
Krupina from now on. This privilege discloses further details regarding Žilina’s
legal and economic situation. It used to be the so-called free town despite
being headed by a heredity reeve, whose rights were partially restricted, mainly
when it came to a property’s taxation. The heredity reeves of the 14th century
in Žilina were those people of noble origin, some of who also served significant
state functions. Throughout the 15th century Žilina townsmen tried to redeem
themselves from the heredity reeve legacy. They finally succeeded in 1509.
Before the battle of Mohács (1523), Žilina was no longer a royal town. It became
a town of aristocracy and remained so until the end of feudalism.
Tomáš Janura
Žilina – the crossroad of business routes
A castle was erected on the verge of the river Váh
in the second half of the 13th century. A settlement developed underneath, which
gradually became a significant crafts centre for the larger surrounding area.
The mileage privilege boosted craft development. It stated that only Žilina
citizens could perform crafts at a distance of one mile from the town. The
privilege of Luis I from 1357, with the right to organise markets, also helped
Žilina’s development. And it was Luis I again, who helped Žilina to link up with
more distant trade. He ordered the building of a road from Košice to the Váh
valley in 1364, on which a toll was collected at several places, including
Žilina. Sigismund of Luxemburg freed Žilina from paying taxes and tolls in 1414.
Matthias Corvinus of Hungary granted the town the privilege of holding an annual
market on the day of St. Michael, in 1458.
After Matthias Corvinus’ death and thanks to feudal
anarchy, the town finished up in the hands of the Strečno castle lordship. In
the second half of the 16th century, the town’s owners realised the significance
of its economic privileges and increased tax income. Žilina drapers received the
right to sell drapery from King Maximilian in 1569. A year earlier, the king
granted Žilina the right to organise annual market at St. Blaise. The Žilina
drapers experienced a boom in the 17th century. The privilege of Matthias II
from 1610 helped it, as it enabled free trading with cloths of all colours at
home as well as abroad. Matthias II also granted the town commercial privileges
– the right of holding a market at St. Lucie (1609), and he freed the Žilina
citizens from paying tolls throughout the entire Hungarian kingdom (1609). The
town received more privileges during the reign of Leopold I: in 1657 he
permitted cattle markets to take place and in 1659 he granted the right of “wet
toll”, which enabled Žilina citizens to collect tolls not only on the bridges
across the river Váh and Kysuca but also at the raft stations, built in case the
bridges were torn down by the water.
Charles III granted the townsmen the right to hold
market on the day of St. Stephan The King, in 1712. In the 18th and 19th
centuries the town was left to deteriorate and lose its dominant position. New
Žilina development started with the construction of the Košice-Bohumín railway
at the beginning of 1970s. The most important medieval road at the town’s
territory was the royal route to Silesia, which led through a bridge above the
river Váh. The wooden bridge is mentioned for the first time at this place in
1499. The road continued from the bridge in the direction to the town, to the
suburb of Kálov. The Kysuce road today follows the initial road’s line, along
with its radius. The upper part of Kálov (today’s Street of J. M. Hurban) ends
at a small square before the Lower Gate, which was demolished after the fire in
1848. The Považská road, heading west, used to join the Silesian road in front
of the Lower Gate. The so-called magna via or Košice road used to
lead to the town from the eastern side. The merchants entered the Žilina
cadastre next to the salt warehouses and royal customs house (from 1763) with a
rafts’ dockyard. The current street managed to preserve its shape thanks to a
cemetery built for the plague victims in its southern area in 1679. This has
been the town’s cemetery since 1707. The road continued right towards the town’s
fortifications and turned north before reaching them, in front of the Franciscan
monastery, where it joined the Silesian road. The local road heading to Rajec
entered the town from the south. At the place of today’s large roundabout, it
joined the town’s road leading to the municipality of Závodie and from there it
headed to a circuit around the town’s fortifications. The circuit joined all
four mentioned business roads.
Michal Jurecký
Franciscans in Žilina in the 18th century
The arrival of the members of the Order of
Friars Minor – Ordo Fratrum Minorum, OFM – to Žilina and its surroundings is
connected with a strong re-catholisation, which was led by Jesuits in the town
since the first half of the 17th century. The confession situation in Žilina in
the 17th century was affected by the battle between the evangelical sacral
community, mainly represented by townsmen, and Catholics, who found their
support in aristocrats. The parish church of the Holy Trinity changed hands
between the Evangelists and Catholics. Jesuits temporarily settled in Žilina in
1686 and worked there until the order was abolished in 1773. The Franciscans
stayed in Žilina between 1704 and 1734. They first lived at the town’s square
and later moved to suburban houses donated by nobleman Paul Esterházy and later
George Erdődy. Since Jesuits were already in town, the Franciscans wanted to be
closer to the people outside of the town’s fortifications. A church and
monastery was built at the Lower Gate, sacrificed to St. Barbara. The town
definitively allocated the territory to the Franciscans in 1721. The church was
built in 1730 and then the building of the monastery started. The Church of St.
Barbara is a one-nave construction with rectangular presbytery and sacristy. It
is the first baroque sacral building in Žilina. A main altar from 1730 dominates
the church. All altars are of baroque style with original sculptures, however,
without the original altar paintings. Those come from the end of the 19th
century and are the work of friar Konrád Švestka, a painter, woodcarver and
restorer. Calvary was installed in 1734. The Church of St. Barbara with its
underground crypts served as a place for burying Franciscan and secular priests,
as well as significant townsmen who asked for it, until 1778. The church organ
consists of two instruments – the large organ, which is placed above the
church’s entrance and was finished in 1734; and the little organ, which sits on
chorus minor and is younger, as the choir started to be built only in
1739. Both are the work of leading organ-builder Peregrín
Verner.
The number of monks stabilised at 40, in 1782. The
registers talk about friars-craftsmen – working as woodcarvers, carpenters,
cooks, bakers, gardeners and tailors. It is also necessary to mention leading
musicians in 1741 – 1750, such as the mentioned Peregrín Verner. Baroque
composers Juraj Zrunek and Edmund Paška also worked there. Some Franciscans were
historians, such as Vojtech Gazda and Hugolín Gavlovič. A wooden sculpture of
St. Barbara placed above the monastery’s entrance in 1748 was replaced by a
stony one in 1773. After the St. Barbara church was built, the monastery
functioned as a small farm. There were granaries, storage for cereals, farm
buildings and stables. A tailor’s workshop is mentioned in the records from
1773. A fruit and vegetable garden was also part of the monastery.
Miloš Dudáš
Evangelical church of Augsburg confession in
Žilina
The Evangelical church choir of Augsburg confession
in Žilina was founded when the Reformation began to spread through Slovakia. The
majority of the inhabitants confessed to Protestantism in the 17th century. The
arrival of Jesuits to Žilina in the middle of the 17th century and the
establishment of their first mission station in 1686 began to gradually change
their dominant position. Life had significantly worsened for them, when Paul
Esterházy, a keen re-catholisation promoter, became Žilina landowner a year
later. He forced the evangelical citizens to accept Catholicism with strict
regulations. When approving candidates for the reeve’s office he made sure that
there was always a catholic in the town’s leadership.
When Evangelists were banned from meeting in the
parish church, they built a small wooden house of worship in 1704. The history
sources reveal that in 1709 they built another wooden house of worship. In June
1710 Paul Esterházy decided to allocate premises for Žilina Franciscans and
after pulling down the second house of worship in 1719, the Franciscans most
probably used the construction material for building the new St. Barbara church.
The intensive work of the two catholic
religions in the town meant that the number of Evangelists was dramatically
lowered. Only a few dozen believers confessed their evangelical faith in Žilina
in 1730 and almost nobody in the middle of the 19th century. It is not
surprising that in such conditions the evangelical church choir in Žilina
perished completely and the town became explicitly catholic. It was not before
the end of the 19th century, when the situation of Žilina Evangelists gradually
stabilized, that their number slowly increased and the efforts to repeatedly
create an independent church choir became real. The church convention decided to
construct a cathedral and a parish building at its meeting on June 13, 1895. In
1903 they built a simple house of worship and vicarage. In 1921 new priest Fedor
Fridrich Ruppeldt (1886 – 1979) came to Žilina, emphasising the need to build a
bigger church. In 1930 he asked the town to allocate him a piece of land free of
charge. However, because the town’s representatives were not keen on the idea,
they sold him the land twice as high as they would have to other private owners.
The Evangelists later found a more suitable and larger place near the town’s
cemetery. Getting the necessary permission for the lands’ interchange, along
with court delays, was to last until May 1934. Nevertheless, the church had put
up a post for an architectural design of the church as well as a vicarage one
year ahead. From four proposals, they selected the project of the contemporarily
famous architect Milan Michal Harminc (1869 – 1964). The construction works on
the church finished on October 10, 1936 and in October 1938 they started
building the new parish in the same functionalist style as the church. After
long and strenuous efforts, Žilina’s Evangelic choir of Augsburg confession had
thus finally managed to built a textbook example of the architectural modern
style in the first half of the 20th century.
Marián Mrva – Andrej Ferko
Považské Museum 3D
online
The uniqueness of the traditional Slovak tinker’s
craft has made it an interesting subject for documentation and presentation. The
first tinker exhibition took place in Dlhé Pole at the end of the1930s. It
formed the basis for a specialised museum established in Žilina in 1942. This
was the first step towards creating a worldwide centre for documenting and
researching the craft of the tinker, in today’s Považské múzeum in Žilina. The
real expansion of documentation and research, however, did not begin before
1989, when the tinkers’ fund dominated the museum collection for some time. Over
6,000 tinkers’ artefacts, in more than 135,000 collection funds, represent only
a small portion. Nevertheless, it is the largest collection of its kind in the
world (the second largest is in France, in private hands).
Apart from the exhibition and ensuing publicity, the
international meetings of tinker masters were an important element in the
propagation and research of the tinker’s work. Since 1990 these meetings became
the place, where a tinker’s craft and art were adapted to the period’s
requirements and where the wire as a material came to the fore. The year of
1992, when the first scientific conference entitled Tinkery as a Craft, Art and
Business took place, was an important milestone directing tinker documentation
to a new quality. At the same time a new exposition was opened to public at
Budatín castle, which introduced the history of tinkers in an untraditional way.
The penetrative arrival of computers in the first half of the 1990s gave the
museum workers the idea of building an electronic databank – a large information
database about tinkery. It was to include a list of collections and documents,
masters’ names, literary sources, articles and artistic works with a tinker
theme, as well as other notes about the craft’s history. It was to serve as an
information centre for specialists, students, tinker enthusiasts as well as the
general public. The museum’s strategy for attracting mainly young visitors was
via a multimedia presentation of tinker memorabilia using high tech information
systems. The project of an applied research, Považské Museum 3D Online, is
co-financed by the Education Ministry of the Slovak Republic. The first public
presentation took place at Nostalgia Expo 2006 exhibition in Bratislava, where
the first Slovak interactive virtual multimedia museum was exhibited. The
interactive multimedia kiosk with a touch screen was developed at the Comenius
University in Bratislava in technical cooperation with the Prover Company and is
to be installed in publicly accessible, roofed, guarded and heated places. The
kiosk can be attached to an Internet or data projector and used for a group of
museum visitors to operate the projection.
Michal Šimkovic
The story of rescuing Lietava
castle
Lietava is one of the most valuable of Slovak
castles. This is mainly due to the good condition of the ruin, mounted into the
picturesque surroundings of the Strážovské hills. The castle was built shortly
after the invasion of the Tartars in the second half of the 13th century. At the
beginning of the 14th century, the castle ended up as the property of Matthew
Csák III of Trenčín and became the centre of his province. In 1360 King Luis of
Anjou donated Lietava to the country’s judge Stephen Bebek. His descendants
owned the castle until the end of the century, when King Sigismund of Luxemburg
took it away from them. Duke Ctibor temporarily owned Lietava at the beginning
of the 15th century when the Bebeks’ gained it back. In the 14th and the first
half of the 15th centuries, the castle was enlarged with new residential
buildings, a small courtyard and a rectangular palace, which was joined to the
older castle with a fortification, which ran around the cliff’s edge. Paul
Kinizsi became the castle’s owner in 1474. He significantly enlarged and
reconstructed it during the 20 years it was in his ownership. Probably before
the end of the 15th century Lietava ended up in the hands of the influential
Zápoľský family, who donated it to their supporter Nicolaus Kostka in 1512. Farm
buildings and a chapel with a late-gothic vaulting were added to Lietava in the
first half of the 16th century. After Kostka’s death, the royal chamber donated
the castle to Francis Thurzo. He unified the complex of the upper castle into a
large exhibition palace, which he extended with another residential floor. The
castle had at least 90 rooms in the 17th century and its roof was covered with
shingle. Another layer of fortification, with a substantial entrance gate
building, a corner cannon bastion and a smaller semicircular bastion on the
northern side, was built during the second half of the 16th and first half of
the 17th centuries.
In 1621 the estate was divided into four parts,
which weakened its maintenance interest. The castle was only a storage place for
grain at the end of the 17th century. The mobiliari went missing at the
beginning of the 18th century, only the archive remained. The castle slowly
turned into ruins; neither repaired nor conserved. Despite all that, Lietava
castle was found as a compact ruin at the start of the 21st century, the value
of which increases with its authenticity. Attempts to rescue the castle started
in 1999, when the Association for the Lietava Castle Preservation was formed.
Works on the castle started in 2003. Thanks to realistically set goals and close
cooperation with conservationists and experts, this special volunteers’
initiation in Slovakia will restore the castle to its original form.
Annual Prize of the Monuments and Museums review for
2006 in the Discovery – Finding Category
Karol Pieta – Peter Roth
A princely tomb from
Poprad-Matejovce
When constructing the Poprad-Matejovce
industrial park, an archaeological research was performed by the
Podtatranské Museum in Poprad (led by P. Roth). In spite of regular
investigations in a seemingly fruitless area, the largest discovery was revealed
coincidentally. A wooden rustic house built of well-preserved massive timbers
was found 250-300 centimetres deep, in groundwater. On account of the uniqueness
of the discovery, the museum invited archaeologists from the Slovak Academy of
Sciences (T. Kolník, K. Pieta) to explore the construction in detail. Furniture
parts were found at the eastern wall and when lifting the beams covering a
chamber, a wooden-frame construction, with a destroyed saddle shelter, was found
inside. Samples were taken on site for archaeological-botanic and dendrological
analysis, as well as radiocarbon dating. The Leibnitz-Labor für Altersbestimmung
und Isotopenforschung, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany)
assessed the year of the circuit log-house’s sample at 380 ± 27 years AD.
The outer construction had rustic walls from
chiselled wood, which were isolated from the sub-base with a filling of beech
wooden coal. Carefully worked beams reached a size of 25 by 15 by 380, or 280
cm. The joints were made with simple notches. Timbers of 440 cm covered the
chamber. The log-house stood on a platform of 12 half-rounded beams placed next
to each other at a depth of 495 cm (673.52 metres above see level) from the
original ground level. Identical with the tomb’s axis, it lied in a north-south
direction. The inner tomb’s chamber (sarcophagi), measuring 170 by 290 cm,
featured a frame construction with corner columns and central wall cross-beams,
which covered very precisely chiselled boards embedded into the notches of
joining beams. This construction was made of larch.
The significance of the princely tomb, not to
mention the quite unusual terrain conditions in Central Europe – working with
wood and brittle organic material in a wet environment – imposed extra demands
on the procedure and organisation of the research, which lasted for four months
and finished in November 2006. An international commission decided on its
working process and goals. The experts also reached agreement on a vital issue:
this unique tomb cannot be preserved in the place of origin. When the rescue
works finish, it will be dismantled and after conservation, presented in a
protected museum space. The international research commission, together with the
head of the research and fellow conservationists, proposed cooperation from the
associated museums in Schleswig (Germany). This significant European institution
has adequate laboratories and experts. It is also capable of conserving a large
volume of exceptionally demanding findings.
In Slovakia’s archaeological experience, even the
construction-technical dismantling of basically fully preserved 1600 years old
wooden architecture, as well as the primal treatment and special wrapping of the
construction parts and individual artefacts, was quite unusual. The initial
rescue of this rare monument was only possible thanks to the financial support
of Slovakia’s Culture Ministry, with cooperation from the self-government region
of Prešov. All organic materials from the tomb, estimated to weigh 10 – 12
tonnes, were transported to laboratory halls and freezing boxes in Schleswig on
November 22, 2006.