The Venediger of the Ore Mountains, and what the strangers really took away

In 1144 the abbey church of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, was consecrated. Its abbot, Suger, recorded that he had obtained an expensive "sapphire material" for the blue of its windows. Much later this glass was analysed chemically, together with blue glass from other French cathedrals. According to the specialist literature it contained an unusually high amount of bismuth, a signature that matches only two deposits, the Kinzig valley in the Black Forest and the Schneeberg in the Ore Mountains of Saxony. Yet no large-scale mining can be traced in either area at that time. Our new episode, the third in our series "Verschollen" (Lost), follows that gap.

Strangers who came in summer

In the Ore Mountains people long told stories about men who arrived in summer and disappeared again in autumn. They spoke a foreign language, climbed alone into the hills and came back carrying heavy sacks. The next year they did not return, and nobody knew exactly where they had been. They were called Walen, Welsche or Venediger, the last of which literally means Venetians.

The first reliable mention appears in 1523 in the Joachimsthal mining booklet by Hans Rudhardt, a technical text rather than a legend. Welsch simply means speaking a Romance language, not Venetian. There is no evidence that they actually came from Venice. The name Venediger was attached to them later by popular tradition, because Venice stood for wealth and distant trade. The legends are told from the Harz and the Black Forest all the way to Tyrol and Styria, and Christian Lehmann published a first collection of them in 1764. What were they taking away? Everyone assumed the answer was gold.

Books that were only attributed to them

The legend comes with books, the so-called Walen books, full of route descriptions, signs and alleged find spots. About 18 or 19 copies are known, and the first mention dates from 1542, by Caspar Bruschius. One booklet from Styria has 16 pages holding 134 directions to finds. Another copy even offers astrological advice on choosing lucky days. The places described are exaggerated or invented.

Two details change the picture. Most of these books date from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time when the strangers had long since become legend. And not a single one survives in Italian. Every known copy is in German. The so-called treasure maps of the Venediger were therefore in all likelihood not written by them at all. They were produced later and sold to treasure hunters. What was being sold was the hope of treasure.

The blue glass of Saint-Denis

The abbey church of Saint-Denis is regarded as the first Gothic building, and its windows were Suger's pride. His sapphire material sounds like a gemstone, but it was the raw material that colours glass a deep blue. That material is cobalt. In some deposits cobalt occurs together with bismuth, so a high bismuth content works like a chemical fingerprint of its origin.

Since no large-scale mining can be traced in the Kinzig valley or at the Schneeberg at that time, someone must have gathered the material at the surface and carried it off, without a mine and without leaving records. That is exactly what the legends describe. The link is an interpretation, though, not proof. Almost four hundred years lie between the consecration of the church and the first written mention of the Walen.

From silver thief to colour mill

Why did nobody else collect this ore? In the Schneeberg district the silver grew scarcer the deeper the miners followed it. Instead they hit more and more of an ore that looked almost exactly like silver ore but yielded no metal at the smelter. Smelting it released toxic arsenic and sulphur fumes. Such an ore was thought to be the work of an evil mountain spirit. The miners called it silver thief and Kobolt, after the goblin, along with a much cruder name. They threw it on the spoil heaps because they believed it was bewitched. Cobalt as an element was unknown to them.

So the ore lay on the heaps, free for the taking, with no mine and no mining rights required. Anyone who knew that this supposed rubbish was the raw material for blue glass only had to pick it up. This is the most widely held explanation for the gap. Lazarus Ercker, chief mining officer in Bohemia, is quoted from 1574 as writing that such grains carried no gold at all and served as an additive from which fine colours were made. Only in 1737 did the Swedish chemist Georg Brandt show that the ore contained a previously unknown metal. The miners' insult had been around for a long time, which is why element number 27 is still named after a mountain goblin.

When the silver ran out, the waste became a business. In 1610 Elector Christian concluded the first cobalt contract with the Dutch, and all cobalt mined in Schneeberg went to the electoral cobalt chamber. Between 1620 and 1640 silver output stalled completely, and cobalt alone kept mining in Schneeberg alive. In 1635, after mining and smelting had almost come to a standstill during the Thirty Years' War, Veit Hans Schnorr the Elder used a charter from the House of Schönburg to build the first larger colour mill in Saxony at Niederpfannenstiel near Aue, on the site of a hammer mill destroyed by Croats. By 1680 five more blue colour works had followed, among them Schlema and the Schindler works. They made smalt, a blue pigment, and zaffre as an intermediate product. From the 16th to the 18th century the western Ore Mountains were the European centre of cobalt processing.

What the orecast map knows

Within 25 kilometres of Annaberg and Marienberg the orecast map records, among other things, 1,632 points for copper, 1,268 for uranium and 1,164 for cobalt. These are not 1,164 mines but documented points along vein systems, because the data splits continuous ore veins into many single points. In the data this vein type is called BiCoNi veins, after bismuth, cobalt and nickel. Bismuth itself is not a raw material in the map, and the finding in the glass comes from glass analysis.

Within eight kilometres, the map counts 250 cobalt and 155 silver points around Schwarzenberg, and 194 and 200 around Schneeberg. Around Freiberg, the well-known silver town, there are 288 silver points and not a single cobalt point. These are two different districts, about 60 kilometres apart in the same mountain range. The map offers no evidence of gold here. Most entries with that word come from the Saxon mining authority's map of mining rights, where a single field lists thirteen permitted raw materials at once, which proves nothing about a find. Two more come from a US database and only have a rough location. You can see for yourself where the cobalt points lie around Schneeberg on the map.

Further east, in Deutschneudorf, the mayor had the Fortuna tunnel dug open in February 2008, because of a story his father had told him. Eight boreholes went ten metres deep each. People were looking for gold and art treasures from the Nazi era, and some even mentioned the Amber Room. Nothing was found, and today the site is a show mine.

A word on the pictures in the video. The Annaberg miners' altar of 1521 and the woodcuts from Agricola's "De re metallica" are genuine historical images. The windows come from Chartres and only stand as an example of the blue glass of the period. The scenes with the strangers, the pages from Walen books and the pictures of the abbot and of Lazarus Ercker are AI reconstructions and are labelled as such on screen.

Seeing it for yourself, without digging

Since 2019 the Ore Mountains mining region has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Schneeberg, Schlema and Aue with Niederpfannenstiel lie close together in the west of the range, and in Deutschneudorf you can visit the show mine. Please check opening times with the operators before you go.

Never enter old tunnels or shafts on your own, even if an entrance looks open. Spoil heaps and old mining traces can be archaeological monuments, so nobody digs there. In Saxony, searching for archaeological monuments requires a research permit, with or without a metal detector, and under the treasure trove rule ownerless finds belong to the Free State. The orecast map shows what is documented in the Ore Mountains, from cobalt to silver. The video tells the whole story in just over twenty minutes. Look, marvel, do not dig.

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