#cimburk

LOCATIONS — 263*/262 — Zimburg

Settlement in the area dates back to the late Stone Age (about 3000 BC). Today, however, only traces of an early medieval fortified settlement remain in the form of remnants of moats and visible ramparts. Some historians (as well as folk legends) claim that Zimburg (Cimburk) Castle, owned by the Lords of Zimburg, once stood here and was even perhaps their ancestral home. Later, the descendants of the family built two more castles with the same name: Cimburk in Trnávka and Nový Cimburk in Koryčany. Unfortunately nothing remains from the original castle. Hence why some historians claim that such a castle never stood here and the settlement rather got its name from the nearby mine that belonged to the Zimburg family. Nevertheless, we decided to depict it in the game.

TRIVIA

— The first settlement of Cimburk reaches back to Eneolithic times, perhaps as far as 3600 BC. A ditch with a gap for a gate shows that the fort was equipped with a 30 metres long rampart, as well as pits, storage rooms and kilns outside the fortification. In the 7th and 6th centuries BC, a new ditch with a moat and a palisade was built, and the same ditch was still used to protect a Slavic hillfort in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. Another remnant from this Slavic time is an ice cellar used to store food and keep it cool for summer. It wasn't until the construction of a shooting range for the local infantry regiment in the 19th century that the settlement was discovered – unfortunately only after the construction caused irreparable damage to the site. For how long the fort has carried the name Cimburk is hard to say, but it certainly lent the name to a mill down by the Vrchlice River, the Cimburk Mill, in old sources also referred to as "mlýn pod hradištěm", the mill under the hillfort. Records about the mill go back until 1682, although it might have existed since the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance. A little bit upstream, about halfway between Malešov and Kutná Hora, lies Velký rybník, the Great Pond (originally known as Lower King's Pond), used for the nearby mines since the Middle Ages and to power the mills in the Vrchlice valley. It was thus the responsibility of the Kutná Hora Millers' Society to restore the pond and fund a dam, and in the 1930s, to pay for said dam's repair. At this time, the Cimburk Mill was owned privately by a woman called Terezie, or Réza, Petránková, and it hadn't been used for grinding in a long time. Still, Réza Petránková was meant to pay her share. She sold her field, the last means for her livelihood, to afford it. Shortly after, the mill burned down. Réza Petránková died in a burgher poorhouse in Kutná Hora. Today the mill presents as a romantic ruin, overgrown by trees and ivy.