Archeologists find WWII bunker and centuries-old human remains

In April, at an apartment house construction site at Spokojna 10 street in Lublin, remains of two Wehrmacht soldiers were discovered, most likely dating back to July 1944, when Soviet troops had entered the city. Among the items found along with the skeletons, there were buttons, a helmet, a signet ring, and a name tag. Next to edge of the excavation slope, the ceiling of an underground structure were found, preliminarily identified as a bunker. This hypothesis was confirmed in late June, when wooden beams, and later walls and ceilings of the structure were uncovered.

Also found in the ground were countless water bottles produced in Austria and Czechoslovakia, as well as ammunition shells from German and Soviet weapons, which suggest that direct fights between Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers had taken place in those tunnels in 1944.

"We've just finished examining this structure. We're not 100-percent sure if it was actually a bunker. It might as well have been an underground military warehouse. Either way, the idea assumed a few interconnected corridors and a staircase," coordinator of the archeological works and Archee company owner, dr Rafał Niedźwiadek told us.

He admitted the discovery came as quite a surprise. "There's no mention of this kind of structure in written sources. When we started to dig deeper, we stumbled across a testimony recorded under a spoken history programme of the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre. A resident of Lublin said that after the front had passed, she had been grazing cows there, and the ground had collapsed under one them," Niedźwiadek added.

The archeologists have also found out that the bunker was built by using the mining method, rather than the usual ground surface way. "Most likely, there is no other structure of this kind in Poland," the archeologist stressed.

All seems to suggest that only a fragment of the structure has been discovered. "We know for certain that it stretches further south. However, we are not able to say how far it reaches. Maybe up to the old tenement houses at Spokojna street. Legend has it that there was an underground entrance in one of those buildings," said dr Niedźwiadek.

Although, the bunker has been already buried - as it collided with the construction of the apartment house - the archeologists are still working at the site.

"Right next to it, we've found eight more skeletons from late 16th or early 17th century. Certainly from before the construction of the fourth line of city fortifications, which were built in mid-17th century. That's because the burial spots were located underneath an old rampart," the archeologist said.

What's particularly interesting is that one person was buried face down. One had their hands cut off, whereas another had no feet. There was also one buried without outer garment on. Their robe, known as kontusz, was laid at their feet.

"We assume that those were burial grounds for people somehow excluded or stigmatised by the society. On hypothesis is that they could have been convicts executed at the city gallows, which had been located at the corner of today's Długosza and Racławickie avenues. But this is only a hypothesis, as convicts were buried in the place of today's Saxon Garden," our interviewee said.

In the process, fragments of dishes and flint tools from the Neolithic period have been also found, as well as a half-dugout from the eighth or ninth century.