Hidden Stories of the Moravian Karst: Obsession, Sacrifice and Factory Lines Underground

Behind the most photographed abyss in the Czech Republic lies decades of one man’s obsession, a bronze figurine whose meaning archaeologists still argue about, a Nazi arms factory hidden from Allied bombers, and modern cavers who paid with their lives for new discoveries. This isn’t the sort of information you’ll find on a ticket price list — these are the stories that make it worth seeing the Moravian Karst as something more than just a day trip to a cave.

QUICK LINKS 🕳️ Absolon’s obsession · 🐂 The mystery of Býčí skála · ⚙️ Caves at war · 🧗 Discoveries that cost lives · ❓ FAQ

The man who spent thirty years searching for a way beneath the abyss

Karel Absolon was born in 1877 in nearby Boskovice, the grandson of Jindřich Wankel, a doctor from Blansko and the founder of Moravian archaeology. It was Absolon who, in the early 20th century, first coined the term “Moravian Karst” — borrowing the scientific term “karst” from the Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić, who had used it to describe a similar limestone region on the border of present-day Slovenia and Italy.

From 1899 onwards, however, Absolon became obsessed with one particular question: was there a connection between the Macocha Abyss and the place where the River Punkva re-emerges on the surface? He led multi-day expeditions in 1901, 1903, 1905 and 1907. In 1909, his team made the first, more or less accidental discoveries while exploring the dry section of the Punkva Caves (Punkevní jeskyně) from the Pustý žleb valley side — and the caves began to be opened to the public almost immediately. The link between the caves and the abyss was found, and from spring 1914 visitors could walk right through the Punkva Caves to the bottom of the Macocha Abyss.

But that wasn’t enough for Absolon. He wanted a route directly by water, along the underground course of the River Punkva itself. Under his leadership, an artificial tunnel — still in use today — was built in 1929 to divert part of the Punkva’s flow, and after further work and the blasting of rock walls, the boat trip that every visitor to the Punkva Caves knows today was ceremonially opened on 1 July 1933. Absolon devoted virtually his entire professional life to this goal — yet north of the Macocha Abyss, where he searched for a further connection, he ultimately failed completely. That part of the underground system, today known as the Old Amateur Cave (Stará Amatérská jeskyně), was not entered until 36 years later, long after his death.

The mystery of Bull Rock: a chieftain’s grave, or a millennia-old sanctuary?

In 1869, the Felkl cousins from the nearby village of Olomučany found a bronze figurine of a bull calf at the entrance to Bull Rock Cave (Býčí skála) — an artefact that, according to archaeologists, most likely didn’t originate in Moravia but arrived from far away, possibly the Middle East or Egypt. The discovery drew the keen attention of Jindřich Wankel, who in 1867 had carried out the first documented investigation of Palaeolithic human presence in Central Europe.

In the cave’s entrance hall, Wankel found not only the figurine and other objects but also animal and human bones, and, against one wall, even a forge — one of the oldest known pieces of evidence of ironworking in the Czech lands. In a recess off one of the side passages, there is also a charcoal-drawn figure on the wall dating back 5,200 years — the oldest known piece of cave art in the Czech Republic. Its meaning has never been deciphered.

Wankel himself believed it to be the burial site of a Hallstatt-era chieftain, accompanied into the afterlife by his wives, servants and horses, placed on a funeral pyre and burned along with his chariot. Doubts about this theory emerged as early as the 19th century, and today’s archaeologists tend to believe that Bull Rock Cave served instead as a long-used ritual site, where people gathered for ceremonies from a wide surrounding area — with the forge, too, said to be linked to the cave’s sacred function, in a manner similar to the ritual metalworking carried out at temples in the Mediterranean. To this day, no one has a definitive answer.

Caves at war

During the Second World War, several caves in the Moravian Karst were turned into a wartime industrial zone — ideally sheltered from Allied bombing. According to the book Moravský kras: jeskyně a člověk (The Moravian Karst: Caves and Man, Ivan Balák, Cave Administration of the Czech Republic, 2019), five caves in total were put to use in wartime production:

• Kůlna Cave — an underground factory codenamed Werke Kulna.
• Michalka Cave — a wartime workshop.
• The entrance hall of Bull Rock Cave — an unfinished factory.
• Drátenická Cave — an underground workshop codenamed Rastl.
• Výpustek Cave — a wartime factory codenamed Auslass (German for “outlet”, a literal translation of “Výpustek”), where up to 1,200 workers and 120 clerical staff worked round-the-clock shifts producing aircraft engines. Read more about this cave in a separate article.

After the war, Výpustek Cave was taken over by the Czechoslovak army and, between 1961 and 2001, converted into a top-secret backup command post designed to survive even a nuclear blast — meaning that over the course of a single century, this cave went from a prehistoric camp, through a Nazi arms factory, to a Cold War installation, before finally opening to the public as a tourist attraction in 2008.

Discoveries that cost lives — and continue to this day

Absolon succeeded in linking the Macocha Abyss to the Punkva Caves, but the system north of the abyss resisted him. The Old Amateur Cave, today part of the longest cave system in the Czech Republic, was first entered in January 1969 by amateur cavers — without professional equipment, working entirely on their own initiative. A year later, in August 1970, further exploration during a flood cost the lives of two cavers, and amateur research was halted altogether for a time as a result.

From 1972, exploration was taken over by professionals from the Geographical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After the institute was disbanded in 1993, amateur members of the Czech Speleological Society resumed the search for discoveries — and haven’t stopped since. In 2006, cave divers discovered a 340-metre flooded tunnel known as the Grand Canyon, through which the River Punkva itself flows. In 2008, divers managed to pass through the eighth sump in the Amateur Cave and, beyond it, came across a 1.5-kilometre-long dry passage decorated with stalactites and stalagmites — a discovery described within the field as one that comes along only once every 50 years. New chambers continue to be found at Bull Rock Cave and elsewhere in the Moravian Karst practically every year.

In other words, the Moravian Karst is not a finished, fully explored and mapped tourist product. Beneath the feet of visitors admiring the Punkva Caves, research is still ongoing — and could, at any moment, yield a discovery of the kind that comes along only once every half-century.

One of the people who shaped the conditions for this research deserves a chapter of his own — the geologist Ladislav Slezák, removed from his leadership role in the Karst by the communist secret police (StB) over an emigration scandal, who returned after the revolution to save the caves from privatisation. You can read his full story here.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Karel Absolon, and why is he so important to the Moravian Karst? An archaeologist and researcher (1877–1960), grandson of Jindřich Wankel, who was the first to use the name “Moravian Karst” and who led nearly thirty years of research culminating in today’s boat trip along the River Punkva, completed in 1933.

Is it true that caves in the Moravian Karst housed factories during the war? Yes, five in total — Kůlna, Michalka, the entrance hall of Bull Rock Cave, Drátenická Cave, and the best-known case, Výpustek Cave, where the Nazis manufactured aircraft engines.

Do we now know for certain what Bull Rock Cave was used for? No. The original theory of a Hallstatt-era chieftain’s burial is now largely disputed by archaeologists in favour of the idea of a long-used ritual site, but a definitive answer remains elusive.

Are new cave chambers still being discovered in the Moravian Karst today? Yes. Amateur cavers from the Czech Speleological Society find new passages and chambers practically every year, most recently at Bull Rock Cave, for example.

Part of the series A Week in the Moravian Karst: A Complete 7-Day Itinerary. Sources: Skořepa, H., Tůma, A. — “CHKO Moravský kras šedesátiletá” [The Moravian Karst Protected Landscape Area at Sixty], Živa 6/2016 (Academia Publishing House, Czech Academy of Sciences); Balák, I. — “Moravský kras: jeskyně a člověk” [The Moravian Karst: Caves and Man], Cave Administration of the Czech Republic, 2019; Výpustek Cave — history verified directly at vypustek.caves.cz.