The Valley That Named the Dollar
One valley in the Ore Mountains produced the silver coin that named the dollar, the pitchblende that gave Marie Curie her radium, and the uranium that the Soviet weapons programme wanted badly enough to staff the mines with political prisoners. The spa that opened in 1906 to sell the radioactivity is still open, and still pumping from a shaft sunk in 1518.
Jáchymov sits at about seven hundred metres in the Krušné hory, twenty kilometres uphill from Karlovy Vary, and fewer than three thousand people live in it. Under the main street is a shaft called Svornost, sunk in 1518. It was dug for silver. It later produced uranium. Today it pumps warm radon-bearing water up to the spa hotels on the surface, where it is used to treat inflammatory rheumatic disease on the Czech public health system, which is to say that a mine opened in the reign of Louis II of Hungary is still in commercial operation and has simply changed its product three times.
Everything that has ever mattered here came out of the same hillside, and the value of that hillside has been reversed three times inside five centuries. The silver named a coin that became the dollar. The black rock the silver miners threw on the spoil tips turned out to be the richest known source of radium. And when a third state wanted that rock badly enough, it sent prisoners down to get it. The list of towns that have been rich, abandoned, celebrated and lethal on the strength of one geological accident is short, and this one is on it.
The coin
The first silver seam was found in the valley in 1512 and the men who found it got nowhere with it; Count Stephan Schlick reopened the abandoned adit, struck ore four years later, founded the town on it in 1516 and in 1520 secured the right to mint. The coins were Joachimsthaler Guldengroschen, a name nobody was ever going to say twice, and it was shortened to thaler almost immediately. Thaler travelled into Dutch as daalder and out of Dutch into English as dollar. By 1533 the settlement held eighteen thousand people and was the second town in Bohemia after Prague. Georgius Agricola arrived as its physician in 1527 and spent four years watching how the mines actually worked; De Re Metallica, the book that came out of it in 1556, was the standard European text on mining for the next two hundred years. The silver, meanwhile, was largely worked out within a lifetime, and so was most of the population.
The rock on the tips
Pitchblende came up alongside the silver and was discarded as worthless — heavy, black, and good for nothing anyone could name. In 1789 Martin Heinrich Klaproth, working in Berlin on samples from Joachimsthal, identified a new element in it and called it uranium after the planet found eight years earlier. From the middle of the nineteenth century the works at the mine turned the stuff into pigment, which is where the yellow-green glass that Bohemia sold across Europe got its colour. Then in 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie, having established that the ore was far more radioactive than its uranium content could account for, arranged with the Austrian government for tonnes of the spent residue. Four years of boiling it down in a shed in Paris produced about a tenth of a gram of radium chloride.
The Curies did not find radium in a laboratory. They found it in a slag heap that a Bohemian mining town had spent three hundred years complaining about.
The first radium spa
Jáchymov drew the commercial conclusion faster than anybody. The mine water was radioactive, radioactivity was the most exciting word in Europe, and the town opened the world's first radium spa in 1906, with the Radium Palace hotel following in 1912. What that era did with radium in tonics, toothpaste and cosmetics was catastrophic and is well documented, so it is worth being exact about what Jáchymov does, because it has never stopped doing it. The treatment is bathing in water carrying dissolved radon at a controlled dose, not ingesting radium; Czech insurance funds it chiefly for ankylosing spondylitis; and whether low-dose radon balneotherapy achieves anything is an argument still running in the medical literature rather than one that has been settled either way.
The third valuation
In November 1945 Czechoslovakia signed an agreement in Moscow committing its uranium ore to the Soviet Union. The Soviet weapons programme needed the material and Jáchymov was the readiest source in the bloc. Output was forced up, and from the late 1940s the labour increasingly came from political prisoners. Camps went up around the shafts — Rovnost, Bratrství, Nikolaj, Mariánská, Barbora — and at Vykmanov, a few kilometres down the valley, a concrete tower still stands in which prisoners crushed and sorted the richest ore by hand with no shielding of any kind. It is known as the Tower of Death. Estimates of how many men passed through the Czechoslovak uranium camps run into the tens of thousands. Mining at Jáchymov ended in 1964.
What is there now
The Krušnohoří mining landscape, taken as a single region across the German border, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019, and the Jáchymov shafts and adits are part of it. The industry outlasted the regime that had driven it: Czech uranium mining finally ended at Rožná in Moravia in 2017, the last working uranium mine in central Europe. A memorial trail through the camp sites above the town is signposted, short, and almost entirely unvisited.
Getting there is a thirty-five-minute bus from Karlovy Vary. The Royal Mint House on the main street is the museum and it is better than a town this size has any right to have; the guided descent into Svornost is bookable and worth the arranging. Then walk up past the spa hotels, which are full, and past the camp memorials, which are not, and note that the town's one surviving industry sells water pumped out of the shafts the prisoners were sent down.