On the ascent to the Niedzica castle (Zamek w Niedzicy, aka Dunajec castle) in the Polish region of Spis (Eastern Tatras) there is a sign "Caution, ghost!" The most famous local ghost is the spirit of the Inca princess beautiful Umina, who was stabbed to death here at the end of the 18th century by Spanish mercenaries.
Niedzica Castle was erected at the beginning of the XIV century, when this area belonged to Northern Hungary as a defensive line against Poland. Since then, Niedzica has changed its nationality five times, moving from Hungary to Austria-Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, and in 1920 it was annexed by Poland. But until 1945 the Hungarian noblemen remained the owners of the castle.
After the nationalization of the castle in 1946, a cache with a tin cylinder was discovered under one of the stairs, which contained several Indian items of gold and a kipu - a knotted letter of the ancient Incas. All attempts to decipher it did not lead to anything, and later the kipu inexplicably disappeared.
The history of this find can be traced back to 1760, when Sebastian Bezhevichi, a distant relative of the then owners of Niedzica, went to Peru in search of Inca gold. There he fell in love with the direct heiress of Atahualpa, married her, but during childbirth, the princess died, having managed to give birth to a girl.
Bezhevichi remained in Peru and even fought on the side of the Incas in the last major uprising against the Spaniards. He married his daughter Umina to the leader of the uprising, the great-grandson of the last ruler of the Incas, Tupac Amara, after which, together with his daughter, her husband Tupac Amaru II and the court of the Incas, he went to Europe. At first, the court stayed in Venice, but after the assassination of Tupac by the Spaniards, it moved to Niedzica Castle
And along with the court Indians and the princess, according to Polish historians, part of the mysterious treasures of the Incas traveled. In 1797, the Spaniards tracked down the court of the Indian princess again. They stabbed Umina to end the lineage of the Inca rulers. Sebastian Bezhevichi gave his grandson, the last prince of the Incas, as an adopted son to his relative.
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The legend says that he buried the treasure somewhere in the vicinity of the castle, marking the place in the kippah.
The last direct descendant of Tupac Amaru, Anton Benes, lived in the 19th century near Brno and died without even once asking for the treasure. But his great-grandson, Andrzej Beneš, who later became Vice-President of the Parliament of the Polish People's Republic, was very interested in this topic. And in the 30s of the last century, he began searching for the treasures of his ancestors.
Tupac Amaru and Andrzej Beneš
In 1946, Benesh found in Krakow a document on the adoption of his great-grandfather, as well as on where the kipu was kept, which he found in a cache under the stairs.
But deciphering the letter was not easy. The Kipu language was forgotten even by the Indians themselves, and the people who know it can be counted all over the world on the fingers of one hand. In the seventies, two Polish expeditions went to Peru to decipher the kipa. But both disappeared without a trace.
And at the end of February 1976, Andrzej Benesz himself died in a car accident on the way from Warsaw to Gdansk, where he was supposed to meet with two foreigners, experts in nodular writing
His son, a lawyer from Gdansk, still refuses to talk on this topic and believes that it was the damned gold that caused his father's death.
Polish historian Alexander Roviński has been studying the history of the mysterious treasure for thirty years. He believes that the treasure rests about 70 kilometers north of Niedzica - in the ruins of a castle that also stood on the Dunajec River.
They say that the last owner of the treasure, a Krakow businessman, ordered the entrances to the castle's dungeon to be bricked up with 300 tons of concrete, explaining that he didn’t want to get the treasure, but even think about it, because it only brings misfortune …