Golden city of the Incas
"Gold" is a magic word that attracted the Spaniards across the Atlantic Ocean …
When asked by an Indian why white people love gold so much, the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez replied only "they suffer from a special heart disease, which only gold can cure."
The Incas treated gold only as the sacred metal of the sun god.
When Francisco Pizarro, another Spanish conquistador, captured the Inca leader Atahualpa, he began to offer so much gold for his freedom that they could cover the floor in the room where they were present. But, apparently, noticing the distrust in the eyes of the Spaniards, he said that the gold in this room would be greater than his height. And Pizarro agreed.
Throughout the Inca empire, messengers of Atahualpa were sent out with kippah - a fringe of long cords tied in knots of various shapes: the Incas used a knotted script. The chief's subjects collected gold vessels and jewelry from palaces, temples and public buildings for ransom. A few weeks later, a room with a volume of about 70 meters was filled with gold and silver, and Pizarro became the owner of treasures that no European monarch had.
Golden garden around the golden temple
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1533 - At the end of the Inca Empire, not very many Spaniards landed on the coast of South America. But, skillfully using the internecine war between the heirs of the Great Inca, the brothers Atahualpa and Huascar, they soon became the actual masters of the country.
Pizarro promised Atahualpa to help him in the fight against his brother, lured him to his camp and actually took him prisoner. The treacherous conquistador did not let him go after he filled the notorious room with Inca gold. Pissarro understood that the Indians still had a lot of gold …
Atahualpa, being in captivity, was able to achieve the death of his rival. Pizarro gave the order to slaughter Huascar, but he immediately accused Atahualpa of fratricide and condemned in all its form the Spanish jurisprudence.
1533, August 24 - Atahualpa was sentenced to death at the stake. The Inca agreed to renounce the laws of their ancestors and be baptized … And the "servant of God, Francisco de Atahualpa," the godson of Pizarro, was not burned, but … strangled with an iron collar - a garrot.
Before his death, Atahualpa was able to convey his last farewell letter to the faithful people. Nobody knows what was in it, but the remaining Inca gold disappeared without a trace …
A few months later, the Spaniards went on a campaign against the capital of the empire - the sacred city of Cuzco. They were attracted by the Karikanche building - the temple of the Sun, surrounded by a cornice of pure gold soldered into the stones. The statue of the Sun and statues of other gods, as well as the famous large disc, representing the Inca, were created from gold. There were also many golden musical instruments in the temple, for example drums, adorned with precious stones.
There was also a golden garden at the temple. One Spaniard described it like this: “In this garden were planted the most beautiful trees, the most wonderful flowers and fragrant herbs that only could grow in this kingdom. Many of them were cast from gold and silver, while each plant is depicted not once, but from a small shoot, barely visible above the ground, to a whole bush in its full growth and perfect maturity. There we saw fields strewn with corn. Its stems were of silver, and the ears were gold, and all this was depicted so truthfully that it was possible to see the leaves, grains and even hairs on them.
In addition to these wonders, the Inca's garden had all sorts of animals and beasts cast in gold and silver, such as rabbits, mice, snakes, lizards, butterflies, foxes, and wild cats. We saw birds there, and they sat as if they were about to sing; others seemed to sway on the flowers and drink the flower nectar. And there were also golden roe deer and deer, cougars and jaguars - all animals in small and mature age. And each of them was assigned an appropriate place, as befits his nature."
The main city square was surrounded by a chain of pure Inca gold, 350 paces long (about 250 m), weighing several tons. During religious holidays, the Incas danced holding it in their hands, and to do this, the strength of 200 people was needed.
However, having come to the Indian capital, the Spaniards saw that all this unheard of wealth, all this gold had disappeared somewhere … There were no Indians in the city either …
Francisco de Perez in his essay "The Conquest of Peru and the Province of Cuzco" wrote: "But when, after the conquest of the country, Inca Manco II met with the ambassador of Spain, he poured a bowl of corn grains in front of him. And taking one of them in his hands he said: "This is all that you could steal from our gold." And pointing to the rest, he said: "And this is left with us."
Where did the Inca gold go?
To this day, historians are debating where the Inca gold disappeared.
Many are inclined to believe that the Incas could have hidden their treasures in the Peruvian jungle, in the legendary city of Paititi, founded as a transit point between the capital and the gold mines.
This city was considered only a beautiful legend, until at the beginning of the 20th century there were accidentally two workers of the same hacienda who fled from the owner. For four days they made their way through the impassable jungle, and on the fifth day they reached an abandoned city, all the destroyed buildings of which were filled with many golden things.
Taking as much as they could carry, the fugitives were able to find their way to civilization. However, realizing that people were already close, they began to share the treasures, and only one of them returned to Cusco … Again he could not find the way to the golden city - his own greed punished him …
1925 - Six members of the Catholic Jesuit Order decided to find the ancient city. Hiring dozens of porters and guides, they set off. But on the way, the Indians attacked them, and only the guide Sanchez was able to protect himself from the poisonous arrows.
He alone found a city lined with golden statues. There, Sanchez chopped off the little finger of one of the statues to prove that he hadn't gone mad. However, his precious find, fearing the wrath of the Indian gods, he kept secret throughout his life and was revealed only before his death to the scientist R. Ordonez. He unconditionally believed the dying man and equipped the expedition. But despite a lavishly subsidized search, the golden city was never found. After years of unsuccessful searches, many thought Ordoñez was simply making a name for himself by buying a finger at a sale.
A new version has emerged about where the Inca treasures may lie. The gazes of the white people turned to the El Sangay volcano, located at the junction of the western and eastern parts of the Cordillera. Sangay is the sacred god of Fire of the ancient Incas, and the slopes of the volcano in our time serve as the burial place of leaders and heroes for the Hivaro Indian tribe. Dr. Kurt von Ritter of Quito, an Ecuadorian of German descent, began developing this version in the early 1960s and even lived for a time with the Jivaro Indian tribe, who are known as "bounty hunters." After asking the Indians about the finds on the slopes of the mountain, he got his hands on a tiny carved statuette of the Inca goddess of Creation Ilya-Tiku, cast from pure gold.
After the doctor was shown the place of the find - a high, more than 2,000 m, cliff, turning into a gigantic gorge, Ritter began excavations. And pretty soon he discovered the skull of a man whose owner had undergone a complex operation during his lifetime. It is known that the Incas not only engaged in surgery, but also successfully performed craniotomy. Soon, the archaeologist found a scalpel - a thin gold plate.
Returning to Quito, Ritter published information about the finds, but warned that it was unlikely that it would be possible to find the treasure without very large investments: the volcano continues to work, and every year its ash raises the soil level in Sangai by at least a few centimeters.
Despite the scientist's warning, a real gold rush began in Ecuador. They knocked together teams of excavators, hired specialists, looked for investments … It's another matter that no one was able to find the necessary amount for excavation. But this did not stop anyone …
A month later, the first expedition arrived at the foot of Sangay. They were two young men from America, Frank Rocco from Pennsylvania and Robert Kaupp from California. The official goal of the expedition is to search for "valuable metals". The Americans were supposed to go down to Quito by Christmas, but they never showed up. In mid-January, a joint American-Ecuadorian rescue expedition set out for them.
Almost at the crater of the volcano, they found their last camp. There were scattered things in the snow, and the traces of the Americans were lost on the road to the Culebrillas Valley. Descending into the valley, the expedition found Robert Kaupp, dying of exhaustion, on the floor in a collapsed Indian hut. He said that when he and Frank Rocco almost climbed to the top of Sangay, they felt that they could not breathe because of the poisonous volcanic gases, and something strange began to happen to them.
The Americans were attacked by a fit of anger, their consciousness was clouded, they no longer understood where they were and where they needed to go. Soon they somehow found themselves on the eastern side of the volcano, although they were climbing the southern one, the same where Ritter found gold. Kaupp began to persuade Rocco to return to the last camp, but he refused: “It's here, Kaupp. I feel it is there."
Kaupp abandoned his insane comrade, and he himself cannot remember how he ended up below. He was taken to a hospital in Riobamba. A few days later, after being discharged from there, he disappeared without a trace. They tried to find him in order to take testimony and see if the Americans had seen anything that could lead to the trail of gold. But all is in vain.
Soon, one member of the rescue expedition gave an interview to a local newspaper. He assured that the rescuers found two chains of footprints stretching to the eastern slope, then crushed snow - traces of a fight, and then there were only one footprint. There was no blood, however, as the rescuer said. Soon another American expedition, sponsored by Rocco's relatives, arrived, but she could not find either Rocco himself or any trace of his stay in the mountains.
Several other expeditions that tried to find gold returned from Sangay empty-handed. Many people said that Dr. Ritter simply tossed Indian rarities bought for the occasion on the mountain to create a name for himself in scientific circles. However, there is no clear evidence to support this version or refute it to this day.
The spirit of the Inca princess guards the treasure
On the ascent to the Nidzica 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 here at the end of the 18th century by Spanish mercenaries.
Nidzica Castle was built at the beginning of the 14th century, when this area belonged to Northern Hungary as a defensive line against Holy. Since then, Nidzica has changed its nationality 5 times, moving from Hungary to Austria-Hungary, after Czechoslovakia, and in 1920 it was annexed by Poland. But until 1945 the Hungarian nobles remained the owners of the castle.
After the nationalization of the castle in 1946, a cache with a tin cylinder was found under one of the stairs, in which there were several Indian products made of gold and a bale - a knotted letter of the ancient Incas. All attempts to decipher it did not lead to anything, and the later pile disappeared in an incomprehensible way.
… The history of this find can be traced back to 1760, when Sebastian Bezhevichi, a distant relative of the then owners of Nidzica, went to Peru in search of Inca gold. There he fell in love with the direct heiress of Atahualpa, married her, but the princess died during childbirth, 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 Inca ruler Tupac Amara, after which he went to Europe with his daughter, her husband Tupac Amara II and the Inca court.
Initially, the court stayed in Venice, but after the assassination of Tupac by the Spaniards, it moved to the Nidzica castle together with the court Indians and the princess, according to Polish historians, part of the mysterious treasures of the Incas traveled. 1797 - Spaniards hunted down the yard of the Indian princess. 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. According to legend, 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 1930s, he began searching for the treasures of his ancestors.
1946 - Beneš found in Krakow a document about the adoption of his great-grandfather, as well as about where the kipu is kept, which he found in a cache under the stairs.
But deciphering the letter was not an easy task. 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 1970s, 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 was killed in a car accident on the way from Warsaw to Gdansk, where he was going 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 of the Incas that caused his father's death.
… Polish historian Alexander Roviński has been studying the history of this mysterious treasure for 30 years. He believes that the treasure rests about 70 km north of Nidzica - 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 to brick the entrances to the castle's dungeon with 300 tons of concrete, explaining that he did not want not only to get the treasure, but even think about it, because it only brings misfortune …
V. Pimenova