During World War II, a bell was buried to protect it. A farmer found it in 2024

One morning in August 2024, Laurynas Družas once again passed his metal detector around his village, Antašava, in northern Lithuania. But this time, unlike the previous ones, he was lucky: He found something he had heard about all his life. In fact, explains This farmer by profession, who bought his first metal detector when he was 18.

There it was, two meters underground, the bell of his town’s church. The bell tower of the Jackaus church had been without a bell since 1942 because someone had kept it safe in the middle of the Second World War. Maybe too good, because getting her back had become a chimera.

Saving the San Jacinto Bell. In 1942 Lithuania was occupied by the Nazis within the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The previous year, the United States had joined the fray and Germany had failed in its attempt to conquer the east in Operation Barbarossa. In this scenario, the bell of Saint Hyacinth of Antašava disappears.

Druzas account that the townspeople risked their lives to hide it from the occupiers with all the sense in the world: it is worth remembering that the Nazi party issued a decree to confiscate the bells and melt them for war purposes. And be careful because at that time there were no tractors: they did it with a horse, a cart and brute force. Quite an act of resistance, protection of heritage and a truly dangerous mission to hide a bell that weighs more than half a ton behind the backs of the Nazi occupiers.

The bell became a legend. And time passed, Antašava said goodbye to the Nazis, Lithuania ceased to belong to the USSR to become independent in 1990 and the bell was still missing. The problem was that, as the years went by, those who knew where the bell was buried began to forget the exact place: the landscape changes, bushes grow and memory becomes blurred.

But people knew that there was a bell in the bell tower and that it was hidden and the story was passed from generation to generation. In fact, Laurynas’ grandmother knew approximately where she was because as a child an uncle showed her the area. Grandma forgot the exact location, but not the idea of ​​finding it. He passed that “obsession” on to his grandson who, 82 years later, found it.

A bell with 100 years of history. The bell of the Antašava church was cast in Poland in 1908 in a foundry that, as confirmed by the Polish “campanologist” Dr. Piotr Jamski, is still active today in the hands of a different family than the original.

After 82 years underground, its state of conservation It was almost perfectneither the bell nor the wood show any signs of deterioration, as Laurynas Družas himself described after the discovery. The only thing missing was the clapper, which according to oral tradition was dismantled the same night the bell was buried and kept separately in a house in the town, although it is still missing. When the discovery came to light, heritage professionals they took care to verify its authenticity and origin.

Back to the bell tower. In August 2025, a year after the discovery, the bell he returned to his houseto the church of San Jacinto. Polish technicians installed the system to make it ring next to the other bell that was already in the bell tower. Vidmantas Družas, Laurynas’s uncle and church bell ringer, account that the two bells are now connected and ring by pressing a button.

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Cover | Authorius Vilensija and Vadym Alyekseyenko