Researchers working in the village of Pień, in the Dąbrowa Chełmińska municipality in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian region, have identified 101 burials so far, including at least a dozen described as atypical.
According to Prof. Dariusz Poliński of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in the north-central city of Toruń, such graves appear elsewhere in Poland, but usually only as isolated cases.
The cemetery is believed to have been Protestant. What has drawn particular attention is the number of graves in which the dead were buried with objects such as sickles, padlocks, and stones, or placed face down.
Archaeologists say these practices reflected beliefs that they would stop the deceased from rising from the grave and harming the living.
Poliński said the site may have been used to bury people rejected or feared by their communities.
In the latest excavation season, the team uncovered four more graves, including those of fetuses, newborns and teenagers aged about 12 to 15.
The best-known burial from Pień is that of a young woman nicknamed “Zosia,” who was found with a sickle across her neck and a padlock attached to the big toe of her left foot.
Her remains attracted wide attention after specialists reconstructed her face in 2024.
Researchers said she suffered from a hemangioma, a tumor in the sternum that may have caused pain and a visible deformity on her chest.
Another grave, found near the edge of the cemetery, belonged to a woman aged about 30 to 50. A stone had been placed on her left hand, while smaller stones lined the left side of her body.
Anthropological analysis showed that she had tertiary syphilis, an advanced stage of the disease that would likely have caused fear and social exclusion in earlier centuries.
In 2025, the team uncovered another burial, probably that of a boy they named Vladimir, with stones placed on his collarbones and near the heart.
A previously discovered grave held a woman aged about 20 to 30 who had been buried while pregnant. Researchers said the fetus was about 24 to 25 weeks old, and described the survival of such delicate remains in the soil as highly unusual.
One older woman, believed to have been about 60, was buried with fieldstones pressed around her skull. Researchers said this was another sign of anti-vampire ritual. They also identified a trace of an aneurysm on the inside of her skull.
Symptoms of such a condition, including severe pain, seizures or changes in behavior, may have appeared alarming to villagers at the time and could have contributed to her being treated as an outcast.
Another grave contained the remains of a young man buried with a child of about two. Archaeologists said burials of men with very young children are themselves rare.
In this case, the child was laid across the man’s lower legs with arms outstretched, and stones were placed among the bodies.
Poliński said such practices were tied to deep fears in a period shaped by war, hunger, epidemic disease, and the Little Ice Age, a time of colder temperatures and poor harvests in Europe.
Without an understanding of disease, communities often searched for someone to blame and turned to rituals they believed would protect the living.
He added that related customs survived in some parts of Poland much later, in some cases into the 20th century.
In different regions, people used different methods, including placing prayers in graves, putting coins in the mouths of the dead, or even removing heads and placing them between the legs.
Research at the early modern cemetery in Pień is continuing, and further publications on the newly discovered graves are expected in the coming months.
(rt/gs)
Source: dzieje.pl