Roșia Montană’s stamp mills

We'll start this exercise using some historical photographs - precious documents that help us mentally reconstruct fragments of what life was like in the small mining village a hundred years ago.

In the photos on the website, you see machines that made the magic happen. Adapted both to the specificity of the place and to the purpose for which they were invented thousands of years ago, these machines crushed the rock brought with baskets and horses from the mountain. They were called stamp mills, and there were hundreds of them. Hundreds of such wooden machines were cleverly powered by natural resources. The water from the reservoirs  was brought through channels, wooden gutters to the large mills of the stamp mills, which thus set them in motion. So imagine: the entire landscape you have seen so far, crisscrossed by gutters and mills.

The stamp mills were vital to ore processing, their operation marked by the thunderous sounds of water and crushing machinery from spring to late autumn. These mills were often part of small ensembles, closely linked to mining households. At the site where you stand, remnants of such an ensemble have been identified, including the basement walls and supporting walls, once driven by the Foieș stream. However, with Nationalization, all stamp mills were destroyed, along with the confiscation of the gold. Today, replicas of these mills can be seen at the Mining Museum, offering insight into the mining practices that shaped the landscape and destiny of this settlement.

The small building on this property is a blacksmith's shop, once common in the area, providing essential iron objects for various purposes, from horseshoes to household items. While many such shops were once scattered throughout Roșia Montană, this particular one was donated by a blacksmith from the Brașov area and meticulously restored through the Adopt a House summer schools initiative. It now serves as a site for occasional demonstrative events led by local blacksmiths. The property is part of a larger project aiming to rebuild the entire household, including its annexes, and reconstruct stamp mills on the site of former mills in the area.

But let's get back to the stamp mills and how the miners used them to extract gold. The stone or gold-bearing ore brought to the stamp mills was crushed into pieces of about 5 cm to be crushed in the stamp mills mortars. The blasted ore from the mine was sorted into three categories: ore with visible free gold, rich ore resulting from vein pieces, and stamp mills ore. Each category had a separate processing technique, but the final selection with the so called saitroc was common to all categories. The saitroc  is a fan-shaped tool, skillfully made by the craftsmen in the region from a piece of maple or poplar wood, to be easy to handle. It was used to separate the gold from the sand obtained after washing and decanting the ore.

The gold selection process was difficult and required great skill on the part of the selector, being the heaviest operation in ore processing. The correct selection of the ore influenced the amount of gold extracted.

You have listened to the content dedicated to Rosia Montana’s  stamp mills.

The UNESCO tour of Rosia Montana is a project implemented by the non-governmental organization ‘Rosia Montana in Patrimoniul Mondial’. The audio-tour is co-financed by Romania’s Administration for National Cultural Funds. We based our story telling on local anecdotes and the works listed on the bibliography on our website. We encourage you to follow the trail that we prepared for you via our website. This will ensure that you discover all objects and their stories of Rosia Montana. Have a pleasant journey and ‘drum bun’ as we say here.