- Did you know that the Cistercians were very hard-working and modern monks?
- Based on the strict Benedictine rule, whose main motto is Ora et labora - pray and work, the Cistercian order was one of the richest in this part of Europe.
- Today, when we hear about underfloor heating, we think that it is a modern technological idea, and this is how the monks in the monastery used to "warm themselves".
Other curiosities from the life of the Cistercians
- They ate once a day, had no meat, fish, eggs or fats on the menu,
- They ate bread, vegetables with salt and oil, fruit,
- They brought carp to Poland and introduced the tradition of eating carp on Christmas Eve,
- They slept on mattresses, in clothes, in a common dormitory,
- At night they got up to sing psalms in an unheated church,
- Each monk had to work physically for several hours a day,
- They were also engaged in animal husbandry,
- They built mills, sawmills, founded the first hospitals, developed milling, cultivation of cereals, hops, vines and breeding sheep, cows, bees,
- They also laid the foundations of modern iron smelting,
- The Cistercians were one of the first to use brick in construction,
- The Cistercians were nicknamed Moles because they built tunnels
Did you know that the first successful trepanation of the skull in Poland was carried out in Sulejów?
This was probably about 700 years ago. In 1854, a medieval skull was discovered under the floor of the monastery chapter house, which bears clear traces of a high-precision surgical procedure. Trepanation was done with a drill, a special steel saw and bone forceps.
