Geocultural significance of millstones within the Southern Baltic Lowlands

We can say that the economy from medieval times till the beginnings of 20th century was managed in a nearly zero-waste manner. Every tool or utensil was used until it was worn out. In many cases, this „useless” items were re-used, often in an original or unobvious way. The great examples are quern stones and millstones, which were expensive both to produce or to buy. On Southern Baltic Lowlands they were mostly made in situ of commonly available materials, such as erratics brought in by Scandinavian ice sheet in Pleistocene. For thousands of years quern stones were one of the most common, and at the same time, most important tools used to meet one of the basic needs – food production. It is therefore not surprising that there was a specific emotional bond between man and these stones. These works of human creativity were immortalised in folklore[1] and often carried symbolic values – for example, in a biblical meaning millstone symbolises death, rebirth or transformation. Semi-finished or worn millstones were used as altars, ciboria, grave stones on Jewish and Christian cemeteries, as well as a material for monuments and sculptures. They also were embedded into church walls, which is a local phenomenon in Northern Poland and Northeastern Germany[2]. In recent years, however, they have also become a desirable material for creation of small architecture in public and private places, like parks or gardens. Some of them can be found in museal collections or in lapidaries, where they serve as geoeducational or geoturistic objects.

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Grant No. 2019/35/B/HS3/03933).

[1] Piotrowski, R. and Wróblewska, V. (2024). “Memory of stones”. The motif of millstones production from erratic boulders in folk narrations from northern Germany and Poland: between a memory of craft and an object of memory. Fabula 65 (3-4): 334-355,  https://doi.org/10.1515/fabula-2024-0017

[2] Czubla, P., Brykała, D., Dąbski, M., Gierszewski, P., Błaszkiewicz, M., Mosakowski, Z. and Lamparski, P. (2024). Unobvious geoheritage in sacral buildings: millstones in churches of NE Poland from a geological and geomorphological perspective, Geographia Polonica 97 (3), 327-354,  https://doi.org/10.7163/GPol.0282