Důlní revír Knötel Ruin

The Knötel mining district is a former mining area in the Krušné Mountains, north of Krupka in the Teplice region. It extends around the cable car to Komáří hůrka, in the cadastral territory of Horní Krupka. It was once the most extensive mining district in the entire Krupka area. From the fourteenth century, tin was mined here mainly, and later also molybdenite and potash feldspar. The waste heaps of old mines are today sought after by mineral collectors. Since 2013, the mining district area together with several mine workings has been protected as a cultural monument.

Tin deposits here are bound mainly to sheets of greisen veins embedded in granite's slate mantle. Occasionally, silver-bearing galena veins appeared. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, dozens of small mines worked them. They were at most thirty to fifty meters deep and they left mainly waste heaps and sunken mine entrances in the landscape. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century we know, for example, the Jacobs Fahrt mine, the Siebenschläfer adit, or in Czech the Adit of Seven Sleepers, further the Juda adit or the Alt Ignazi shaft. From the final phase of mining, when adits were longer and shafts deeper, come the waste heaps called Glück auf, Vendelin, Alter Abendstern and Josef. The Regina mine was visited in 1813 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Among the oldest remains of mining belongs the Zwickenpinge subsidence, originally perhaps Zwitterpinge, near the modern Barbora adit. It originated in the sixteenth century and measures fifty by thirty-five meters. The Gewelbter adit ran beneath it. About a hundred meters to the west lies a surface mining pit one hundred thirty meters long on the Mahler vein.

During the Second World War, mining resumed and molybdenite and potash feldspar were added to tin. The deposit was worked by four adits: Prokop, Barbora, Václav and Večerní hvězda. Mining ended in 1956. The Prokop adit was connected with Barbora and served mainly for prospecting the quartz-molybdenite stock above it. Barbora is connected with the Václav adit by a steep decline. It enabled manual mining of potash feldspar above and below the adit level and ores of molybdenum, tin, tungsten and lithium were also mined there. The Václav adit from 1948 was created to explore deeper parts of the deposit.

Večerní hvězda belonged to the historic mines. They experimentally reopened it in the years 1913 to 1914, in 1928 and in 1948. In the nineteen fifties they dug a new one beneath the entrance of the old adit. Originally it bore the names Václav II and Naděje, later it was renamed Večerní hvězda. It remained in operation until 1953.