by Peter Koller (Austria)
Email: pkoller@edu.uni-klu.ac.at

This is the story of one of my favourite finds, a gargoyle from the early 16 hundreds which I found in the Woerthersee, the lake at which I live. As I pointed out in a previous mail, English is not my native language: therefore, please feel free correct vocabulary, grammar style whereever you consider this necessary! Nevertheless, I hope you and the readers will like it!

I have been fascinated with old things since I can remember. Even at the age of five, my parents had a hard time getting me out of Museums once I was in. During my highschool years I used to buy and sell antiques (gave my wallet a nice "boost"!) and when I got my first metal detector at the age of 16, my family got seriously worried about my school carrier.

My second greatest passion has been swimming and snorkeling, which has developed into scuba diving in 1990, and one of the first pieces of equipment I bought was a waterproof detector...

In the east bay of the Woerthersee/Carinthia/Austria, there is a peninsula with a chapel (first recorded in the 11 hundreds) and the chatteau Maria Loretto, built in the mid-seventeenth century by the Orsini-Rosenbergs, the Dukes of the province. Whenever I cycled past this place on my way to the university I felt like diving there but somehow this never happened until one sunday in April 1993, one of the first days the lake was without ice that year.

It was a nice warm spring day and the first tourists were crowding the place and pestering me with questions like "How deep can you go?" and "How long...?" and "Whats that plate-on-a-stick for - is it a propeller?".... All I wanted to know was "If it is called tourist season, why oh why cant we shoot them?"

The only escape was to get into the water as quickly as possible. I used to dive in a wetsuit at that time, and the first spot where you feel why it is called so is about 3 inches below the navel: The water was FREEZING! The second worst stage at these tempereatures is when your face gets wet: for the first few minutes it feels like someone pealing off the skin with a knife. I ignored the cold and quickly dropped to the ground where I followed the slope down to about 8m. I switched on the detector and, going back and forth around the peninsula, worked my way towards the shallows.

After about one hour and a half I already felt pretty uncomfortable, not just because of the cold but I had dug up some WW2-handgranades and knew I was working an Allied Forces dumpsite. (When the Allied Forces were in Austria, they used to throw litterally thousands of truckloads of arms and explosives into the lakes, because they naturally didn«t want anyone to have Wehrmacht material and were to lazy(?) to take their own back home (The slogan "Leave nothing but footprints!" obviously had not yet been en vogue!). Many of these "gifts" are still sitting there, well preserved in almost oxygen free silt and mud, looking like lost only yesterday, and are waiting for idiots stupid enough to touch them: whoever does so runs the risk of looking pretty secondhand afterwards - just in case he survives!)

Moreover, I had not found ANYTHING yet that would have been worth "coming with me" and I was so cold that I did not feel my feet and hardly felt my fingers: the dive looked like a complete waste of time and air! However, I was not cold enough yet that I absolutely had to get out immediately and there was enough air left. Therefore, I decided to go around Maria Loretto one more time. I dived all the way around the peninsula again and when I was at the far end and still had not found anything, I turned around, swam faster and started swearing and cursing VERY creatively, while the detector sweeps got more and more careless.

Then there was a signal. Sounded just like another handgranade - leave it where it is. I swam on. After a few meters, however, I turned around and swam back calling myself names for doing so. The place now was covered in a cloud of silt and and viz was near zero, still it was no problem to find the signal of this relatively big target again. It was rather deep, almost too deep for only fifty years (but who knows?), and bigger than a handgranade (about plate size - probably two close together, or a mine? Or a rusty pot?) I gave the silt a few moments to settle a bit (a look at the depth gauge: 4m) and then started fanning it away. Any moment I was to see another piece of junk - harmless junk at best and "boom" at worst (nono, that is very unlikely: I didnt intend to touch it!)

Meanwhile, the hole had grown to deep to produce any war relics, but with the signal still being equally strong and clear I got curious and longed into the mud very carefully, with my fingers spread, and pushed my hand deeper and deeper down.

My arm stuck in the mud almost up to my shoulder. Suddenly there was an obstacle. I felt it the best I could with my numb fingers: it felt like a face - probably a mask; or could it be a head!? To find out, I let my fingers glide down the sides: it was hollow underneath, the whole thing being very massive: about 1cm thick metal! I grabbed it and pulled. No chance. I widened the hole in order to let some water underneath the object reduce suction, pulled again. It did not move.

I didn«t want to remove 2 1/2 feet of mud and with that thing being so massive anyway, I decided to do something different: I got a thorough grip on it and fully inflated my stab jacket. I now hung there like a liftbag. One hand on the valve (which I had to pull in order not to rocket up to the surface as soon as the "thing" was out of the mud), I stretched and gave it a sudden rip, another one and immediately pulled the exhaust valve. It worked the way I had planned it. I stabilized buoyancy, still clinging to the "thing" (which I did not see yet because I was in a cloud of silt), then swam into clearer water:

Yes! it was a face! I rubbed off some mud. Something right between a human and a lion, it seemed. The gazing eyes, the hairstyle and everything: that«s Mannerism! With a hole in the mouth and some mortar left: a Manneristic gargoyle! And completely undamaged.

I swam back to the surface, lay on my back, smiled at the sun, the gargoyle lying on my chest. From time to time I lifted it so I could see it. I stumbled out of the water (have you ever tried walking with 50lb of equipment and feet you don«t feel anymore?), struggled out of my wetsuit (try open a zip with fingers you don«t feel and can hardly move!)... But so what: what on earth can spoil a day like that?

The very next day I reported the find to the Provincial Museum and Archive, where I found the following information: Maria Loretto, built in the 1650s, but maybe even older, with huge Barroque gardens and several fountains (of which, alas, the plans are lost), burned down in 1709 and was rebuilt on a much smaller scale (without the garden): therefore, this could have been the time they threw away/lost my gargoyle. On the other hand, as it stylistically belongs to Mannerism, a pre-baroque style, and art historians dated it to apx 1590-1620, it might also be a piece of evidence for the suspected building preceding the chateau.

More information on Maria Loretto.

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