For ages, Bolesławiec’s water has been renowned for its excellent quality. Princes and kings admired it; in 1538, Frederick I, the then king of Bohemia and Hungary, who had succeeded Louis Jagiellon and would later become emperor, scooped up water at the spring with his hand and stated—as the chronicles relate—that it had a refreshing effect. In general, this spring was often visited by travellers. The town was supplied with water from this spring by an ingenious water-supply system, while the sewage system connected with it formed the basis of Europe’s second irrigation system for gardens and fields, after Gouda in the Netherlands. Frederick Holstein writes about this in the second chapter of his chronicle from 1585–1600, when he, a Bolesławiec native, was a pastor in Bolesławiec.
The title of this chapter is “Queckbrunnen” in the original and literally describes a well with an adjective that already in Holstein’s time aroused doubts, especially since there was not really a well as such. He explains that the name does not derive from the liveliness of mercury (Quecksilber—quicksilver), as another Bolesławiec native, Dr (!) Sebastian Reusner, believed. Reusner was a “physician” in Lwówek Śląski in 1548 and, without foundation (!), as Holstein says, maintained that silver could be distilled from this water. Instead, the name came from an old Saxon word in which “Queck” meant cattle. According to Holstein, the name therefore arose because cattle were watered at this spring. Although the most accurate translation would be watering place, the suggestion conveyed by the German interpretation of the name initially led us to translate it as “lively spring.” Bearing in mind the function the spring served over the centuries, and especially the quality of its water, praised to the skies and celebrated by local poets, we decided that it would be most appropriate to retain the original idea while omitting the adjective and simply call it a spring in translation.
The spring Holstein writes about—of which, according to a 1583 poem by the Żagań parish priest Laurenty Wiedermann, there were actually three—flowed a short distance from the end of Łasicka Street, where a pumping station is still located today. In 1590, to supply the higher-lying Górna Street (today’s Asnyka Street), water was brought from the spring on Piaskowa Hill, cut through by today’s Kosiby Street. A water intake is still located there.
And here is what Frederick Holstein himself writes About the Spring:
“The spring is not one of the least splendid features of this town... It lies two bowshots from the town, toward the sunrise; it begins in the coarse gravel that lies deep everywhere here and continually saturates it with its moisture, eventually emerging as a little stream into daylight and becoming water. It is quadrangular in shape; at first it was enclosed in wooden frames, and in 1559 it was lined with dressed stone slabs. The intake is 23 cubits long, 14 cubits wide and half a cubit deep; from there the water flows into ponds, of which there are 46, eventually becoming a pond near the town moat. From there it is distributed through pipes to the town for public and private use; it fills a reservoir from which everyone may draw and supplies 108 reservoirs in the townspeople’s homes. It also drives two mills in the town, called the upper mill and the monastery mill, as well as the mill on the sands. The water flowing away from the aforementioned three mills is also channelled to numerous gardens and meadows, from where it finally flows into the Bóbr beside the princely mill. Ordinary stones cover the bottom, and the water is so clear that one can see whatever has been thrown into it. Even when horses and cattle are driven into it, it does not become cloudy... The hotter it is, the colder the water becomes... Linen cloth can be bleached around the spring. And, to express this in the shortest terms, the spring serves the town for many purposes:
1. for watering people and cattle,
2. for bleaching linen,
3. for keeping fish in the ponds,
4. for driving mills,
5. for cooking and brewing beer,
6. for washing and bathing,
7. for flushing underground channels,
8. for irrigating gardens and meadows.
Many scholars celebrated the spring in exquisite poems...