Whispers of the coming apocalypse lurk in the landscape of artificial mountains, lakes and rivers.

1

It feels more like decay than Armageddon. The village is called Kuźnica, a collection of several dozen houses on the edge of the open pit. I make my way along a drainage ditch. The concrete sides are covered with a rusty residue; the water pumped out of the mine has a lot of iron in it.

It’s quiet here. Only after a few minutes do I realize – it’s a little too quiet.

Somewhere in the distance a dog is barking, but here there is silence. I start to look around carefully, peering over garden fences. The yards are clean and tidy. Empty. No one lives here. You can tell from the weeds that have already taken over.

I stand in one of the empty yards and only then do I begin to understand. The houses on this side of the village were abandoned because the fields that belonged to them were swallowed up by the pit. They were a covering layer that was removed. I look at the empty house, the open barn door, through which I can see the desert-like landscape of the pit, and I feel the growing suction of a vacuum.

2

On 9th December 1961, employees of the Piła Oil Exploration Company discovered a deposit of tertiary era lignite in a village near Bełchatów called Piaski, which no longer exists. This is where it all started. Further sampling proved unusually promising. The deposit guaranteed a good supply of this raw material for decades to come. To get access, several villages had to be liquidated. The largest of them, Kuców, had 116 families; Folwark had 88 and Wola