Once upon a time there was an evil burgrave, Puta of Illburk, who resided in Loket Castle (1). He was a harsh man who demanded socage far beyond his rights and collected taxes without any concern about the peasants being ill or the crops having failed. One day, a widow with a wee bairn approached him. She had lost her husband to disease and was shaking with a fever herself, clutching the little underfed boy to her breast. But the burgrave who stood on a parapet outside his hall watching the crowd that had come with her, would not listen to her pleas and tears. "Pay me the tax your late husband is due, or I will throw you into the dungeon."
When the poor woman realised that no tears and pleas would move the burgrave, she cursed him. "A heart of stone you have, and may God turn you to stone for it."
At that moment, despite the weather being fair and the sky blue, a lightning struck the parapet and a bright light soared skyward. The crowd fell to their knees in fear and covered their eyes against the light. When they dared to look up again, a wall in the burgrave's hall had disappeared, and a large black stone lay inside the room.
The real story is less colourful, of course. The meteorite was found in a nearby field by farmers who'd ploughed it up, and brought to the castle. Due to the connection of the legend with the burgrave Illburk, the time of the find is dated to some time between 1350-1430 since that was the only time when burgraves resided in Loket. The unusual look of the stone gave rise to legends and superstitions. It was chained in the cellars of the castle so that the soul of the burgrave would not cause any evil (2).
It is said that the stone was thrown into the castle well during the Thirty Years War and rediscovered in the late 17th century. It was hidden from the French troops the same way in 1774. Obviously, the stone at that time was considered some sort of charm for the town and castle of Loket at which should not be taken away by foreign troops.
The meteorite originally weighted 107 kilograms and had an octahedrite structure of about 50x30x20 cm. Unfortunately, it has been cut in two parts in the 19th century, and several smaller chips are missing as well. One of those obviously has been made into a knife, but I could find no confirmation.
The stone must have been heated at some point, since it shows no traces of the original fusion crusts the iron develops when heating up while cutting into the earth atmosphere. One legend has it that the peasants who found the stone gave it to the smith who found the alloy so different from what he was used to that he thought it must have been the work of the devil.
The archives of Loket have been destroyed, therefore we only have the legends and some vague information of the fate of the meteorite from its discovery to the time when K. A. Neumann, a professor of chemistry in Prague, analysed the stone in 1811 and recognised it as a meteorite of an iron-nickel alloy. This was confirmed by Heinrich Klaproth and Ernst Chladni, two other leading natural scientists.
The polished surface of the cut shows a pattern named after Count Alois Widmanstätten, the director of the Imperial Porcelain works in Vienna. A Widmanstätten pattern consists of long nickel-iron crystals in a fine interleaving of kamacite and taenite bands. Those are two different nicke-iron alloys; kamacite with a lover Ni-content and taenite with a higher Ni-content. They develop at temperatures below 900-600°C under slow cooling. (It is difficult to discern on the photos, though.) The Loket meteorite is classified as the member of the IID group, a relatively rare group of meteorites.
Later, the main chunk of the meteorite (79 kilograms) got chopped of and taken to Vienna where it is displayed in the Natural History Museum. The rest (down to 14 kg by now) remained in the town hall of Loket. Today, the larger chunk is still in Vienna, the smaller one in the county town Sokolov. The display in Loket Castle is a replica.
The meteorite became something of a tourist attraction in the 19th century. Among the visitors of town and castle of Loket was the German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who had taken an interest in geology during his travels in the Harz mountains. He visited Loket in 1823 and got a statue in the town for his troubles. 'Goethe Was Here As Well' is obviously still a tourist magnet.
Footnotes
1) Today Loket is in the Czech Republic, but it belonged to Germany and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire in former times, then known by its German name Elbogen.
2) We don't know what really happened to the burgrave Puta of Illburk. It is possible that he was recalled by the king for overstepping his rights.
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