Verteba Cave
Verteba Cave is a karstic cave near the village of Bilche-Zolote, Chortkiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine. It sits near the Seret river, on a high plateau known as the Podolian Upland, and is one of several such gypsum caves in the region; however, Verteba is the only cave in this cluster to show signs of prehistoric occupation. In Copper Age Europe, the cave was inhabited periodically by members of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture. Thousands of artefacts, including ceramic vessels, clay figurines, bones, and tools, have been found inside. Human remains—which mainly consist of disembodied skulls—have been found bearing injuries consistent with having been intentionally killed.
Between October 1942 and April 1943, 28 Jews from Bilche-Zolote and Korolivka hid in the cave to escape the Holocaust. When the Gestapo stormed the cave, the group was forced to relocate to Priest's Grotto; most survived the war, having hidden underground for nearly two years. Their ordeal was the subject of a 2007 book, The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story; and a 2012 documentary, No Place on Earth.
Verteba partially opened to the public as a show cave in 2004. Inside, the cave hosts the Museum of Trypillian Culture, displaying archaeological finds from the past 200 years.
Description
Verteba Cave is located from the village of Bilche-Zolote, Chortkiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine, at an elevation of. It is one of several karstic caves located in the Podillia–Bukovynian or Transnistrian karst region on the Ukrainian Podolian Upland, a loess plateau cut by several ravines and rivers. Verteba itself is on the eastern bank of the Seret, a tributary of the Dniester. There is only one entrance, located in a depression caused by a collapsed sinkhole. The cave features a labyrinth of interlocking passageways. Estimates of the total length of the passageways range from to. The overall surface area of the cave floor is about and the cave's capacity is about.History
Discovery and excavations
During the 19th century, the land on which the cave sits was part of an estate owned by the Polish noble Sapieha family. Jan Khmeletsky discovered the cave in 1822. Prince Leon Sapieha was part of the Anthropological Committee of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków and permitted Adam Kirkor to conduct the first explorations in 1876 and 1878. These archaeological excavations yielded two human skeletons and several additional incomplete sets of remains. Further studies took place sporadically between the 1890s and 1900s by and, between 1914 and 1928, and again after World War II. After the war, the cave again began attracting tourists for its geologic and archaeological interest, and it officially opened as a show cave to the public in 2004.Beginning in 1996, Mykhailo Sokhatskyi from the Borshchiv Local History Museum has led periodic archaeological expeditions. By 2010, the team had excavated of the cave. The 2018 field season unveiled a new hearth and a bag of flint blanks. The flint was not from local quarries but instead originated in Volyn Oblast and was subsequently brought into Verteba Cave.
Holocaust occupation
On 12 October 1942, 28 Jews from seven families fled from Bilche-Zolote and the nearby village of Korolivka to Verteba Cave, seeking refuge from mass executions by the Nazis, who had arrived the year prior. Tourism to the cave had by then halted for the winter months. Upon arrival, the group chose a chamber measuring across and sealed it off with rubble. Once a week, three of the men—who had obtained special licences to remain in the area collecting scrap metal—performed a supply run, bringing a wagon with supplies under the cover of darkness. As the cave has no reliable water source—the inhabitants collected water runoff from the walls—and the Nazis planned to resume searching the forest for hiding Jews the following spring, the refugees regarded Verteba as a temporary shelter. To avoid discovery, in February 1943, they moved deeper into the cave, from the entrance. They also dug out a smaller, second entrance as an emergency escape route, towards which they carved steps into the stone. In one part of the cave, a survivor inscribed wikt:שומר| in Hebrew on the wall.On 5 April 1943, their hiding place was discovered and the Gestapo stormed the cave. All but five of the Jews, who were taken by the Nazis, managed to escape through the back entrance; three more later escaped execution and rejoined the group. The survivors spent a few weeks hiding around Bilche-Zolote and Korolivka before a neighbour told them about Priest's Grotto. There, they waited out the remainder of the war and Holocaust until Soviet troops arrived in April 1944.
One of the survivors, Esther Sterner, published a memoir entitled We Fight to Survive about the experience in 1975. Christos Nicola later published a book, The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story, about the group's ordeal and his excursions into the caves to corroborate their story. In 2012, a documentary, No Place on Earth, was released. Some of the artefacts from their occupation, as well as some that belonged to Nazis, have also been retrieved by archaeologists.
Geology
Verteba Cave, as with many other local caves in the Transnistrian formation, is set inside a gypsum sequence that developed under a shallow sea during the Middle Miocene epoch. The eventual evaporation of the sea into separate lagoons left behind large deposits of gypsum, limestone, clay, and other layers of sedimentary rock. Stratigraphically, this gypsum layer is located between the Eastern European Platform and the Carpathian Foredeep. Over time, the unstable gypsum has caused collapses on the surface, one of these causing a steep depression that forms the current cave entrance. Although most of the cave is covered by modern Quaternary topsoil and limestone, some outcroppings of gypsum are visible around the entrance.The cave's layout consists of a maze of interlocking passageways and galleries. Several theories regarding the cave's formation have been proposed. One early group of scholars posits that it formed during the Early-Middle Pleistocene, through the erosion of underground streams fed by the nearby Seret, which bends close to the site. In 2000, a new theory emerged that springs from underground aquifers formed the caves through artesian flow, in which groundwater below and around the cave permeated through more porous rock layers into the gypsum and carved out the channels. This process could have taken place between the Late Pliocene and the Early Pleistocene.
Deposits of different materials—some geologic, some biogenic—make up the surfaces of the cave. The floors are lined with silty loam or chernozem soils. Overall, both the topsoil and the gypsum rock above the cave create a semi-permeable surface prone to collapse, through which water and soil can enter; water movement has created calcite speleothems and clastic rock debris litters the cave. These collapses have also rendered some caves that might have been used in prehistory inaccessible, and other entrances to the cave complex may have existed at that time. Verteba has gone through regular periods of heavy flooding by silt, creating undisturbed soil deposits even between the prehistoric human layers of occupation.
Archaeology
Although Verteba is only one of several karst caverns in the area, it is the only one known to have prehistoric occupation. Early human presence at Verteba was part of a larger settlement pattern of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, the dominant, mostly-agricultural culture of Copper Age Eastern Europe at the time. About 5,000 years before present, people began settling, farming, and ranching along the local rivers, building adobe houses and creating ceramic vessels. Within of the site, at least 16 other settlements from this culture have been identified, dating between. Within the Dneister Canyon, population density measured about 12 people per square kilometre, making it one of the most densely populated areas of Europe at the time.Verteba Cave's prehistoric occupation occurred in three distinct periods. Several different groups from the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture occupied the cave at different times. The occupation periods at Verteba Cave fall within three distinct horizons: the BII, CI, and CII horizons. Most researchers agree that Verteba Cave was not used as a permanent residence and possibly functioned as a temporary shelter, or even a religious center. However, the 2018 discovery of a permanent hearth similar to the ones in the surface settlements may provide evidence of long-term occupation.
Most of the excavated archaeological material is kept either in the Archaeological Museum of Kraków or in the Borshchiv Local History Museum. The Kraków collection contains papers detailing the earliest archaeological excavations, over 35,000 ceramic sherds and 300 intact vessels, approximately 120 clay figurines, other clay objects like spindle whorls and fishing sinkers, and hundreds of other artefacts. One of the most prolific deposits of archaeological material occurs in a region of the cave known as Site 7. Here, ceramics, anthropomorphic figurines, bones, and antler or stone tools have been recovered. Larger structures such as waste pits, dugouts, sleeping platforms made of fired clay, and hearths have also been discovered.
Hearths, which left behind traces of ash, charcoal, and burnt clay, fired the gypsum cave walls, causing some surfaces to crumble. For light, people inside the cave carried portale lamps, as well as having installed stationary open-flame lamps at intervals along passageways. Some of these lamps left behind spots of overfired gypsum on the cave walls, about above the cave floor.
Ceramics
Three different Cucuteni–Trypillian ceramic typologies, which roughly correspond to the occupation periods, have been identified amongst the Verteba Cave pottery: the Schypynetska, Koshylovetska, and the Kasperivska. The site was busiest around the first transition period, .About 2,500 ceramic vessels and 200 cooking vessels from the early Schypynetska group have been recovered. This group occupied the cave for about 195 years; a 2010 study dated a sample of ceramics to. Their pots come in a variety of shapes and are characterized by their grooved, spiralling ornamentation and were painted with red, black, brown, and white pigments. However, dozens of ceramics and fragments from this era were found to have been imported from the neighbouring Badrazhy group, as well as the more distant Bodrogkeresztúr and Lublin-Volhynia cultures.
Many samples of the Koshylovetska pottery group display patterns that are more characteristic of the Branzeni and Badrazhy assemblages within the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture. Besides vessels, this group notably includes clay anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines. Such artwork began to be uncovered during the late 19th-century excavations, and are believed to have been fastened to either the walls or ceiling of the cave. Of the 113 humanoid figures excavate before 2022, almost all are female, only five being designated as male. Generally, most are sculpted standing up, with two legs that join together into one foot, and two eye holes carved into a disc-shaped head. A further five female figures were discovered in 2023. 133 other figures represent various animals, including bears, bulls, horses, goats, and sheep. These are stocky but proportionate with four short legs, and several have tails.
The Kasperivska pottery group contains signs of influence from the neighboring Funnelbeaker and Baden cultures. Several features of the Verteba Cave ceramics also reflect Anatolian and Balkan influences, which fits into a broader pattern of similar pottery that stretched as far as modern-day Poland. These vessels are relatively colourless. Combined, the Koshylovetska and Kasperivska groups occupied the cave for a period of about 803 years, radiocarbon dated to about 3550–2747 BCE, with a period of about 87 years between them during which the cave was disused.