Kutná Hora had a problem no other rich Bohemian town had: it was sitting on top of its own mines. Centuries of shafts and drainage adits pulled the water table apart and fouled what was left, so the town could not drink from its own ground. Water was piped in through wooden mains several kilometres long — from the Svatovojtěšská spring about 2.5 km away, and from sources around Bylany — and held in covered stone tanks. This is the one that survived.
It was built in 1493–95, paid for by Jan Smíšek of Vrchoviště, the mine owner who rebuilt Hrádek, now the silver museum, and endowed the painted chapel in St Barbara’s. It was long attributed to Matěj Rejsek, which is why the square carries his name; more recent scholarship gives it to the mason Brikcí Gauske. It is a twelve-sided stone prism worked with late-Gothic tracery, blind arcading in a fish-scale pattern, crockets and finials.
Be honest about the stone. Ludvík Lábler’s restoration of 1887–90 replaced most of the damaged carving with copies and did not rebuild the original roof, so what stands is a 15th-century design in largely 19th-century stone, missing its top and the statues it probably carried on brackets. The shape and the purpose are the point: no jet, no basin, no coins — a cistern that pipes filled and townspeople drew from, in continuous use until 1890.
There is nothing to pay and nothing to book. It stands on Rejskovo náměstí, about five minutes’ walk west of the Stone House and ten from the Italian Court, in a small square most day-trippers never turn into. Give it two minutes on the way past and it will explain more about what mining did to this town than any label in a museum.
