Kuźnia Wodna, Gdańsk

Kuźnia Wodna is a timber hammer forge built across the Oliwa Stream, where flowing water turns the machinery. Its working history reaches back to 1597, when the Cistercian abbot of Oliwa acquired the forge, and production continued until 1948. Look at the water wheels and the heavy wooden shafts: each workshop has its own furnace and hammer, with wheels about 4 metres across lifting hammers weighing roughly 250 kilograms.

Their fall is only about 40 centimetres, yet this machinery once handled work that smaller smithies could not. A smaller water wheel powered shears capable of cutting heated iron up to 40 millimetres thick. After decades of decline and rebuilding, the forge reopened to visitors in 2021, and it is now a branch of the Gdańsk Museum.