Lake Resia: The Bell Tower of the Village Beneath the Water

High in the Alps of northern Italy, near the borders of Austria and Switzerland, a church bell tower stands in the middle of a lake. There's no church around it and no village, just the stone tower rising out of the blue-green water. The village it belonged to is underneath. The tower was built in the 14th century, part of the Romanesque church of Graun, a farming village in the Vinschgau Valley of South Tyrol. For centuries, Graun sat beside two small natural lakes, the Reschensee and the Mittersee. Plans to turn the area into a reservoir began early. In 1920, there was a proposal for a modest artificial lake about 5 meters deep. Then, around 1939, the Montecatini company announced a much bigger plan: a dam that would merge the two lakes into one lake 22 meters deep, submerging Graun entirely, along with part of the neighboring village of Reschen. The villagers fought it. Construction began in April 1940, but the war and local resistance slowed it down. After the war, the project was pushed forward on the grounds of national interest. The homes of Graun were dynamited, and families were moved out, many into a makeshift camp at the entrance to a nearby valley. Montecatini paid the residents little for their homes. Some moved away for good. Others rebuilt above the waterline, in a new Graun on the hillside, where their descendants still live. The bells were removed from the tower. The church itself was demolished. The tower was left standing. In July 1950, the dam was completed and the water rose. In all, 163 houses and 523 hectares of farmland were submerged. Today the tower is the only part of old Graun still visible, and one of the most photographed sights in South Tyrol. A local legend says that on cold winter nights, you can still hear the bells ringing beneath the lake, even though they were taken down before the flood. In winter, when the lake freezes, people walk out across the ice to stand beside the tower of the village under the lake.