We boarded the rowboat and Szpakowski pulled us along a line through the man-made caves. He could flush more of the water out, but tourists enjoy the boats. It was dark, lit in parts by hanging bare bulbs. Szpakowski explained he spent over $650,000 of his own money to excavate Włodarz. When he started, the tunnels were full of collapsed rock and submerged from natural drainage. All the entrances were closed off, exploded, crammed with rocks and debris; they descended almost 200 feet by line to begin clearing. “There was a moment when I was really close to quitting, because I thought I spent loads of money; it’s just too much,” he said. The first year, there were weeks where only a handful of people trickled in. But the summer’s gold train frenzy attracted more visitors than any previous year — 70,000 came in 2015. Thanks to the publicity, Szpakowski expects 100,000 this year.

Szpakowski told me it had always been his plan to make enough money and explore full time. In his words, it was a bit like being a “big boy” — the thrill of discovery, even the equipment explorers use, and what they find, tanks, guns, detritus.

“This isn't just a hobby — it’s that we are surrounded by all of it," he explained. "In the place where we lived, there are remnants everywhere.” The thrill is in putting together the pieces of the puzzle. “If you just collect information and documents and everything, you can create a picture of the whole and that is what fascinated me.”

As a former businessman, he had a theory about what happened with the gold train fiasco: private interests. Koper and Richter, whom Szpakowski considers comrades in arms against the AGH scientific commission, use the KS-700 georadar, the same type Szpakowski uses, and this has infringed on AGH’s stranglehold on the industry of treasure-hunting verification — as Poland’s premier technical institution, the commission has been called to check most of Lower Silesia’s confounding mysteries. “Before that they had monopoly for every request or application,” Szpakowski said. "And now unexpectedly, someone stepped into their specialization without asking them for permission with new equipment and other ideas."

For Szpakowski, it’s personal. The same commission turned up nothing when looking for the three sections Szpakowski said he found. “They declared that there are some anomalies but there is no underground city, nothing,” he told me. Szpakowski maintained this was because they don’t know what they are doing, so he decided to test them. He took the AGH scientist to a field where he himself had buried a large septic tank and said their GPR turned up nothing. So Szpakowski is plotting his revenge, vowing to return to the place where AGH found only anomalies with his own equipment and the press. “In the same spot, I will show that ‘Here you are: underground tunnels, shafts,’” he explained. “I will do the reverse of what they did, just because they really pissed me off.”

In February 2015, Poland changed its treasure-hunting law: Everything that is one meter underground belongs to the Polish state. Previously, there was just an honorarium, so there was no incentive to report findings. With the addition of a 10% finder’s fee, everyone flocked to put in applications. The local administration in Wałbrzych told me it’s examining 15 applications out of roughly 40 filed for permission to dig. Seven of those are Szpakowski’s.

I had heard others privately deride Szpakowski as a maniac for his applications, all the theories about trains, complex parts, underground cities, and hidden levels, a criticism he was well aware of. I asked Szpakowski if it didn’t seem like he had given everything up to wander around like a lunatic shouting from a soapbox about three hidden complexes and missing trains. He agreed, but told me he was the one who said the complex had been built in blocks and that no one believed him until recently. “I was very bravely talking about it for years, back then it was only theories; I continued on this path and I proved it. Now it’s common knowledge,” he said. He was convinced. And in many ways, he was convincing.

If from the outset the idea of missing trains, secret cities, and buried treasures seems outrageous, it takes only a few minutes in the Riese complex to begin to think anything is possible. Descending into the tunnels is an emotional quandary — equal parts awe and revulsion. It is the capability of humans to force others to build this, to commit the inconceivable cruelties we know they did, that makes them seem capable of so much more.



