ZBIROH,

CENTRAL BOHEMIA

Somewhere down a well more than 500 feet deep on the grounds of a 12th-century castle, a network of tunnels could reveal a hidden cache of stolen Nazi treasure.

It's been a local rumor and the subject of pub banter for years in this small village 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside Prague. The only person tired of talking about it is Jaroslav Pácha, 46, the owner of Zbiroh Chateau, originally a Gothic castle.

"I don't have time to care about this," he says.

Pácha purchased the building from Zbiroh village in 2004 for 200 million Kč ($8.9 million) with the intent of turning it into a posh entertainment venue for clients of his company, Gastro Žofín, a leading Prague culinary enterprise. Since then he has fully restored most of it, turning its rooms into an homage to the many eras the castle has survived.

"These rooms are more important than the well, that's why I'm showing you them," Pácha tells a visitor, leaving one in which the artist Alphons Mucha lived and worked. "There are so many more interesting things than the well at this castle."

But ever since last year, when workers cleaning the well discovered an archive of German wartime documents among the well's refuse, the Czech media have been able to focus on little else about the castle. Surveys have revealed a vast network of tunnels branching out from beneath the castle, and that fact coupled with its history as a former base of the Nazi SS in Czechoslovakia is fueling speculation that somewhere down there lurks valuable Nazi loot.

Naturally, not everyone is buying into that.

"I am familiar with the topic of the Nazis and Nazi treasure," says Vladislav Černík, a tourist visiting the castle for a day. "I think it's another rumor."

Television networks have done repeated broadcasts from here. Newspapers have written features. Interest fades now and then, but re-ignites whenever the special security firm cleaning the well for Pácha finds something else, as it did last month when it unearthed a whole new stockpile of weapons.

"Most national and regional dailies call regularly to find out about the latest developments," says Oldřich Šelenberk, owner of SCSA Security, which has 20 people working on the well.

Worst of all, in his mind at least, the media has labeled Pácha a modern-day treasure hunter. He cuts a dashing figure, to be sure: He pulls into the castle's courtyard amid the crunch of gravel beneath his Range Rover, dressed in designer jeans and snakeskin boots. But he is just a businessman, he says.

"I'm not a treasure hunter," he says. "I don't know anything about Nazi treasure. ... Nazi documents are a byproduct for me. They were discovered when I needed to dig a hole somewhere."

Searching everywhere

The Czech Republic has no shortage of treasure hunters, of course.

American Graeme Smith has spent six years and 9 million Kč searching for the gems looted from Amber Room, which the Nazis ransacked from the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg in 1941, at Hora Svaté Kateřiny in north Bohemia.

German Helmut Gaensel searched the same area for the missing amber panels, valued at some $250 million in 1998, but for the most part he has concentrated his attention, and $3.5 million, on crates of Nazi gold thought to be hidden somewhere in Štěchovice, central Bohemia.

Josef Mužík, perhaps this country's reigning treasure hunter in terms of sheer determination, has been looking for those same crates in Štěchovice since 1990, investing 13 million Kč in the hunt. He's convinced there are some 964 of them containing gold, art and Nazi bank account data.

He's never turned up a thing.

Few places in this country have as strong a connection with the Nazis as Zbiroh, however.

The SS used the castle to track radio signals from 1943 until the end of World War II. (The Czechoslovak Communist Party put the castle to similar use as a headquarters for its army under the Warsaw Pact. For years, Zbiroh was a secret location, the castle never appearing on official maps).

The case of the crates

In the days before the Nazis fled, witnesses reported seeing aircraft land nearby and unload numerous cases bound for the castle. No one has ever found those cases; when the Nazis abandoned the chateau they reportedly sealed off many of the castle's tunnels with concrete and booby-trapped them with grenades.

The well itself, which Pácha says is the deepest in Europe, was filled in when he bought the castle. "My goal was to have the deepest well," he says.

So, he hired SCSA last year, and since then workers have crammed into a musty basement room heavy with cobwebs and hauled up dirt and rubble from the well, repelling ever deeper down into it.

Two hundred feet down they reached a concrete floor that sealed off the remainder of the well. A passageway runs off from the well at this point. It is covered with netting that holds small round objects that workers right now are taking to be grenades.

The team has postponed work on the well until the end of the month, as they consult explosive experts and ascertain how safe it is to continue.

So, there's no telling yet what might lurk beyond. Military historians are generally skeptical that these excavations will yield anything of huge value, scholarly or otherwise. Several contacted for this story declined to even speculate about what's underneath Zbiroh Chateau.

Much of what has been found — rifles, glasses, bottles, stamps and other supplies from the SS commandant's office — are housed behind glass in one of the castle's rooms, next to other artifacts found on the castle's grounds.

Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry is studying some of the documents found.

Pácha says that right now he is concentrating on finishing the castle's restoration, due to be complete next year. But he does allow that the various passageways beneath where he stands could in fact be hiding treasure.

But that's not why 20,000 visitors came to the chateau in 2005, its first year open to the public, he argues.

"The castle itself is so valuable, it can attract visitors on its own," he says. "It can survive without the well."