It was discovered that a 750-year-old Emmaus Church in eastern Germany sat upon lignite, or brown coal. The church wasn’t demolished. A more interesting solution was found.

This 660-ton church was moved by trucks from its home village Heuersdorf to Borna, 12 kilometers down the road. Before this, the 14.5-meter-high and 8.9-meter-wide building along with its 19.6-meter-high chapel were prepared by engineers who plugged walls’ cracks with concrete and wrapped the construction in 4 steel corsets. Then the church was lifted and huge, multi-wheeled transport bed was slid in beneath it.

 It was the wish of the village’s 59 inhabitants to move this church, because their village had to disappear, swallowed up by a coal mine, as Heuersdorf sat upon 52 million tons of brown coal. This move costed MIBRAG Company that supplied power plants with coal about $4.3 million. It had to re-engineer roads, divert small rivers and take down traffic line to allow the trucks move smoothly. Good, this church has made it.

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