Going for a bong: the global trade in church bells

the pastor in Radoszowy, a small town in south-western Poland, was surprised to get a letter from a German parish offering to send him a bronze bell. The church’s oldest parishioners still recall the day Nazi troops stole the town’s 400-year-old clanger. Now Mr Sonnek says he is planning a special mass, in October, to celebrate its homecoming. Eighty years after German troops stripped church towers across Europe, parishes are trying to give some back. Perhaps 150,000 were melted down during the second world war, to make guns and bullets. Some 25,000 survived; they found their way to vast “bell cemeteries”, from which German churches took their pick. Last year a bell that was decorating the courtyard of a big church in Munster went home to the Polish village of Slawiecice. The diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart has a project to return 54 bells.