The Kuckuckstein is a rock in the Königshain Mountains near Görlitz. It is located about 300 m north of the Hochstein at an altitude of 340 m above sea level. NN. The shape is very similar to a bird's head, preferably an eagle is recognized in it. The eye forms an artificial viewing hole. During the winter solstice, the midday sun appears in the eye for several days.
Already in 1828 Karl Benjamin Preusker suspected a “pagan sacrificial altar” for a “sun cult” for the neighboring Totenstein in his work Upper Lusatian Antiquities. In 1937, the head of the Leipzig University Observatory interpreted recesses on the Totenstein as depictions of the constellations. A copper engraving from 1790 in the work Observations over the Mountains near Königshayn in Oberlausiz by Carl Adolph Gottlob von Schachmann shows the cuckoo stone already in its present form. Numerous archaeological finds, which prove the human presence in the Königshain Mountains up to the Stone Age, support the assumption of a former cult site. The alignment of the cuckoo stone to the midday sun was discovered in 2007 by Hilmar Hensel and Ralf Herold. [1]
In 2008 the public and school observatory "Bruno-H.-Bürgel" in Sohland / Spree founded the archaeoastronomy group to research this and other calendar solar observation phenomena on other rocks in Upper Lusatia. The archaeoastronomical research project was named "Project of the Gods" and the rock objects that show the calendar-based solar observation phenomenon are referred to as the "Sun Sanctuaries of Upper Lusatia". [2]
In 2013, the writer Sylke Hörhold described a crime scene in her detective novel "Hexenbrennen" by making comparisons with the cuckoo stone in Königshain and its solar phenomenon.
Source: Wikipedia