This is rock salt from the salt mine, which is the only open mining facility in the world working continuously since the Middle Ages. Not much mining goes on today (they just evaporate some of the super-saturated water that can be found in the mine and use it for local consumption) and the mine is supposed to end production in the next year or so and become solely a tourist attraction. It took us three hours to complete the tour of the sections of the mine open to tourists, and our guide said that we had covered only 1% of the total area of the mine! Most of the rock looks kind of like this: blackish greyish due to impurities with white veins of more pure salt. They hand out free samples like this in one of the chambers of the mine.
A picture of the underground restaurant where the tour ends. I think I read that it's the only completely underground restaurant in the world? And it's something like 135 meters under the surface. This place was dug out of the salt...so yeah, that ceiling is rock salt and under the wood floors is rock salt.
Huge banquet hall next to the restaurant, also dug out of salt.
A statue of Goethe made out of rock salt. There are tons of sculptures in the mine that were all chiseled from rock salt by the miners themselves, none by professional artists.
A chandelier made from pure crystal salt. This was in the main chapel (huge!) of the mine. There are 40 or so chapels in the mines because the miners were understandably very religious since they worked in such a dangerous place. Most of them are small chambers dug out of the salt, maybe the size of your average living room but with taller ceilings. I've got a picture of the largest chapel below.
A carving from the main chapel of the mine. I think this is honoring the resurrection of Jesus. All made out of salt, and sculpted by your average miner.
A salty version of "The Last Supper." It's amazing that the miner that did this could get the kind of depth he did.
A shot of the main chapel (all made out of salt) from the top of the stairs leading down into it. All of the chandeliers are made from the pure salt. This whole place was made by three miners. It's a lot newer than all of the other chapels in the mine, most of which date from the Middle Ages up through the 18th century. This one was made by miners in the first half of the 20th.
Passage through the salt.
A sculpture of one of the dwarves that miners thought lived in the mines. They were very superstitious and believed that there were dwarves that would help them mine the salt and keep them safe.
A shot down through the mine as we walked down the stairs from level 1 (about 60 meters below ground) to level 2 (about 90 meters). We traversed a total of 3 levels (the deepest at 135-ish) out of a total of 13 or so.
Head of Kazimierz the Great, a Polish king from the 1300s. He's kind of a big deal. Made out of salt, like everything else in the mine.
The whiter salt is called "cauliflowers." It gets made when water seeps down through the salt.
Another passage through the mine. That's Rachel and Bradley in the picture.
Nicholas Copernicus! Or Mikolaj Kopernik, as his name really was in his native Polish. He attended the university where we're taking our language classes (the Jagiellonian). He visited the mine as a tourist in the 1500s. The mine was already open for tourism (though only for the rich and famous) way back then.
So visiting the mine was pretty amazing. All the salt is the remains of the ocean that used to cover this part of Europe and evaporated who knows how many millions of years ago. Salt was apparently really important in the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed - our tour guide said that at the height of Poland's power (so the end of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance), 70 miners worked the mine and generated one third of the national income. Salt was more precious and valuable than gold. Pretty cool, huh? When we first got down in the mine, the guide said that if we didn't believe that all this black and gray-ish rock was really salt, we could lick the walls...super disgusting. You can actually see the places where the salt is worn and smooth-looking from people licking it. I did lick the little hunk of salt I got for free, just to check. It was super salty! I bought a candle-holder made out pink-ish salt and now I'm tempted to rub a little off every time I make pasta since I still haven't gotten around to buying some at the supermarket yet.
1 comment:
Whoa that's so cool! Awesome pictures.
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