Salt mine

Wieliczka Salt Mine

This is E writing. About half an hour SE of Krakow is the 

Wieliczka Salt Mine. The mine was opened in the 13th century and operated continuously until 2007. 

A little exercise to start the tour

The tour of the mine starts with a long walk down almost 400 steps (over 50 7-step flights) to get to the first level of the mine. When the miners were working here these were narrow, slick steps (made of salt).  Now they are wood -- not so bad, but still a lot of walking, especially carrying L & T.

As the miners hollowed out rooms they needed to hold up the walls -- the salt often forms large layers which could fall off the other rock (clay) without them. They used wood originally, then metal.  It turns out the wood is much better. The logs become petrified by the salt and maintain their strength or get stronger as the centuries pass, while metal corrodes in only about 30 years.

Copernicus

The miners built a large number of statues in the mine, like the one above celebrating Copernicus (the famous Polish physicist who found that the planets revolved around the sun). Many famous people visited the mines over the centuries and had rooms named after them and statues dedicated to them.

The mine itself is very interesting. We saw salt in several different forms. In some cases it was a rock solid coating on the walls. The kids enjoyed the tour guide's suggestion to lick the wall and confirmed it was salt. Other places the salt was more like popcorn, often coating logs.  Here you could easily break off chunks. In others it was like veins

The thing I found most amazing about the mine was that it was solid rock (rock salt, clay, ...) at the beginning -- no natural openings like you find in caves. Miners opened up every room by using pick axes (at least for the first few centuries) and chopping out the salt. If they were luck and found a big chunk of it then that became a 'natural room.' Now there are 9 levels, hundreds of meters deep, with hundreds of rooms.  I guess if you give people 800 years they can accomplish a lot. They had a lot of motivation though. Salt used to be as precious as silver. A chunk the size of R weighed about 2 tons and could be used to buy a village. Look at the room below and think how many R-sized chunks came out of it!

Some rooms are more special than others. This was carved out and decorated by only 3 different miners over 85 years (working sequentially).

One carved a picture of the last supper on the wall (having never seen the original but just pictures of it -- not bad!)

S particularly liked the salt chandeliers.

Lots of tunnels look like this -- salt floors and petrified wooden walls and ceiling.

This room was only recently reopened to visitors. It used to be deemed to dangerous to visit, even though it was firmly held up by scaffolding like that in the right side of the picture. The problem is that the salt layers are delaminating from the clay and rock and could collapse at any moment. Now they've figured out that if the drive 10 meter long fiberglass rods into the ceiling and wall (the little white dots all over the left side of the picture) that they can hold everything together and make it safe again. At least, that was what the guide said. A figured that she could have done without going in a room where tons of salt were held to tons of clay by glass rods.

Another danger in the mine is brine -- the salt got here in the first place because it used to be under and ocean and then the water receded/evaporated leaving the salt behind. Freshwater working its way through the walls though eats out the salt destabilizing the mine. The miners developed lots of tricks to route the water where they wanted it to keep things safe. This room had a deep pool of water in it. The guide suggested we toss in L since she couldn't sink if she wanted to in the brine. L decided she didn't feel like a swim though.

After a couple of hours we had walked down 130 meters. It took so long that by the end T figured he could lead the tour himself!

We really enjoyed the slat mine and learned a lot. Afterwards the guides offered to take us back to our apartment but we decided to get dropped off in the center of town instead because S wanted to go back to her favorite restaurant -- the milkbar -- so she could enjoy scrambled eggs and kompot (a Polish drink of stewed plums).

The city is undergoing a lot of renovation (two sides of the same street)

We walked home in two groups -- R & I took the littles while S & A went to a market before coming home. We both found a different way to get lost, but made it home not too much later. A & S had picked up a huge bag of currents along the way as S is crazy for them.  The bag had about twice as many as you see on the plate below and cost only $2.  Finally our Eastern European great deal!