The Wieliczka Salt Mine of Poland: part-1
The Wieliczka Salt Mine of Poland was included within the first UNESCO World Heritage checklist in 1978. It is usually on the Polish Checklist of Historic Heritage and, when visiting, gives an attention-grabbing method to get to know the way salt has been mined underground for nearly 9 centuries. In the summertime, virtually eight,000 vacationers a day go to Wieliczka, which has 500 tour guides and 400 miners sustaining the mine. After shopping for your ticket, you might be allotted a information who will take you across the mine. Patrycya, our information, has been on the job for 20 years and we enthusiastically adopted her to discover the sweetness, materials tradition and historic heritage of the mine and its excavated advanced.
We opted for the vacationer route, which helps you to discover chambers, galleries, chapels and lakes. The mine has been opened to the general public with this route because the finish of the eighteenth century and has greater than 300km of galleries and virtually three,000 chambers. It’s divided into 9 flooring at depths various from 64m to 327m. We went right down to the third ground, which is at a depth of 135m. To get to the primary degree, one has to stroll down 380 picket steps, however the stroll is relatively simple. There are a complete of 800 steps that vacationers stroll within the mine and, after the tour ends, a elevate takes you to the exit in a mere 40 seconds.
The gray rock ceiling of the primary ground is a nationwide treasure, fabricated from impure salt which is 95% sodium chloride and 5% totally different impurities. It’s these impurities that give the salt its gray color. Previously, this salt with out being purified was used to protect meals. It’s edible and accommodates good portions of minerals. In subsequent chambers of the mine the place this gray salt is current on the partitions, vacationers can lick it (in the event that they wish to danger it) to infer for themselves that it’s certainly salt. The primary chamber that we entered is named the Urszula Chamber and it reveals how miners used easy hand instruments to extract salt between 1649 and 1685.
There’s a hoisting system, which was operated by 4 miners who walked spherical and spherical it, pushing it ahead to wind the rope across the vertical axel to elevate a heavy block of salt. This course of was used to move salt from the second to the primary degree, because the shaft was 30m deep. The ground can be fabricated from salt and, in lots of tunnels and chambers of the mine, there’s a strong salt ground or salt tiles, which get polished by guests strolling over them.
At a depth of 64.4m, we entered the Nicholas Copernicus Chamber. Nicholas Copernicus was the well-known Polish astronomer, who has been credited with formulating the heliocentric mannequin of the photo voltaic system. It’s believed that he visited the mine in 1493, when he was learning in Krakow. At the moment, he was 20 years previous. The ground, ceiling and partitions of this chamber are all fabricated from salt.
Within the centre of the chamber, there’s a monument devoted to Copernicus. Carved in salt in 1973 by Wladyslaw Hapek, the monument marks the 500th anniversary of his birthday. Previously, this chamber was a single large block of salt. Normally, there are layers of salt underneath the bottom, however, within the higher a part of the deposit, there are not any layers. The miners dug within the mushy rocks of clay and shale to discover a block of salt. The chambers within the mine are of various sizes and shapes, as this trusted the dimensions and shapes of the blocks of salt that the miners discovered underground.
Within the subsequent chamber are six life-size salt sculptures that depict how rock salt was found in Poland. The legend goes that Kinga was a Hungarian princess and was engaged to marry a polish duke. As a dowry, she was given a salt mine in Marmaros. Presently, salt was very valuable and Poland suffered from an absence of it. Kinga, studying of this, determined to offer salt to Poland as her wedding ceremony current. She threw her engagement ring within the mine and in Wieliczka, Kinga ordered the miners to dig in a particular spot. Her ring was discovered within the first salt block unearthed and salt has been present in abundance in Poland ever since. Kinga is the patroness of the miners.
Lengthy and skinny salt stalactites might be seen at one nook of the chamber and these are a reason behind fear to the miners, because it means water is leaking via the mine. The miners gather the water and produce it to the floor to supply salt. About 15,000 tonnes of salt is manufactured in a 12 months. In different chambers of the mine, we discovered white salt, which is pure sodium chloride and it crumbled once we touched it.
That is the primary a part of a two-part collection about this fascinating mine. Within the second half, I’ll take care of the geological origin of the mine, the usage of horses there virtually 400 years in the past, the St Anthony’s Chapel, the Holy Cross Chapel and the most important and grandest chapel of all of the Wieliczka Salt Mine – the St Kinga’s Chapel.
All pictures by Khursheed Dinshaw.
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