[Saturday, June 22]
[Click on any photo for a bigger view]
Today would be our last day with the Gate 1 tour group. We had booked an optional activity, a visit to the salt mine at Wieliczka in the morning, and there would be a farewell dinner with the group in the evening. The rest of the day would be ours to walk around Kraków on our own. We boarded the bus for the short ten mile ride to the town of Wieliczka.
Sodium chloride has been mined for millennia for its use as a food preservative. Salt can be gotten from sea water, from upwelling of briny water from areas over salt deposits, and from mining salt deposits. In earlier times, it was thought that underground salt deposits are rare, and so salt, universally used, was a very valuable commodity. Salt mines could greatly enrich places with access to them. There is evidence that salt was processed from brine upwellings in the area of Wieliczka in neolithic times. The salt mine at Wieliczka was first dug in the 13th century and produced salt until 1996, when it was halted because the need to dig ever deeper outweighed the economic benefit of mining the salt.
During the middle ages, the mining of salt was controlled by local princes or the king. This was done in part to ensure a steady (and high) price for salt, and to allow workers to work the mines seasonally. The mines could be quite hot in the summer, and workers would often use the time off in the summer to do farm work or other tasks above ground. In addition, the ventilation of the mines using humid summertime air, not to mention the breath of hundreds of workers, introduced even more risk by turning the walls and pathways slick. Mine workers were usually well paid since their job required a high level of skill, not to mention risk. There was always the risk of collapsing ceilings, floods, or poisonous or explosive gas deposits. Workers came to the surface every day while animals, such as horses that were used in the mines, spent years living below ground without seeing the light of day, since it was difficult to transport them to the surface. When these animals were retired, it took some time for them to become accustomed to the light of day.
What makes the Wieleczka mine special, indeed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are the numerous carvings made by several artistically inclined miners. Starting in the 19th century, whole chapels were made complete with religious decorations in salt. The mine itself has over a hundred miles of tunnels and chambers down to a depth of over 1000 feet. The tourist area encompasses less than 2% of the mine, but descends via over 800 steps to a depth of over 400 feet. Along the way, visitors pass salt galleries containing exhibits of salt mining technology over the centuries, and at the lowest depths chambers and chapels full of salt carvings.
The group slowly made its way down into the mine. All visitors take the descent on foot, but to keep things flowing and avoid two-way traffic, we all got a mineworker's elevator ride to the surface at the end of the tour. Our Gate 1 local guide and the mine guide kept us all together; there was always another group following close behind, so we couldn't dally too long in any one place. It still took us well over an hour to get to the bottom. There was a very elderly woman in our group who used a cane, but that did not keep her from doing the full descent. She made it all the way and was usually not at the back of the group!
Our ride back to the surface was fun. We were crammed, nine at a time, into one of two elevators that whisked us back to the surface in about half a minute. We felt like we were in a fraternity telephone booth stuffing contest. It was humorous, but not for the truly claustrophobic!
I took a lot of pictures in the mine, more than what is shown here. But what I show is more than what's in the typical travelogs from the mine that I've seen online. Go ahead and scroll through to the last section of writing for this day: our trip to Nowa Huta for our Gate 1 farewell dinner.
The outside of the Wieliczka Salt Mine
We'd use these elevators on the way up.
Display of Medieval salt mine worker and block of salt being hoist to the surface
Display of human powered pulley system
Mine chamber with wood bracing
Nicolaus Copernicus was one of the first tourists to visit the salt mines in the 15th century
Doorway to St. Anthony's Chapel carved in salt
Wood supports become infused with salt and rock hard
Display of workers checking for methane
Display of Medieval salt mine workers
Display of horses used to haul salt
Horses lived underground until they were retired from mine duty
King Kazimierz the Great
Display of animal powered elevator system
Salt was extracted from brine pools above the mine area during Neolithic times
Salt sculptures of gnomes working in the mine
A fully saturated brine solution
Brine lake
Modern tourist stairway next to old miners' steps
Mary and child Jesus
Chapel with crucifix. Pillars and other figures are carved from salt
Saint Kinga's Chapel is the most impressive chamber, with salt chandeliers and numerous religious scenes carved in salt
The Last Supper
The Flight from Egypt
The young Jesus teaching in the temple
Altar in St. Kinga's Chapel with a salt chandelier
Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding at Cana
Christ in the tomb - Christ risen
Christ appearing to the Apostles after His resurrection
Nativity scene above a depiction of the Slaughter of the Innocents
Pope St. John Paul II
Backlit statue of Mary
Carving of salt mine worker
The carvers of St. Kinga's Chapel
The Wieliczka Salt Mine is one of the inaugural UNESCO World Heritage sites
Vast chamber in the mine
Display of salt mineral deposits
I forgot what this legend is about!
Pool of brine and salt stalactite
Another chapel in the mine. You can get married there!
Banquet room with seating for 500!
Juliusz Słowacki, Polish Romantic poet, whose life was almost exactly contemporaneous with Chopin's Electric vehicles replaced animal power in recent years of operation
Mine train tracks
The last set of 75 steps down before the elevator ride back up
That was one crowded elevator ride back to the surface!
Glad to be back up top
We had a little time after the tour before our final event with Gate 1, the farewell dinner. Vicky and I visited the mall across and train station adjacent to a large public square next to our hotel. As in Warsaw, the mall was hopping. It's location near the station and the heart of the tourist area helps it to thrive at a time when most US malls are dead or dying. We also stopped by the station to get the lay of the land for our own side trip to Zakopane the next day.
Mall adjacent to the Kraków train station
Main train station in Kraków
Our farewell dinner was held at a restaurant a few miles away in Nowa Huta. Nowa Huta ("The New Steel Mill") was built as an ideal socialist city starting in the late 1940s. It was created as a separate city to the east of Kraków. It is now part of the city of Kraków itself, and with about 200,000 residents is one of the most populous areas of the city. The Lenin Steel Works was opened in 1954 and became the largest steel works in Poland. The planned city contains large areas of workers housing, shops, and an abundance of parks. It is one of the largest "socialist realist" settlements in the world, second only to Magnitogorsk in Russia. The buildings in the residential areas maintain the socialist realist look of Stalinist times, but have been repurposed for the new era of capitalist prosperity. The Lenin Steelworks became one of the centers of anticommunist resistance in the 1980s. The vast majority of the workers there were members of the Solidarity union. After the collapse of communism, the steelworks were renamed to honor the Polish engineer and metallurgist of international renown, Tadeusz Sendzimir. In 2005, the steelworks were purchased by the Mittal Steel company, the largest steel producer in the world.
Street corner in the socialist workers paradise, Nowa Huta
Nowa Huta street scene
The farewell dinner was a nice affair. The food was excellent. The group had some good conversations and some traded contact information. Some were leaving early the next day, though a few (including Vicky and me) had plans to linger a little longer in Poland.
Our tour farewell dinner in Nowa Huta started with, what else? Pierogi!
Chicken soup with mini-pierogi
Remains of roast pork in beet sauce with kopytka
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