THIS IS UNBELIEVEABLE - Part 1

What the Miners did to an Old Salt Mine in Poland 

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Deep underground in Poland lies something remarkable but little

known outside Eastern Europe. For centuries, miners have extracted salt

there, but left behind things quite startling and unique. Take a look at the

most unusual salt mine in the world.

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Remember, this was all done over many years by the miners themselves as they worked underground!

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From the outside, Wieliczka Salt Mine doesn’t look extraordinary.

It looks extremely well kept for a place that hasn’t mined any salt for

over ten years but apart from that it looks ordinary. However, over two

hundred meters below ground it holds an astonishing secret. This is the salt

mine that became an art gallery, cathedral and underground

lake.

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  ~  Situated in the Krakow area, Wieliczka is a small town of close to twenty thousand inhabitants. It was founded in the twelfth century by a local Duke to mine the rich deposits of salt that lie beneath. Until 1996 it did just that but the generations of miners did more than just extract. They left behind them a breathtaking record of their time underground in the shape of statues of mythic, historical and religious figures. They even created their own chapels in which to pray.
 ~   Perhaps their most astonishing legacy is the huge underground cathedral they left behind for posterity.  
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It may feel like you are in the middle of a Jules Verne adventure

as you descend in to the depths of the world. After a one hundred and fifty

meter climb down wooden stairs the visitor to the salt mine will see some

amazing sites. About the most astounding in terms of its sheer size and

audacity is the Chapel of Saint Kinga. The Polish people have for many

centuries been devout Catholics and this was more than just a long term

hobby to relieve the boredom of being underground. This was an act of

worship. 

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Amazingly, even the chandeliers in the cathedral are made of

salt. It was not simply hewn from the ground and then thrown together;

however, the process is rather more painstaking for the lighting. After

extraction the rock salt was first of all dissolved. It was then

reconstituted with the impurities taken out so that it achieved a glass-like

finish. The chandeliers are what many visitors think the rest of the

cavernous mine will be like as they have a picture in their minds of salt as

they would sprinkle on their meals! However, the rock salt occurs naturally

in different shades of grey (something like you would expect granite to look

like).

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Still, that doesn’t stop well over one million visitors (mainly

from Poland and its eastern European neighbors) from visiting the mine to

see, amongst other things, how salt was mined in the past. 

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For safety reasons less than one percent of the mine is open to 
visitors, but even that is still almost four kilometers in length – more 
than enough to weary the average tourist after an hour or two. The mine was 
closed for two reasons – the low price of salt on the world market made it 
too expensive to extract here. Also, the mine was slowly flooding – another 
reason why visitors are restricted to certain areas only.
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The religious carvings are, in reality, what draw many to this

mine – as much for their amazing verisimilitude as for their Christian

aesthetics. The above shows Jesus appearing to the apostles after the

crucifixion. He shows the doubter, Saint Thomas, the wounds on his wrists. 

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