Ferropolis: Germany's City of Iron Built From Giant Mining Machines

For decades, the countryside around Gräfenhainichen in eastern Germany was being eaten away. This was the heart of Central Germany's lignite industry. Lignite is a soft brown coal that lies close to the surface, so instead of tunneling for it, miners stripped the land away in enormous open pits. At the Golpa-Nord mine, up to 1,000 miners worked at peak times, and villages in the path of the pit were dug away entirely. The work was done by machines built on a scale that's hard to picture: excavators and spreaders taller than an eight-story building and longer than a football field, each crewed by a small team and creeping across the mine on rails or tracks. When East and West Germany reunified, much of the old East German coal industry shut down. Golpa-Nord closed in 1991. The pit was left behind as a scarred wasteland, along with the machines that had dug it. In 1992, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation proposed something unusual: instead of scrapping the machines, turn them into monuments. Five of them were gathered on a peninsula in the old pit, arranged in a semicircle, and fitted with stairs and walkways for visitors. Around them, the pit was allowed to flood, forming Lake Gremmin. Altogether, the five machines add up to about 7,000 tons of industrial history. They became Ferropolis, the City of Iron. Each machine has a nickname. Gemini is the largest: a spreader built in 1958, weighing 1,980 tons, 30 meters tall and 125 meters long, with a 60-meter boom and a crew of six to eight. Big Wheel, built in 1984, is a 1,718-ton bucket-wheel excavator named for its giant digging wheel. Mad Max, from 1962, is a 1,250-ton excavator carrying forty enormous buckets. Medusa is a spreader named for its repair crane that swings a full 360 degrees. Mosquito, at 792 tons, is the "compact" one. A museum in the mine's former power station tells the history of the pits, the villages lost to them, and a remarkable discovery made during the digging: the remains of prehistoric forest elephants. Today, Ferropolis is both a museum and one of Germany's best-known open-air event venues. Mad Max forms the lakeside edge of the arena, and when concerts are held there, the old mining machines light up behind the stage.