Wieliczka: The Cathedral Carved From Salt

Southeast of Kraków, the town of Wieliczka sits on top of a vast underground world. People collected brine here long before anyone dug. The first written record dates to 1044. From the 13th century on, miners followed the salt deeper into the ground. Over centuries they cut more than 287 km of passages, reaching 327 meters below the surface. Salt from Wieliczka was valuable enough to help fund the Polish crown. Miners spent their lives underground, and they made the space their own. They carved statues from the gray-green rock salt and cut chapels where they could pray before their shifts. Four chapels were carved in all. The largest is St. Kinga’s Chapel, about 101 meters underground. It’s 54 meters long, 18 meters wide and 12 meters high, and everything in it is salt: the floor, the altar, the railings, wall reliefs of scenes from the New Testament, including a version of Leonardo’s Last Supper, and even the chandeliers, made from salt crystals. It was carved by Antoni Wyrodek and the brothers Józef and Tomasz Markowski. Mass is still celebrated there on Sundays. Over the centuries, visitors included Nicolaus Copernicus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Frédéric Chopin. In 1978, Wieliczka was on UNESCO’s very first World Heritage list. Commercial mining ended in 1996, after salt prices fell and flooding threatened the mine. Today about 1.2 million people a year walk through its salt chambers.