The Ring in the Salt

Here is a story about a ring that may never have existed, and a chapel that certainly does.

Half an hour's drive from Kraków, in southern Poland, there is a small town with a hole under it. Go down, and the ceiling, the floor and the walls are all the same substance. Salt. Whole halls, staircases, a lake and a church are cut out of it. Nothing was carried in. It was carved from the very rock you are standing in.

Children who hear about salt mountains often picture a giant saltshaker buried underground. People just scooped tunnels through the pile, like tunnels in a snowdrift. But then why did the pile last through more than seven hundred years of mining? The real answer is slower and much older. Millions of years ago, a sea lay where Poland is now. It dried up. The salt it left behind was pressed into a single layer, hundreds of metres thick.

In the Middle Ages, salt was not a seasoning. It was closer to a metal. The mines here, known as the Kraków salt works, brought in, by some estimates, as much as a third of the treasury of the Polish principality. Not a pinch for dinner. A line in the budget. The line that paid for the army and the palace.

Now, a legend. And it is a legend, not a document. A Hungarian princess named Kinga was to marry the prince of Kraków. For her dowry she asked for no gold. She asked for a salt mine. Before leaving home, she dropped her engagement ring into one. When she reached Poland, she ordered the workers to dig here, near Wieliczka. In the very first lump of salt they lifted, they found her ring.

The legend explains the find with a miracle. The facts explain it more plainly. The deposit really was enormous, and it really was found around those centuries.

People were not the only ones who lived down there. Horses were lowered into the mine to turn the great wheels that hauled salt to the surface. They never came back up. They were born underground, worked underground and grew old in underground stables, by the light of oil lamps instead of the sun. One of the last of them spent almost its whole life below. It walked out into the open air only shortly before the old workings closed.

Something else was more dangerous than the horses' hard life. Gas. Salt gives off methane. It gathers under the ceiling and explodes at any spark or candle flame. Not just anyone was sent to fight it. The job went to experienced, older miners. They put on soaked clothes and took a long pole with a flame at the end. Then they crawled along right under the vault and burned off the gas before it could go off by itself. The work was called penitent work, and the men who did it, penitents. People believed you took such a job as punishment for sins, your own or someone else's.

The light in these halls is strange, too. In the main chapel, some of the lamps are made from crystals of the salt itself. The lamp glows not with glass but with the rock of the very room it hangs in. This is the Chapel of Saint Kinga, named for the princess of the legend. It lies more than a hundred metres down. Three miners cut it out: Józef Markowski, Tomasz Markowski and Antoni Wyrodek. It took not a season, not a year, but several decades. Józef Markowski carved the main altar and the pulpit. His companion made reliefs of scenes from the Bible. The third man carved the flight into Egypt and the Last Supper. None of them was a trained sculptor. All three went down here every day of their lives as ordinary miners. They did their carving after their shifts, in that same thin light.

For seven centuries, people came here simply to bring up salt for sale. Along the way, without asking anyone, they built a city under a city, with a church, a lake and stables no one will ever descend into again. Salt stopped being a line in the royal budget long ago. The church it made remains, useful for nothing. It was started once, and its makers could not stop carving.

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