The mines of Wieliczka – Part 3, the graduation tower, and the town of Wieliczka itself

Monday, 24-June-2024

I ascended out of the mines, and into the Sun.

The scent of salt receded as the temperature climbed. My skin, feeling the warmth of the above-ground, rejoiced at the return of Vitamin D at first… then quickly started crying out for relief from the sweltering heat. My body rebelled at the return of the summer heat, and I consoled myself in the knowledge that I’d descend into the cool depths again shortly.

I… also contracted poetry while underground, I guess?

I had a few hours before my next shift in the dark, and intended on taking full advantage of that time. I was well fed, cooled off, and invigorated from the salt air I’d been breathing for the better part of 4 hours. I’d heard about the Graduation Tower on the first tour, and intended on exploring it as best I could.

I wandered Wieliczka a bit, checked out some statues in town, saw some pretty growing things, and made my way to the tower.

I expected a sort of medieval bastion tower, built from rocksalt as a sort of defensive position, or a place to showcase the wealth of the mines – I’d seen photos of the tower in the mines, with sheer black walls mirroring the black rock salt of the mines.

In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t likely to be built from rock salt. Salt dissolves in water, you may recall, and as such makes for a very poor building material. In fact, one of the more recent methods of “mining” the salt from the mines had been to simply pump freshwater in, and then pump the salt-filled brine out.

Instead, the Graduation Tower was in fact a “graduation tower” – a tool used to increase the salinity of the brine water, allowing easier extraction of the salt… and, as an added bonus, creating a salt-atmosphere area that’s supposedly quite good for your health. Unexpected, but also really cool to see up close! In short, the walls are made up of bundled sticks with wooden troughs on the top, which have valves and notches to allow a steady, but slow, stream of water to run down over the bundled sticks. Water evaporates as it trickles and falls down, increasing the salinity.