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Show HAS GREATEST SALT MINES Galician Town of Wieliczka Is Built Over Most Wonderful Caverns in World. Wieliczka, in Galicia, is an interesting interest-ing town, not for what is in it, but for what is under it. The salt mines there are the greatest in the world, and the most wonderful. They form what amounts to an underground town, which might have suggested to Jules Verne his underground community commu-nity in the Children of the Cavern. The Wieliczka salt mine is two and one-half miles long from east to west and 1,050 yards wide from ncrth to south. It has seven levels, the lowest being nearly a thousand feet deep, and is entered by eleven shafts. The different dif-ferent levels are connected by flights of steps hewn out of the rock salt. In the mine there are chapels, tramways, a railway and railway station, a ballroom ball-room (with a regular orchestra) and several other halls, all hewn out of the rock salt with elaborate architectural decoration. For a hundred years the mine has belonged to the Austrian government. It employed a thousand workpeople and turned out 60,000 tons of salt a year. There are 65 miles of pony tramways tram-ways and 22 miles of railway in the Wieliczka salt mines. All these lines and the principal passages or "streets" meet in a sort of central railway station, sta-tion, with spacious waiting rooms, offices of-fices and an excellent refreshment room all complete, all hewn out of the rock salt, and looking, according to one description, "more like a summer pavilion than a railway station, with. its latticed galleries and stately pillars pil-lars gleaming white and iridescent." This is comparatively modern, of course. The oldest "building" in the mine is the Chapel of St. Anthony, dating from 1691. It contains three altars, a pulpit and much statuary, all elaborately carved out of rock salt. But services are now held only in the more modern but equally elaborate Chapel of St. Cunigund, which is entered en-tered down 46 salt steps. The chapel is 50 yards long, 15 yards wide and 30 feet high, and is used regularly for worship. The ballroom is a huge place, where miners' festivals are often of-ten held. A miners' orchestra plays regularly in this hall not only for the dances, but for the entertainment of visitors, for the mine is one of the wonders of the world and is much visited vis-ited by tourists. There are other big halls in the mine carved in the same way. The mine has been worked for at least 800 years. |