I didn’t read enough about this place before we went there, so I will need to get back to this post and add more details. Boris visited the Silver Mines of Kutna Hora about fifteen years ago, and he wanted me to see it as well, so we booked an English tour and arranged the ride. At the end of the day, everything was timed in the best possible way, but as I said, we had to use a taxi.
Kutna Hora is a Medieval Czech town which prospered due to the outstanding deposits of the silver ore, relatively close to the surface. At some point, about one-third of the all Europaen silver was mined at Kutna Hora. The mining stopped in the 17th century when the silver ore deposits were exhausted, and the mines were abandoned, but in the 1960s, they accidentally found an abandoned mine, which is now used as a tourist attraction.
As one can imagine, it’s difficult to take pictures inside the mine :), there are stretches when you can only move forward sidewise, and there are stretches where you have to bend almost in half (the height is a little bit over a meter). Just a little bit I’ve taken, in the mine itself, and in the museum.
An original 15th-century oil lamp used by the miners. They could not use candles because they would consume too much oxygen. Such a lamp would provide very little light, and if it did go down, a miner would have to work in complete darkness until the end of the shift.Ore basket and other instrumentsA model of the mineThe tour guide leads us to the entry pointThe most spacious part of the mine. We are dressed in protective clothes similar to what the medieval miners used. They didn’t have any head protection, though, until much later when the leather caps were introduced – still a very minor protection, but more than nothing.That’s me after we got out 🙂
I will post more pictures from Kutna Hora tomorrow!
My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996.
I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future.
I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life.
As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.
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