From the very beginning, the history of salt has been very closely linked to the history of mankind and its wellbeing. The mining of salt at Poland’s Wieliczka mine – one of the world’s most important – involves engineering, sculpture and religion.

From the Middle Ages, when it assumed the name of Magnun Sal, the salt mine of Wieliczka, which lies 12km east of Cracow, has been worked continuously. With chambers, galleries and subterranean lakes which stretch for a total of 250km and reach a depth of 327m over nine levels; it’s a history that illustrates the successive stages in the development of mining technology.

Salt has always been an important economic foundation of the state; in the 14th century, it generated over 30 percent of all its resources; in the 16th century, the Wieliczka salt mine was one of Europe’s largest enterprises. Initially, salt was extracted from brine springs; it was only in the second half of the 13th century that rock-salt began to be mined.

In seven centuries of mining, 7.5million cubic metres of salt have been extracted and over 2,040 chambers have been hollowed out by generations of miners. The dangerous work of the miners, whose lives were constantly threatened by floods, gas explosions and fire, made them more religiously-minded, perhaps, than other social groups.

Every morning the miners of Wieliczka used to hear Mass in these excavated chapels. They raised crosses where their fellow workers had lost their lives, a custom that is continued to this day. A fire in one of the chapels in the 17th century resulted in a ban on all flammable material such as wooden statues and religious images. This in turn brought about the development of a unique tradition of rock salt sculptures which has been perpetuated in the mine for over three centuries.

Each year, 800,000 tourists visit Wiekiczka. Twenty historic chambers connected by the two km of galleries, chapels, shafts and brine lakes, are part of the tourist route. Machinery and mining techniques of the past, as well as thematic displays, are exhibited along the way. The greatest of the three chapels of the mine at Wieliczka is that of the Blessed Kinga, added as a tourist attraction in the early 20th century. She is the patroness of the mine – while St Barbara is patroness of miners.

According to the legend, it is she who miraculously discovered the mine in the 14th century. Everything in the chapel is illuminated by five salt-crystal chandeliers – the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the three altars and the balustrade facing the chancel, the pulpit, the three side chapels and the flight of stairs – which are all entirely made of salt. Because 3-7 percent of the salt’s composition is clay, sand and other impurities, its colour ranges from grey to bronze, which surprises many visitors.

Józef Markowski, a miner with a gift for sculpture, was commissioned to sculpt this and it took him nearly four years to complete the main altar. The figure in its centre, carved in fore-shaft salt, a practically translucent salt found only in one of the chambers in very small quantities and difficult to access, is not that of the Virgin Mary, as it is often believed, but that of the Blessed Kinga, the daughter of King Bela IV of Hungary and of Queen Mary, and the spouse of Boleslaus the Bashful, the Duke of Cracow.

A few years later, Józef Markowski was assisted by Tomasz, his younger brother, with whom he collaborated until he died in 1920. Working as a team, they carved the two side altars and the sculptures of the side chapels. The inspired idea of Tomasz was to represent on the walls of the chapel episodes of the New Testament. “Let the salt of the earth itself tell the story of the Saviour”, he said. His first bas relief, still somewhat awkward, depicts King Herod and the massacre of the Holy Innocents.

When he passed away in 1927, another miner, Antoni Wyrodek, followed in his footsteps and devoted himself to Tomasz’s hardly started assignment. The five following bas reliefs are all his. He put a close to the saga of the Markowski brothers only in 1963, after a long interval. His first work was ‘The Flight into Egypt’, followed by ‘Jesus Preaching in the Temple’, in which, for the first time, there is a sense of depth and perspective that he went on perfecting in his subsequent works and particularly in the ‘Marriage of Cana’ in which two different scenes are superimposed.

His fourth bas relief – ‘The Last Supper’ insired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, was the pinnacle of his career. Nearly 30 years went by before he devoted himself to the fifth and last of his bas reliefs – ‘Doubting Thomas’, bringing the cycle initiated by the Markowski brothers to a close.