The story
Saint Kinga kneels in prayer among the mountains around Nowy Sącz in a canvas Jan Matejko, Poland's best-known painter of national history, made in 1892 for the 600th anniversary of her death. Kinga was a Hungarian princess married to a Polish duke in the 13th century. She is the patron saint of salt miners, and legend credits her with bringing salt to Wieliczka, which is why the painting hangs here.
The Cracow Saltworks Museum is primarily a museum of mining. It opened in 1951 on the initiative of the painter Alfons Długosz, at a time when many of the old workings were due to be closed, and it has two homes. Underground, on the third level of the Wieliczka mine about 135 metres down, its route leads through historic chambers past tools and machines that trace salt mining from wedges and picks to electric drills. Above ground, in the Saltworks Castle, the seat of the mine's management from the 13th century until 1945, the displays include a large collection of salt cellars.
Matejko appears here a second time, with an earlier canvas from 1879 showing two officials of the mine, Seweryn Bethman and Andrzej Kościelecki, climbing down into the shafts to fight a fire in 1510.
