Camping Club Steemit CONTEST March - Аdventures in the Underground Mining Museum

We're going 50 meters underground! Where is the only underground mining museum in my country?

In the center of Pernik - the city of black gold, there is an underground museum. The first sod of the first Bulgarian mine, which now houses the museum, was made in 1891. It was active until the 1960s, when its deposits were exhausted.

At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of Pernik miners visited the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland, which is an underground museum. This is how the idea was born to have a similar museum in Pernik as well. It opened its doors in 1986 and is still the only one on the Balkan Peninsula and one of the few in Europe!

The museum is housed in two mining galleries with a length of 630 meters, in which about 30 expositions are shown, which present the development of mining in our country. The development of coal mining equipment, various equipment for strengthening and lighting, as well as the transport equipment - locomotives (electric locomotive "Siemens", 1925) and passenger wagons, with which the miners moved, is traced.

In the corridors of the mining museum you will see a platform with a water barrel due to the condition of the air in the galleries a miner drank 5-6 liters of water a day. You will see the figures of the mining gnomes. They are believed to be guardians of underground riches, and miners believe that they protect them from troubles in the dungeons. Among the exhibits are a carbide lamp from 1902, a handcart with wooden carts used to transport the coal, a combine harvester. You will also see a model of a horse from 1896, when coal haulage by horse was introduced. 350 horses worked in the galleries, 250 of which never left the ground! In the underground galleries, a rather dangerous gas is formed, which the miners call grizu. It is highly flammable. The slightest spark can cause an explosion. At the same time, the problem is that this gas has neither color nor smell.