Journey to the Center of the Earth: the Unirea Mines of Slanic-Prahova

Saturday, the 13th of June, I've been with the children and the volunteers of Salvati Copiii to one of the most amazing places I've ever been: The Mine Unirea of Slanic-Prahova. 200-250 meters in the hearth of the Earth, where miners extracted salt for about 30 years (1938-1970), before the site was transformed in a touristic attraction.

Beeing 200 meters above the ground, in a cave with a ceiling at least 100 meters high, brings you back to some kind of pre-natal age. The silence, the echos of the joyful screams of the babies, the darkness, the closeness to the hearth of the Mother Earth and the huge walls that seem protecting you from the external dangerous world, make you regress to some kind of peacefull collective childhood. The Unirea Salt Mines are a sort of universal playground. It's not a case if there are playgrounds for children, football and tennis playgrounds and some other amuzement-park-like attractions.

In the first huge room after the entrance, on the ceiling you can notice a hammer and sickle in a red circle, and a huge flourescent cross nearby one of the walls, built I think in the years after the revolution.

The hammer and sickle brought to my mind pictures of miners, miners working hard, miners dying, miners going to Bucharest to suppress the revolts that took place under the 'Iliescu regime' after the 'democratic' revolution of December 1989.


I tried to imagine how Romanian tourists could feel in the 70's and 80's at Slanic-Prahova, when the country was under the control of the Securitate and the fear imprisoned people in a cage of terror. There, in that surreal atmosphere, every whispered word, amplified and distorted by the echo, could turn into a scream of pain and revolt.

Going to Unirea Salt Mines, descending to the center of the Earth, is a regressing trip to a collective eternal childhood and a surreal journey in the past of a country.