The Fairy Grottoes of Saalfeld

Around 1530 mining began in the Arnsgereuth valley above Garnsdorf, and so also in the mountain where the Feengrotten lie today. The men were looking for rich ore but found only alum shale: grey-black, brittle and at that time good for nothing. Only about 1544 was it worked in an orderly way. By leaching the rock they won alum, with which the tanners treated their hides, and later green vitriol and very rarely blue. In 1599 there is said to have been a first boiling house where the lyes were evaporated.

It was poor work, and men who crawl in the dark every day tell themselves stories. The old people said the mountain had a folk of its own: the little mine-man with the lantern, who knocked where the good vein lay and kept silent where the stone would break. Whoever greeted him came up again; whoever laughed at him stayed below. From 1757 Johann Ehrenreich Jeremias and Johann Jacob Nolde kept the pit alive, and after the first of them the mine was thereafter called «Jeremias Glück». The Leipzig banking family Frege took it over and kept it running, although it turned a profit only in its first decade. When the rising industry supplied purer chemicals, the digging came to a stop about 1850. In 1860 Waldemar von Frege gave up the mine and all its rights. The doors closed, and people forgot the mountain.

But the mountain went on working. Mineral-rich water seeped through the abandoned galleries and laid down what it carried. The dripstone growing there is not lime but diadochite, called mountain butter by the local people: an iron-bearing salt that grows about a thousand times faster than the sinter of ordinary limestone caves. In less than three hundred years the water built whole halls full of fringes, curtains and towers.

In 1867 the Saalfeld entrepreneur August Wohlfarth dammed the mine water in the Long Adit in order to win the settled iron ochre as a pigment. The colour covered badly and lost out to the products of the chemical industry; in 1909 the work was given up. A year later Otto Wohlfahrt went down into the pit with a dozen Saalfeld physicians, geologists and other scholars. What the lamps lit up nobody could believe: red, ochre, brown in dozens of shades, yellow and greenish white, as if someone had hung jewellery there.

People whispered that this was the work of fairies, that the mountain folk had set up their treasury in the galleries men had abandoned. The truth is no less beautiful. The rock is rich in iron, and by now more than forty-five minerals have been securely identified in the grottoes: sulphides, oxides, carbonates, sulphates, phosphates, vanadates, arsenates and silicates. Every salt colours differently. No fairy ever set a brush to it.

Otto Wohlfahrt wanted to turn the water into a spa, but the money was lacking, and in 1912 he sold the pit to the Berlin banker Adolf Mützelburg. He saw what he held. On the twenty-second of December 1913 the men broke through to the third level and stood in the oldest and finest chamber of the mine, with dripstones some two hundred and fifty to three hundred years old. The geologist Hans Heß von Wichdorff, then known throughout Germany, gave the names that have stayed: Feengrotten, Märchendom, and for the grown-together cluster of dripstones at the back, Gralsburg, the castle of the Grail. On the thirty-first of May 1914 the grottoes were opened to visitors.

The Gralsburg lived up to its name. In the 1920s Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard, was inspired by this setting to design a stage picture for Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival. On the tenth of September 1937 one of the first healing adits in Germany opened on the first level; the air down there is free of dust and germs, ninety-eight per cent humid and ten degrees all the year round. Since 1993 the Saalfeld Feengrotten have stood in the Guinness Book as the most colourful show grottoes in the world. More than twenty million people have gone down since 1914, today about one hundred and sixty thousand a year.

Whoever walks through today hears the guide speak of iron and phosphate, and still sees the castle standing in the depths. The little mine-man with the lantern was never found. But the miners of Jeremias Glück, without knowing it, hewed out the finest hall in Thuringia and then left it to the water.