The beginnings of mining and what drove the basin's growth

The first mentions of coal mines around Wałbrzych date back to the 15th century, and the oldest known record of mining in Nowa Ruda is dated 1434. Over the following centuries, coal was extracted by small, scattered mining guilds, without joint organisation or major investment. A turning point came in 1769, when the Prussian king Frederick II the Great issued a new mining law that organised extraction rules in Silesia. A year later, the guild from Biały Kamień was transformed into the Fuchs company, which over time grew into the Julia mine, the largest works in the region.

The growth of the basin was driven by industrial demand. Coal from Wałbrzych and the surrounding area supplied Silesian ironworks, brickyards and textile factories, and from the mid-19th century also the railway, which itself needed fuel and made its transport easier. In 1794, work resumed on the Fox Adit (Fuchsstollen), which opened access to as many as 19 coal seams - one of the first adits on the continent where extracted material was transported underground by boat. In 1867, the mine's main shaft was put into use, reaching 611 metres underground, and two years later work began on sinking another shaft, Ida.

The largest mines and the scale of employment

The mine that today operates as the Stara Kopalnia Science and Art Centre changed its name with successive owners and political eras. In 1920 it was bought by the Schering Concern, in 1928 it was taken over by Niederschlesische Bergbau A.G., and a year later the Consolidirte Segen Gottes mine was merged into it. After the war, on 11 July 1945, the works passed under Polish administration as Julia. Between 1946 and 1949 it was named Biały Kamień, from 1950 it operated for years as Thorez, and in 1993, in a different economic reality, it was transformed into the Julia Mining Works.

A total of 254 kilometres of underground mining tunnels were dug beneath Wałbrzych - the cumulative result of more than 400 years of coal mining in the region. On the grounds of today's museum, twin Malakoff-style headframe towers have survived, along with engine houses from 1911-1912, mechanical workshops from 1872 and coal sorting buildings erected between 1888 and 1914 - their scale shows well what a huge industrial undertaking the mine was at the time.

Mining settlements and life around the mine

Wałbrzych grew alongside its mines - successive districts of the city arose precisely as housing for miners and their families. One of them is Rusinowa, next to which a municipal park of around 27 hectares was established around 1930, reaching all the way to the mining settlement in that district. Stary Zdrój had a similar character, where in 1870 the neo-Gothic St Barbara's Church in Wałbrzych - patron saint of miners - was built to serve around three thousand Catholic residents of that mining district.

Even today's Market Square in Wałbrzych, for centuries the city's main trading square, was for decades a place where the paths of residents of working-class districts commuting to work underground crossed. A strong folk tradition also existed in the mining community - miners told stories of Skarbnik, a spirit in the form of a bearded foreman with a lamp on his forehead, who was said to warn of cave-ins and fires but punished those who disregarded safety rules, leading them to their doom. This is one of the most widespread Silesian mining legends, known even beyond Wałbrzych itself.

Mining disasters

Work underground has always carried risk, and the Wałbrzych Basin was no exception. Between 1945 and 1998, the period for which systematic statistics were already kept, more than a thousand miners died underground - the exact number of victims is 1,031. This figure covers both individual workplace accidents and larger disasters linked to cave-ins, methane explosions or fires, which occurred regularly in hard coal mines throughout the 20th century.

The memory of the victims of underground work is also woven into the history of Wałbrzych's Mausoleum, a monumental building erected between 1936 and 1938. Although formally it is a cenotaph, that is a symbolic tomb without actual burials, it was meant to commemorate those who fell in the First World War, as well as the victims of mining accidents - proof of how deeply the death of miners was woven into the city's collective memory.

Wildcat pits: illegal mining in the shadow of closure

The phenomenon of wildcat pits, that is primitive, illegal shafts dug without safety measures and without official permission, was not new in Poland - they appeared in the greatest numbers as early as 1929-1933, during the Great Depression, when they were almost the only source of income for unemployed families. In Wałbrzych they revived at a different moment - after the closure of all local mines in the early 1990s. Unemployed miners returned to seams they knew and extracted coal on their own, selling it at a lower price than through official channels.

Work in wildcat pits took place without any observance of safety regulations, often carried out by people without mining qualifications, which - as in the 1930s - caused numerous accidents, including fatal ones.

The decision to close the mines and its consequences for the city

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Wałbrzych's hard coal mining industry faced a decision that changed the city for decades. The mines were declared unprofitable - the costs of extracting increasingly thin and hard-to-reach seams exceeded the value of the coal obtained, and the infrastructure was outdated. In 1990, the Julia mine was formally declared unprofitable and directed towards closure, although extraction itself continued for a few more years. The last cart of coal came to the surface on 20 September 1996, ending more than two centuries of mining history at this site, and the formal closure of the underground workings was completed on 17 September 1998.

The consequences for Wałbrzych were severe: the city, whose identity and economy had for generations been based on mining, lost its main employer for thousands of families. A wave of unemployment, the migration of younger residents and the wildcat pits mentioned above are direct consequences of this transformation.

Stara Kopalnia as a museum

The site of the former Julia mine did not stand empty for long. As early as 1999, just a year after the formal closure of the workings, the Museum of Industry and Technology was opened on part of it. After years of effort and a thorough rebuilding of the post-mining buildings, on 9 November 2014 the expanded institution opened under the name Stara Kopalnia Science and Art Centre. A year later the site was included in the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), confirming its standing among similar post-coal sites in Europe.

Today the former mine buildings house an industry museum, a ceramics workshop and a contemporary art gallery, and visitors can see the preserved infrastructure: twin headframe towers, engine houses from the early 20th century, mechanical workshops and a former miners' bathhouse. What for more than two hundred years was a place of hard labour has become one of the symbols of Wałbrzych's transformation after the closure of its last mine.