Both my guide, Uros Erzen, and me, crouching to avoid the tunnel’s low roof, noticed a sparrow-sized black bird flitting around in the cavern as water from the river above filtered through porous rock, dripping onto our rain slickers and hard hats. It wasn’t a canary, and it wasn’t
a coal mine; but could it have meant something anyway?
We were a few steps down from the entrance to Anthony’s Mine Shaft, five centuries old in 2000 and the earliest part of an extensive tunnel network -- over 800 kilometers in all -- below Idrija. A few minutes earlier I’d begun my tour in the chamber where miners once gathered for roll call, now a room where visitors sit on benches and watch an introductory film about what was one of the world’s largest mercury mines.
Mercury is, of course, a toxic substance. Prolonged exposure to high levels, either in the form of vapors or absorbed through the skin, can result in nervous system damage, including mental disturbances, loss of balance, speech, vision and hearing problems, even comas and death. (There's a large psychiatric hospital on the northern edge of town; one assumes the siting wasn’t purely accidental.) Lung diseases were also a danger. In the early days, a man could only work five to seven years below before becoming too ill to continue.
At its peak, Idrija was the second largest mercury mine in the world, after Almaden, Spain, eventually yielding 13 percent of all the mercury ever mined; 150,000 tons. In the 19th century the town became a scientific research center as doctors came to study and treat the miners.
But all that’s history. In the 1970s, awareness of mercury’s health risks widened; in the ‘80s, the bottom dropped out of the market. Five centuries after the first shovels crunched into the earth, only about 100 kilometers of tunnels remain open. From a peak of 1200, about 110 workers are left; their job, to close up shop for good. Ore is no longer extracted. Over the next decade, Uros informed me, all 15 of the mine’s levels will be sealed; some of the galleries will be filled with water, some with concrete, to prevent the town from sinking beneath the massive
excavations.
The tour goes out of its way to entertain, with several surprises along the way; kids shouldn’t be bored. The mine comes with its own legendary dwarf, Berkmandels, who, when in the mood, knocked on stones to point the miners the way to rich cinnabar veins. (The miners left him bits of food to stay on his good side.) Along the way, one encounters Berk himself, sort of (he lights up, he laughs).
The tour ends in the simple, perfect miners’ chapel, which took 15 years to build in the mid-18th century. It was a civil chapel, unaffiliated with a church; a place for the miners to stop after their labors to give thanks for another uneventful journey.
From journal Idrija, the town that quicksilver built