In Terezia mine — 112 metres from shaft mouths to floor — floats a lake with boats around a salt island. Below, the descent chamber by chamber.
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Durgău valley · Turda, Cluj county · today
The town under the hill
From the car park you see nothing special: a new glass pavilion and a green hill. But under the hill lies a whole town, cut by hand in salt over centuries: a 917-metre gallery, a bell as tall as a 30-storey block, a lake with boats and a panoramic wheel.
We descend together, chamber by chamber. The 3D cross-section shows the chambers' proportions; their relative positions are schematic. The indicators show the chamber, dates and known depths.
The new pavilion at Durgău: the entrance from above. Photo: MC 26, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Where we descend
The mine sits at the edge of Turda, in the Durgău–Valea Sărată perimeter, on Aleea Durgăului. The salt below us belongs to a huge underground body some 4 kilometres long.
The entrance is a gallery dug between 1853 and 1870 to bring salt out more cheaply. It began at 780 metres; by the end of the century it had grown by 137 more, reaching 917 metres.
The first 529 metres cross clay, not salt, and are lined with 40-centimetre stone masonry. Pegs remain on the wall for measuring the gallery: every 10 fathoms. A fathom (stânjen) is 1.89 metres, so 529 metres means 280 fathoms counted by the miners.
Here, the guides say, the acoustics change as you enter the salt stretch: the rock above your head starts sounding different.
The Franz Josef gallery. Photo: Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Registry chamber · staircase and altar
The staircase the rich walked up
The Registry chamber is ruled by the Staircase of the Rich, the oldest wooden structure in the mine. It is fir: its resin keeps the salt at bay, and the layered wood creaks a warning before it cracks.
Emperor Franz Josef is said to have descended on it. After that, no miner was allowed to set foot on it: it stayed for nobles only. That is where the name comes from.
In the neighbouring salt wall sits the altar: a niche with the Virgin Mary, where the mine priest held a service every morning for the cutters' protection.
Crivac chamber · salt lifted by horses
The engine on four legs
In an octagonal room stands the crivac: a giant vertical-axis whim built in 1881, which lifted salt from Rudolf mine to gallery level up an 87-metre shaft. It is, the mine says, the only machine of its kind preserved where it worked, in all the salt mines of Europe.
Horses drove it, one or two per arm, in turns.
Above the shaft, in a dug tower 10.5 metres tall, the steel pulleys fitted in 1864 still sit. They still work.
The 1881 crivac. Photo: Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Rudolf mine · 42 × 50 × 80 metres
The hall where the last salt was cut
Rudolf mine is a trapezoidal dome 42 metres deep, 50 wide and 80 long. Salt was worked here to the very end: it is the last mine closed at Turda, in 1932.
Miners once descended 172 steps over 13 landings; each landing wall carries the year its level was dug. Today the same hall holds sports fields, a 180-seat amphitheatre and the 20-metre panoramic wheel, probably the only underground wheel in the world.
On the north-west ceiling grow salt stalactites up to 3 metres long, tracing a vein of near-pure salt: over 99.9% sodium chloride. The mine says the stalactites grow about 2 centimetres a year.
Rudolf mine today. Photo: Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Terezia mine · the bell with a lake
The oldest chamber: a bell with boats
From Rudolf we descend a little lower, into Terezia: the mine's oldest working, dug between 1690 and 1880. The void left behind is 90 metres tall and 75 across, and from the shaft mouths to the mine floor is 112 metres — the deepest point of the visit.
On the floor lies the lake: up to 6 metres deep, over some 80% of the surface, with an island in the middle made of residual salt dumped here after 1880. The water arrives as infiltration and salts itself by dissolving salt: it is a brine on which visitors now row boats.
For Terezia's air, the mine publishes a count of 4–10 microorganisms per cubic metre. The official page does not specify when or how these measurements were taken.
The Terezia lake and salt island. Photo: Pomptidom, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Iosif mine · the echo chamber
The cone where sound repeats 20 times
Iosif mine is a cone descending 115 metres from the surface, 67 metres across at the base. You can only see it through balconies dug in salt: it is being fitted out to join the visitor circuit too.
The closed shape and the lack of links to other workings repeat sound up to 20 times. Hence the name: the Echo Chamber.
In 1853 the Hetilap paper described it as visitors saw it then: you were lowered in a basket, on ropes, into a "sugarloaf" 50 fathoms deep, timbered at the mouth and widening to a salt sole some 30 fathoms across.
The salt · the sea that withdrew
It all began with an evaporating sea
The salt below us was laid down some 13.8 million years ago, when the Paratethys Sea, ever more enclosed, left concentrated brines behind. The age was not measured at Turda: it is dated from Rocks formed from volcanic ash. Dating them can help establish the age of associated salt layers. elsewhere in the basin and applied here by correlation.
Under pressure from the overlying layers, the salt deformed and moved upward, forming the Valea Sărată salt body. This A mass of salt or another material that deforms and rises through overlying rock layers. is some 4 kilometres long and 750–1100 metres thick in its central part. It is nearly pure: over 98% The mineral form of sodium chloride: the salt we use at the table., with A mineral made of calcium sulphate and water, which can form as salty water evaporates., clay and A rock made mainly of clay and calcium carbonate. veins. The dirty bands come from clays with A clay mineral found in some of the darker bands in Turda salt. and A group of often greenish minerals also found in the clays within Turda salt..
Salt blooming on its own on the walls. Photo: Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Rebirth · shelter, cheese, light
What happened after mining stopped
In 1932 salt ended as a business: productivity had fallen, Ocna Mureș had won the race, and the 1927 attempts to stop the decline had failed. But the mine did not stay empty: in September 1944 some 5,000 Turda people sheltered here, then the galleries matured cheese, from the late 1940s or from 1950.
It opened to visitors in 1992, and between 2008 and 2010 a European project of some 5.9 million euros turned it into what you see today: museum, concert hall, amusement park. In 2018, almost 690,000 people descended here.
Next: the people who worked the salt and what they left behind.
Pick a chamber
Jump to the room that interests you; the 3D cross-section goes there.
How the salt beneath Turda formed
Some 13.8 million years ago, a wide sea, the Paratethys, lay where Transylvania is. As its link to the ocean closed, the water concentrated and left salt behind: A mineral made of calcium sulphate and water, which can form as salty water evaporates. first, then The mineral form of sodium chloride: the salt we use at the table., in thick beds. That is how the salt under Turda was born, dated by correlation with Rocks formed from volcanic ash. Dating them can help establish the age of associated salt layers. elsewhere in the basin.
Salt is less dense than the overlying rocks. Under pressure, it can slowly deform and move upward while remaining solid. This formed the Valea Sărată A mass of salt or another material that deforms and rises through overlying rock layers.: a salt body some 4 kilometres long, 200 to 700 metres wide and 750–1100 metres thick in its central part. In places it reaches to within a few dozen metres of the grass; here and there it breaks the surface.
Samples show The mineral form of sodium chloride: the salt we use at the table. above 98%, with A mineral made of calcium sulphate and water, which can form as salty water evaporates., clay and A rock made mainly of clay and calcium carbonate. inclusions. Terezia lake is fed by water that infiltrates through the rocks and dissolves salt, becoming brine. One sample measured 8.5°C, pH 8.7 and A measure of how well water conducts electricity. Dissolved salts increase it; it can help estimate their concentration. 114 mS/cm, from which some 91 grams of salt per litre were estimated — an estimate, not a direct assay.
The people: cutters paid by the piece
On 3 May 1552, royal commissioners counted at Turda 19 cutters in the small working and 8 in the large one. They ordered blocks to be shown: a boat-salt block of 5.5 Hungarian pounds and a cart-salt block of 17.5 pounds. At 0.49 kilograms to the pound, that means pieces of 2.7 and 8.6 kilograms. On Saturdays, the cutters said, they were owed 1–2 sacks of crushed salt each, and on Sundays a bonus from the chamber officer.
The mine today tells visitors its miners were free men, hired yearly, each 7 January, at 12 florins a year with feast-day gifts: a barrel of wine, an ox and 100 loaves. The account deserves care: the mine's page cites no source for these details, and the 12 florins appear in the 1552 report as the pay of the Ocna Sibiului judge, proposed as a model for Turda. What is certain is that some cutters worked on one-year contracts and others by the day, paid partly by the hundred blocks.
As for the Romans: they probably took salt here, but no secure archaeological evidence shows a Roman working at Turda. Wooden tools recovered in 1902 from an old working were called Roman, but they may be prehistoric. Even the mine says today that clear evidence is lacking.
The cutters' altar, in the Registry chamber. Photo: Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The deep: each chamber with its years
The oldest document touching Turda's salt business is from 1075: a grant by King Géza I to Garamszentbenedek abbey — half the royal share of a salt toll. It is a toll, not a mine, and the text survives through late copies, with additions. The first explicit mention of a working is the grant of the "Turda salt mine" to the Transylvanian Chapter: the transmitted dating reads 1269, modern catalogues place it at 1271 (with a question mark) or even 1272. The exact year is disputed; the grant is not.
Today's visitor chambers are much newer, though. Terezia was dug between 1690 and 1880, the Franz Josef gallery between 1853 and 1870, the crivac dates from 1881, and Anton mine stopped in 1862 because the salt held too much clay. In 1767 János Fridvaldszky wrote at Cluj that Turda's mines deserve "the greatest admiration" and that Turda is "so famed for its salt mines that you would hardly find its equal in the whole East". (The mine's page wrongly dates his praise to 1867, a century after the book.)
Chambers and their years
Chamber
Working years
Measure
Terezia
1690–1880
bell 90 × 75 m; 112 m from shaft mouths to floor
Rudolf
until 1932
hall 42 × 50 × 80 m; 172 steps, 13 landings
Iosif
unknown; described in 1853
cone 115 m from surface, 67 m at base; echo ×20
Anton
until 1862
isolated; to 108 m; clayey salt
Franz Josef gallery
1853–1870, extended
917 m; 280 fathoms through clay
Extraction shaft
pulleys from 1864
87 m; pulleys working to this day
War and cheese: what the mine was after it closed
The mine closed in 1932 for falling productivity: the Romanian state had taken it as war reparations after 1918, the 1927 attempts to stop the decline had failed, and Ocna Mureș had produced more efficiently since 1840. The state monopoly is the context, not the proven cause.
On 5 September 1944, as Hungarian-German troops entered Turda, some 5,000 people — men, women and children, Romanians and Hungarians — sheltered in the Franz Josef gallery. On 20 October, Soviet officers and Romanian police screened people at the tunnel mouth, and a group of about 100 men, almost all ethnic Hungarians, including teenagers of 15–17, was sent to labour in the USSR. The episode is known from testimonies gathered by the Turda historian Eugen Gergely.
Then the galleries matured cheese, from the late 1940s or from 1950 — the mine's pages give both years. In 1992 the mine opened to visitors.
How the mine became today's attraction
Between 2008 and 2010 a PHARE project of about 5.9 million euros, with local and national co-financing, transformed the mine: a new entrance pavilion, panoramic lift, wheel, a wharf with boats on the Terezia lake. In January 2010 the mine reopened to visitors, transformed.
Then came the figures: some 618,000 visitors in 2017, almost 690,000 in 2018, and 601,627 in 2023, per the administrators' report. In 2013 Business Insider included the mine in "25 Unbelievable Travel Destinations You Never Knew Existed", and in 2017 Smithsonian magazine placed it among the "subterranean wonderlands". The mine is a category A historic monument, LMI code CJ-II-m-A-07801.
For current prices, hours and tickets, see the practical guide Salinele României.
Eight statements: true or false?
Choose. The answers check out against the page's sentences.
The lake in Terezia mine is up to 6 metres deep.
The 1075 document grants someone the Turda salt mine.
The Franz Josef gallery is 917 metres long.
Every cutter at Turda is known to have earned 12 florins a year.
Anton mine closed because the salt held too much clay.
The Turda salt was laid down 900 years ago, with the first documents.
In September 1944 thousands of Turda people sheltered in the Franz Josef gallery.
The mine first opened to visitors in 2010.
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What the 3D cross-section shows and what remains uncertain
Chamber dimensions are the official ones, from the mine's pages: Terezia 90 × 75 m with 112 m from shaft mouths to floor, Rudolf 42 × 50 × 80 m, Iosif 115 m from surface with 67 m at base, the gallery 917 m, the shaft 87 m. The 3D cross-section keeps their inner proportions; placing the chambers against each other is schematic, because we found no published surveyed cross-section of the mine, and the gallery is shown shortened, with a break mark. The indicator shows the chamber and, where one exists, its official level: 112 m from the shaft mouths (at the surface) to the Terezia floor, 115 m from the surface to the Iosif sole. Intermediate levels in the section are schematic: we found no published surveyed levels for the gallery, the Registry chamber, the crivac or Rudolf.
What we do not know: whether the Romans dug here (likely, unproven); the exact year of the medieval grant (1269 as written, 1271 or 1272 in catalogues); which year the mine began holding cheese (1948 or 1950); how fast the stalactites grow (2 cm a year is the mine's claim). On the therapeutic effects of mine air this page gives no verdict: it says what the mine offers, not what it heals.
Photographers: Pomptidom, Superchilum and MC 26, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY 3.0 licences (credits under each picture). Map: Natural Earth + Nominatim / OpenStreetMap.
Business Insider, 26 Dec 2013: the "25 Unbelievable Travel Destinations You Never Knew Existed" list (Turda is 22nd in page order, not a ranked place).
