This is a picture of miners in festive dress outside a graphite mine in Český Krumlov. I did not know that graphite is mined and I did think that it was used in pencils but only about 1% is.
So on a drizzly day I went underground to see. First, this mine was operative from 1975 to 2003 although there has been graphite mining in Bohemia for 200 years. We dressed up in overalls, gumboots, hard hats with torches and got into rather tiny bogies. The little railway took us about 1 km. into the hillside and we continued on foot. The tunnels, there are 13 km. of them, are supported by wooden props and the floor has a lot of puddles from drips from the ceiling. It is not specially claustrophobic and there’s plenty of fresh air. We stopped at a vertical chimney going 74 metres up to the surface, which is one of the sources of air. The chimney had a small wooden ladder, no doubt to be used in the case of an emergency. Air was also circulated by huge fans and all through the year the temperature stays constant at 10 C.
There was blasting and drilling and the blast rock and mine slack was carried out in wheeled skips on the narrow gauge railway. As the tour was in Czech I am still none the wiser as to how and at what stage the graphite was extracted.
By way of contrast, there is a photographer’s house and studio that has been made into a museum. Joseph Seidel (1859-1935) and his son had a business here from 1905 until it was closed down by the communists in the 1950s. It has been restored and much of the original furnishings and equipment remain.
This is his upstairs, north-facing studio. The curtains over the windows are to control the light. His subjects would sit on the white bench with a variety of backgrounds on painted backdrops. Besides portraiture he did pictures of people skiing, cycling, working in factories and, specially, picture postcards. It is an extraordinary time capsule, culminating in the attic where he stored his photographic plates and his wife hung up herbs to dry.