Treasures of the World (Schätz der Weöt)

Time travel to history

Together with the German-French cultural broadcaster arte, Südwestrundfunk (SWR) produced the documentary series "Treasures of the World" in the 2000s. These documentaries, which are about 15 to 20 minutes short, take viewers to the most important World Heritage sites. One of them: Hallstatt. The multi-part documentary series can still be seen today in numerous third television programs, on the Kulturcenter Arte or on the cultural channel 3sat. The documentary gives viewers an insight into the millennia-old culture of the UNESCO World Heritage region of Hallstatt Dachstein Salzkammergut. With the kind permission of Südwestrundfunk (SWR), we were allowed to reproduce the text of the documentary on this page.

UNESCO has been protecting the world's most valuable natural and cultural monuments as "Heritage of Humanity" since 1972. The television series "Treasures of the World" tells of these places in impressive pictures. And here you can also find the treasures on the Internet.
Hallstatt - Three millennia of salt

This film tells the story of a remote region in the Austrian Salzkammergut with captivatingly beautiful images. Here in Hallstatt is the oldest salt mine in the world. Even in prehistoric times, people mined the white gold in a highly developed culture. The evidence of their existence has been preserved by salt.

Hallstatt itself could never become very large because of its location between a lake and a mountain, but the salt brought with it continuous prosperity. The city is located in an idyllically beautiful landscape in the Alps and today lives not only from salt but also from tourism.
The remarkable thing about this region is the durability with which this cultural landscape has been preserved for thousands of years.

Written and directed by: Ute Gebhardt
Camera: Wolfi Beyer

Watch the film "Hallstatt - Three Millennia of Salt" A production of the Südwestrundfunk (SWF)
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Filmtext

When the clouds hang low over Lake Hallstatt in the early morning, you shouldn't have much hope that the sun will shine in Hallstatt on this day. All too often, the clouds gather on the high mountains and it rains. Almost every morning is cloudy, but the people of Hallstatt don't experience a sunrise anyway because the mountains are so high. Only in the morning can the sun's rays reach Hallstatt. In the last century, there was no road leading to Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut. The climate is harsh and unreal, the winter lasts a very long time. Nevertheless, this area has been inhabited for thousands of years. What keeps people here? A valuable treasure is hidden in the mountain above Hallstatt.

The salt. Mining began more than three thousand years ago and continues to this day. It is the oldest salt mine in the world. The prehistoric miners left this rope made of lime bast in the salt mine. Pine shavings and torches were also found in many places. It is amazing how well all the traces are preserved. salt, otherwise we would never have seen such finds as the carrying bag for rock salt. Even the finely sewn fur cap has stood the test of time. The old miners mined the salt with pickaxes. But why the mining figures are heart-shaped, no one knows today. Who were these mysterious miners of ancient times? The high valley in front of the mine is also full of traces. The valley was a burial ground - for more than four hundred years. What was found here gave the name to an entire epoch of prehistory: the Hallstatt culture. It is the beginning of the Iron Age. Around two thousand graves have already been opened here, many are still suspected. This must be a woman's grave. It is a rich grave - like all Hallstatt graves. As early as the middle of the last century, a Hallstatt mining master discovered the first graves. The man was not an archaeologist, but he documented his finds very precisely. So the knowledge about the excavations is complete, even if some finds disappeared. The grave goods tell of a highly cultivated people. They had beautiful vessels, fine jewelry, and good weapons.

The salt had made them rich people. They owned gold and already knew glass. They traded from Africa to the Baltic Sea: the sword pommel is made of ivory and amber.
And they knew how to protect their wealth. The forest in the high valley has revealed many secrets - but kept even more to itself. They were the ancestors of the Celts, but where had they come from? Why did they disappear around 500 BC? So much is uncertain. Their settlement was never found. The town of Hallstatt at the foot of the Salzberg was certainly not her place of residence. The community of a thousand souls was founded in the Middle Ages, when mining and the salt trade began to flourish again. Miner is still a respected profession in Hallstatt today. For five hundred years, every family has lived on salt in some form. Hallstatt became quite wealthy - but the place could not grow because there was simply no more space between the lake and the salt mountain. So the Hallstatt houses look like they are stacked on top of each other. Even the Hallstatt cemetery has long been too small. For centuries, the rest of the dead has ended after about ten years. Then the bones are dug up, the bones bleached and the skulls painted. Generations of Hallstatt families lie in the ossuary. Traditions count for a lot in Hallstatt. The whole village still follows when the Corpus Christi procession moves through the alleys. Even religious customs have to do with salt: on the way, the priest blesses the salt mountain and the salt mountain

The traces of mining run through the entire landscape. The mountain stream in the narrow gorge was used to bring the wood from the mountains to the valley. It is an ancient principle called the hermitage. The mountain stream is dammed for a few hours behind the hermitage. Then it is opened. A mighty torrent now plunges into the valley and sweeps away the logs lying in the riverbed. Salt mining devoured huge amounts of wood. For centuries, transporting the wood in the mountains was a dangerous adventure.

The people in the valleys around Hallstatt also lived from salt mining. The Gosau Valley was home to the woodcutters. Their houses are often more than three hundred years old, and the woodcutters also ran small farms. But all the miners could never be fed with this. Food was always brought in from outside, but there was always enough of the vital salt. While the prehistoric miners extracted rock salt, the modern miners leached the salt from the mountain as brine. The salt was boiled from the brine in the Hallstatt brewhouses. The fires of the brewhouses gradually ate up the wood from the mountains. When the brewhouses had to be shut down at the beginning of the 17th century, the miners built a brine pipeline made of seven thousand wooden pipes. It is the oldest pipeline in the world. It leads over forty kilometers down into the valley, where there was enough wood. The saltworks still stands there today, in which the Hallstatt brine turns into salt. Today, it is hard to understand what salt once meant. For thousands of years, it was the most important preservative. Without preserved food, we might still be hunters and gatherers. Salt is therefore a cultural founder of the first order. It was not for nothing that it was weighed in gold.

But how did the salt actually get into the mountain? The salt in the Alps comes from the sea that once covered Europe. When the uplift of the Alps began, inland seas were formed. These evaporated and the salt was deposited. The Alps continued to rise and unfold: the salt was now compressed in the mountain. The caves in the Dachstein Mountains are cracks and fissures in the rock that the water has deepened. The Dachstein Ice Cave high above Hallstatt offers a never-ending spectacle: glacier water drips through the rock into the cold cave, freezes and thaws and creates ever new formations. The figures are up to twenty meters high. The ice cave is by no means the only Dachstein cave. The mountain has branched labyrinths, of which only a fraction has been explored so far.

More than a thousand meters above the caves: The summit of the mountains above Hallstatt: The Dachstein. It is the most beautiful and highest mountain in this part of the Alps, the king of the region.
Five hundred metres below, the Gosau ridge drops steeply into the Gosau valley. The beauty of this landscape was discovered late. In the 19th century, topographers began to measure and draw the Alps. They were followed by the landscape painters. A new genre of painting emerged - the Alpine paintings. This is how the landscapes became famous and now attracted the first mountaineers and summer visitors. Tourism was invented and today feeds the people in addition to salt mining. Until a hundred years ago, this small world of Hallstatt was almost completely cut off from the big world. The Salzkammergut was an economic region with its own strict laws, a state within a state. No one came here unless they were involved in the salt trade.

It seems like a miracle that a prehistoric culture flourished in this remote region three thousand years ago.

Man has wrested from nature what he needs: the salt, the wood, the water. The delicate balance between man and nature was often endangered here and yet never destroyed. Perhaps this is the real miracle of Hallstatt.

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