The chalk callers have had a big impact on the townscape of Chełm. To such an extant that over the last two centuries the town’s street have collapsed on several occasions, while the white bear in the town’s crest is actually brown, but covered in chalk.
Paris is famous for its Eiffel Tower, London for Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, Rome for its Catacombs, and Chełm is know for Europe’s only 40km maze of corridors, grottos, passages and subterranean cloisters hollowed out beneath the oldest part of the town in chalk from the upper Cretaceous. At certain points the excavations have formed as many as 6 levels. The deepest of them is 30m below the ground, the shallowest is barely 70cm below the street surface. The chaotic layout of the passage is the result of the ‘cottage mining’ of the merchants, who in the Middle Ages began digging out the chalk beneath their homes to sell (it was a building material, but was also used in polishing, smelting, and cosmetics). Chełm’s underground corridors have been classed as, a third-class cultural monument, and from one of 30 subterranean tour routes open in Poland. Every year Europe’s only open underground chalk mine has 15,000 visitors. As long as Bieluch, the legendary lord of the chalk excavations, doesn’t bar their way, visitors complete the route with their guide and lit torches in one hour. But as the spirit has been accustomed to walking the passages in the company of bards or poets, you should add another 30 minutes to this. And it’s worth doing, even if not for art with a capital A at a temperature of 9oC, then for the power of Bieluch. Legend has it that he once conquered Boruta, a noble devil from Łęczyca.