The complex of Tuzla salt (salt) wells with a pumping station at the Borić site is - along with the old Saltworks and the Salt Museum in Kreka and the salt well from the Ottoman period on the Salt Square - an integral part of an exceptional national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina, namely the Salt Production in Tuzla. Salt has been produced in Tuzla since the Neolithic period. Tuzla was founded and developed on salt deposits, and salt production has been the main branch of the economy for centuries. Salt was exploited in the Trnovac-Hukalo area by pumping salt water from wells. The pumping station at Borić, north of the Džindija Mosque (in the immediate vicinity of the current artificial salt ‘Pannonian Lakes’), was built during the Austro-Hungarian administration. Salt water was pumped from the well, placed in reservoirs and from there transported further to the Saltworks in Kreka through pipes of a special salt pipeline. Since the end of the 19th century, 176 salt wells have been built along the Hukalo-Borić-Trnovac stretch.
For more than a century, the uncontrolled exploitation of salt by pumping out salt water (brine) lasted in Tuzla. By 1991, about 90 million m3 of salt water had been exhausted from the Tuzla deposit, which created a solid mass deficit of about 12.6 million m3. This resulted in land subsidence in the very center of Tuzla with a constant expansion of the area of the subsidence zone from 50 to 500 ha (1947-1991). No city in Europe has suffered such an ecological disaster. On an area of about 500 hectares, Tuzla sank as much as 10 to 12 meters. The consequences for this city were catastrophic: entire city districts disappeared, both the old Tuzla mahallas and numerous significant city buildings from the center of Tuzla. Since the beginning of the 1960s, the city has been losing one building after another: the Gymnasium, the Hotel ‘Bristol’, the Monastery, the Madrasah, the Catholic Church, the Health Center, the Post Office, the Library, the Army House, the Municipal Building, the First Elementary and Music Schools… Around 2,700 housing units were demolished, and more than 15,000 citizens were relocated to other parts of the city. In addition to the huge housing area, a total of around 200,000 m 2 of educational, health, commercial, religious, cultural and sports facilities were destroyed. The most intense subsidence was in the Plavkuša district, which completely disappeared in the 1970s. In its place appeared a pool of salt water emerging from the ground, which the people called ‘Pinga’. On a half-sunken house in the middle of ‘Pinga’, next to the road that led from Vladikain dvor to Slana Banja, there was a board with information about the subsidence of the terrain in that place for years (see one of the old photos). Until 2003, when the first Pannonian Lake was built in that area, ‘Pinga’ was a sad monument to Tuzla, a reminder of the decades-long subsidence and collapse of the city. For Tuzla, known as the ‘City of Salt’, May 29, 2007 is a historic date. On that day, the last salt well was stopped, which finally eliminated the cause of the subsidence. The cause has been removed, but the process of subsidence is still ongoing. A replica of a wooden tower of the former salt wells is located within the Pannonian Lakes complex in Tuzla.
Translated by Google •
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