INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BARBARASTOLLEN
On the western edge of Black Forest, deep into the mountains where miners once quarried for silver, lies Germany’s cultural heritage.
It’s housed inside an old tunnel driven into the rocks for nearly 700m whose entrance is now barred by a heavy steel door. Behind this door are hundreds of stainless steel barrels stacked waist-high. Inside these hermetically sealed barrels are copies of the country's most important cultural documents and images etched in microfilm. Safely buried under 400m of granite and gneiss, these canisters and the precious film they contain are expected to survive for at least 500 years through any natural disaster and nuclear attack.
The Barbarastollen underground archive is located near the village of Oberried, in Breisgau. The tunnel itself was built in 1903 originally to transport material and ore from the mines to a train station planned in Hintertal. But after carving for 700 meters, work was abandoned. It was repurposed as an underground archive during the early 1970s.
The Barbarastollen underground archive is one of only five such sites worldwide created under the ‘Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict’.
The need to protect one’s cultural property was realised after the world witnessed the wide scale destruction of art and books in the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. Deeply shocked by the senseless destruction, Germany, along with more than 130 other countries, signed the Hague Convention in 1954. Never again, the parties agreed, would inheritance become the victims of war, as ‘any damage to cultural property, irrespective of the people it belongs to, is a damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity, because every people contributes to the world's culture’, the preamble of the treaty reads.
As the nuclear threat loomed large during the Cold War, Germany decided to act. Barbarastollen was chosen as the site where the archive would be created. Remotely located, the place was far from military bases.