We park in one of Kuttenberg’s narrow streets and start walking uphill toward the Italian Court. We catch the tour exactly on time, without planning it in any way. The guide irritates us with her inaccuracies and the breathless pace of her commentary, but we both manage to tune her out. I don’t know about Jane, but I see the minters everywhere. Hammering silver blanks into coins and slowly going deaf in the process.

All because of the miners.

You go underground and you have to believe. In yourself, in the others, in the pickaxe, and above all in Saint Barbara - that she will protect you when the worst comes. One day, perhaps, you will claw your way toward light. Or toward a vein of silver. You live like a mole, yet belong to one of the most important estates of the medieval world. Without you, none of that legendary wealth would exist.

And beauty least of all.

We leave the Italian Court frozen to the bone. After warming ourselves over lunch, we finally make our way toward her. She stands there like an apparition from another world. Even the triforium has finally been restored. The upper stained-glass windows were left clear, allowing an extraordinary softness of daylight to pour inside. Along the gallery walls hang photographs and large architectural drawings tracing the way the cathedral slowly came into being.

It only took her five hundred years.

I breathe in the space and its echo. The columns and windows calm me more than any herb ever could. The miners’ lamps and little hammers grow through me all the way back into childhood, when I first learned their shapes and kept singing, over and over again:

“May the miners’ craft forever shine,

the miners’ craft, this pride of mine.

Though I may lose the light of day,

for my dear homeland still I stay.”

Then I turn eighteen and become the only one in my family not to attend mining school, but to study economics and the humanities instead. For years, I feel as though I have escaped my own bloodline. Gone somewhere so far away there may no longer be a path back. And yet, in the end, I remain most deeply rooted in vaults and underground passages.

Where light is not given at the beginning.

It is a state I keep breaking toward.

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