SLOVENSKO | SLOVAKIA |
Košický kraj | Košice region |
okres: Rožňava |
The Dobšiná Ice Cave is located near the mining town of Dobšiná within the area of the municipality of Stratená about 29 km northwest of the district town Rožňava and about 72 km west-northwest of the regional capital, Košice. Because of its unique cave formations and its natural beauty, it was included in 2000 on the UNESCO World Heritage list (see list of UNESCO heritage sites depicted on glasses of this collection) as a part of the Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst site, a series of over 1,000 karst caves spread out over a total area of 55,800 heactares along the border of Hungary and Slovakia. With the entrance at an elevation of 920 m it is one of the lowest ice caves in the world.
The cave was discovered on 15 June 1870 although the entrance was known from time immemorial by shepherds and hunters as Studená diera ('Cold Hole'). The cave was opened to the public one year after its discovery. In 1887, it was the first electrically lit cave in Europe. At about this time 7,171 square metres of the cave's known area of 8,874 square metres are covered with ice. The total ice volume is estimated at 125,000 cubic metres, which makes it one of the most important ice caves in the world. The thickness of the ice reaches up to 26.5 metres. The total length of the cave is 1,491 metres (some sources claim 1,232 m), of which 475 m plus individual 43 m are open to the public from May to September. In the 1050s, the 'Great Hall' was used as a training space for Czechoslovak ice figure skaters and the national ice hockey team
An interesting note on the individual item: it appears that the souvenir gass is actually unfinished (probably unintentionally): at close look, there appears
a figure of a small child on the underlying transfer print at the far right of the picture, which, however, was not coloured by enamel painting like the rest
of the picture.
As a second note it has to be noted that the spelling of the label is not in the current Slovak orthography, reading
Dobšinská lǎdová jaskyňa, replacing in the word ľadová the first two letters (ľa),
denoting the phonetic sound /λa/, by lǎ, although the character ǎ is used neither in the Slovak nor in the Czech
language.
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dob%C5%A1insk%C3%A1_%C4%BEadov%C3%A1_jasky%C5%88a, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dob%C5%A1in%C3%A1_Ice_Cave;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_of_Aggtelek_Karst_and_Slovak_Karst]