Izmir Marble Mines in Turkey – Marble Research (Following Sadbhuja Das through Europe)

Dandavats. I would like to give you an overview of my trip to Europe for the White Marble research. This trip was a mind-blowing experience, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to personally go and learn what is involved with the Marble business in Europe. It was exciting to see the level at which marble is exported from Turkey, Macedonia, and Greece. I would like to give you a breakdown of the three major countries and their marble — Turkey, Macedonia, and Greece…

Even though we know that marble production is done on large scale, especially for a temple like the one we are building, it is still amazing to see how much marble passes out of the quarries for houses, churches, mosques, and other places of worship. One example that comes to mind is Mecca, one Mosque there is covered with about 2 inches of marble on all floors — so thick, and the purest of the pure in terms of white marble. I personally had the opportunity to observe the cutting and preparation technique they used for marble that is used for this purpose.

I think that the three countries are equals in terms of the quality of their marble. I personally feel that my choice for our marble supply would be either Turkey or Macedonia, because the price of marble is about half of what is in Greece. The reason being that Greece works with Euros — this is what is actually killing the marble industry in Greece, because it is very costly to produce marble when you are paying wages in Euros.

Here you can see the scale at which they are mining the marble, and the quality of their products — and of course the enormous depths of the marble mines. Some of these mines are more than three hundred feet deep — extremely accessible for marble-extraction.

Here we have photos of the Izmir mines in Turkey, these show the scale of operations they have there. They ship out 360 containers of marble a month — that’s a lot of marble! And this is just one company. You see the white marble in these images.

Please see below for an example of what our first order will look like — they asked if they could cut it for us tomorrow.

Please look at the images of marble with Arabic names on them — companies in Asia order from these mines as well. You will see this huge machine trying to pick up this monster block of marble. It looks impossible. This company has 12 of these machines, and the company has put their signature on the block — soon we’ll have some too.

The group shoot is of a number of big buyers from Syria — they have come and placed orders for tons and tons of pure white marble. It was eye-opening to see so many different companies from different countries involved with this quarry.

Here we can see marble already cut and packed, ready for shipment — a transportable form in wooden crates — by observing the number of crates it is easy to see how they ship out 360 containers per month.

Here a couple of shots documenting the possessing and grading of the marble — the marble is then separated according to it’s quality.

This is their processing operation, in which the marble is cut for specific orders. The marble is cut, polished and packed. There is no further processing to be done at the other end aside from laying it down. The end product makes it seem like you’re buying a tile from a hard-ware store.

More of my trip later installments, I hope you found this informative.