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Video: Mysteries of the Thunder Stone: How the St. Petersburg Bronze Horseman got a pedestal
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The St. Petersburg monument to Peter I is probably known to every resident of Russia. It is not necessary to come to St. Petersburg for this: the memorable outlines of the sculpture made it one of the symbols of the northern capital, penetrating photographs, postcards, videos and even the Lenfilm emblem. The poem "The Bronze Horseman" by Pushkin, where the towering Peter comes to life in the eyes of the mad hero of the work, also added fame. Meanwhile, the pedestal of the monument - the Thunder-stone - has its own history and its own mysteries, which have not yet been revealed.
Find
Empress Catherine II wanted to erect a monument to Peter the Great. It was decided to find an equally grandiose pedestal for the grandiose sculpture, and for this purpose the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti began to publish announcements, where it urged interested persons to "break down and bring here, to St. Petersburg" a suitable stone.
The state peasant Semyon Vishnyakov, who served as a supplier of building stone, responded to the request and pointed to a huge boulder in the vicinity of Konnaya Lakhta. The people called him the Thunder-stone, because of the legend that he broke away from the rock as a result of a lightning strike. Captain Marine Karburi, the head of the prospecting work, paid the peasant for the find a decent amount at that time - one hundred rubles.
Scientists suggest that the stone came to the vicinity of St. Petersburg a long time ago, about 11 thousand years ago, from North Karelia or Scandinavia. Or, more precisely, it was dragged along by a glacier: very often unique rocks turned out to be south of their origin thanks to the ice ages, when the growing glaciers literally pushed huge boulders ahead of them.
The composition of the Thunder Stone is really unique (68% feldspar, 29% quartz), granite of this type is no longer found near St. Petersburg. It was believed that the famous Olginskie boulders on the shores of the Gulf of Finland are pieces that broke away from the Thunder Stone, which were left near the pier during the transportation of the stone giant. But geological analysis found out that the Olginskie boulders differ in composition from the Thunder-stone. Therefore, this legend is incorrect.
Delivery
The thunder stone was delivered to St. Petersburg for almost a year. Due to such a long period, it may seem as if the place of his discovery was incredibly far from the capital. However, today the area of Horse Lakhta is included in the city limits. The technical means at that time simply could not afford to quickly deliver a huge boulder weighing under 2 thousand tons.
Its original dimensions were 13 by 8 by 6 meters. After waiting for the frost to begin, so that it would be more convenient to carry the wooden platform across the icy soil, the workers removed the stone with levers and placed it on the platform. At the site of the excavation, the Petrovsky Pond was formed, which still exists today.
During the day, it was possible to move the platform by about 20-30 steps. So from November 1769 to March 1770, the stone was dragged to the pier. The empress herself once specially came to Lakhta and watched this process, forbidding the cutting of the stone - she wanted it to reach St. Petersburg without losing its volume. In the spring, the Thunder-stone was loaded onto a barge and delivered to the capital by sea.
One boulder and many pieces
At the most superficial glance at the pedestal of the Bronze Horseman, you can see that its front and rear parts have a slightly different color, and are separated by almost cracks:
Vision does not deceive you: these are different pieces of the same Thunderstone. By the way, in fact, they are not three, but four, as shown by later studies. Carefully laid, they maintain the strength of the pedestal structure and, if you ignore the color border, give the impression of a single monolith.
There were other bits too. The stone was hewn, polished and shaped according to the architectural design. What happened to the construction waste? There is information that souvenirs were made from the remains of the Thunder Stone - writing instruments, cane knobs, brooches. However, it was not possible to find these souvenirs. Catherine II sent some polished piece to her pen friend, the French philosopher Denis Diderot. It is not known whether it has survived - it may have been among the exhibits of some French natural science museum.
So even after 250 years, the Thunder Stone retains its mysteries, no less than the Bronze Horseman towering over it.
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