Ruskeala Marble Quarry

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14 June 2015

My wife wanted to visit the Ruskeala marble quarry and so did I. I searched the web for guided tours and found the cheapest one-day trip from Petersburg to Ruskeala via Priozersk and Sortavala with Scan Tour Company. I paid for the tour by bank card without visiting any offices. Unfortunately the tour was cancelled due to technical reasons (perhaps the bus was broken) on the initial date, 13 June, and postponed till 14 June.



This entry mainly deals with three interesting places: Priozersk and its Korela Fortress, Sortavala, and Ruskeala Marble Quarry (including the story of a Soviet war movie re-shoot in 2015).



The bus departed at 8 in the morning from Ozerki Metro Station, about ten minutes’ walk from our home. We bought some food products on the day before to make sandwiches on the trip. The first stop was in Priozersk (I’ve visited it before, see my previous entry, year 2012) where we were able to see the Korela Fortress (we stayed there for about 30 minutes) – we simply walked around the fortress. The weather was not fine throughout the day.



The road was very bad on two long sections from Priozersk to Sortavala. The top pavement was simply stripped off, leaving a bumpy and corrugated surface with lots of holes. No repair machinery was seen anywhere, the driver had to steer to the left and right, and to top it all, the road itself was winding like a serpentine. We arrived in Sortavala for lunch at a restaurant by the river bank (an additional payment was required; we ate our own sandwiches). I wished to have a walk in Sortavala but we only had a very short stop there so I will most probably return there just for a day’s sightseeing.



We managed to have a glimpse of a park and have a cup of hot tea in a small shop selling souvenirs, cakes, tea and other articles.



Sortavala during its history belonged to Sweden (from 1617 till 1721) – the settlement of Sordavalla was founded in 1632 by order of King Gustav II; to the Russian Empire (from 1721 till 1918 and then from 1940), and to Finland (from 1918 till 1940). The city center mainly comprises brick 3-4 storey buildings from the beginning of the XX century (before the 1930-ies); these mainly belong to the northern modern style (national romanticism, neoclassicism), later buildings are in functionalism style. They were built by well-known Finnish architects Uno Verner Ulberg, Saarinen, Arenberg.



From Sortavala it is a short way (about 30 kilometers) to the village of Ruskeala and the part. We had a guided tour of the park and learned everything about its origin, development, and decline. No marble is being extracted nowadays, but the park is an excellent spot for resting and adventures such as boating, bungee jumping, and trolley line, also diving, husky riding.



The Ruskeala mountain part is a tourist complex, its main attraction being the former marble quarry filled with ground waters. Empress Ekaterina II did much for exploration of the local quarries. The quarry is 460 meters long and up to 100 meters wide, water is transparent up to 15-18 meters. Ruskeala marble was used for construction of the most beautiful and important buildings in Petersburg, such as Isaac’s Cathedral, floors in Kazan Cathedral, Hermitage window sills, windows of the Marble Palace and the façade of Mikhailovsky Castle, as well as the underground halls of Primorskaya and Ladozhskaya metro stations. The walls of the old quarry are penetrated by multiple drift ways and entries linked by vertical shafts. The majority of openings were flooded after the Great Patriotic War. The complex is developing several more attractions for tourists (I remember hearing something about skating in winter on the ice in the openings).



We wanted to have a boat trip but there was too long a queue and we had only 40 minutes left, barely enough to have a bite. The café was unable to quickly prepare French fries with sausage for us so we had only a slice of pizza. We had one more sight to see, that is the Ruskeala waterfalls. These are four plain waterfalls near the Ruskeala Village on Tohmajoki River, height from 3 to 4mmeters. The waterfalls are also known thanks to the Soviet film of 1972 “And the Dawns Here Are Queit”. This is a very sad film (I have seen it in Arzamas in a movie theater on the 9^th of May, the Victory Day) telling the story of master sergeant Vaskov and five young lady-antiaircrafters standing against a squad of experienced Nazi subverters in a strategically important location.



After the waterfalls we started driving back. All was well but then we came in a very long (about one hour and a half) traffic jam. It annoyed me greatly. Just why would people stand in a traffic jam at midnight? We were very lucky to return home by one, because the bus stopped near Ozerki metro station and we live just a couple of minutes from there.

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