Mariinsky water system - a great artifact of antiquity

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The scale of the work just amazed me! Then I learned that all this is not all, that at the same time, the end of the 18th century, Kronstadt was being built with its forts of cut granite on the embankments, at the same time the bast peasants were building Petersburg and without hesitation they dressed the canals in granite! Many wrote about the strangeness of the construction of St. Petersburg and its incomprehensible technologies! But when in my head it all came together in one time and place, the volume of work, their quality and grandeur simply amazed me to the depths of my soul! But this turned out to be just a small fraction of what actually happened in this region in the late 18th and mid-19th centuries … the time of construction or the development of the former Mariinsky system! Why did I get caught up in this water main - as if its story is simple and clear - Aleksashka Menshikov took up and began to build bypass canals, then the Oldenburgs continued, and the Soviet builders finished it! Is it that simple? No, it's not easy, and that's why - as we see on the map, this system includes the Volkhov River and the Neva River! These are very unusual rivers - the Neva is the deepest and shortest of all rivers on earth … it starts from a lake and flows into the Gulf of Finland … well, okay, it happens! But the Volkhov river is generally strange - it flows out of Lake Ilmen, and flows into Lake Ladoga, the river resembles a canal so much that it is often called a canal, and the river flow is sometimes one way or the other, but it is on its own, very necessary place and is part of the general water system. Naturally, no where you will find a mention of the construction of such a canal, how could the "ancient" city - Veliky Novgorod stand on this river!

Here is a modern scheme and the Volkhov River is included in it - straight like a canal, more direct than the famous Volgo - Baltic Canal!

This scheme helped a lot in understanding the issue - it shows a general scheme that includes everything from Kronstadt to Rybinsk, a single water transport system that unites, as they say, natural and artificial objects and the Mariinsky only part of it.

The Volkhov River and the Rurik settlement …

Here is a description of the Mariinsky system - the length was 1145 km, along the route. From Rybinsk to St. Petersburg, on average, it took 110 days. In this case, it was necessary to pass 28 wooden locks.

The whole system looked as follows: Locks on Kovzhe - St. Constantine, St. Anna and one half-gate.

9 km from St. Anna dug a connecting canal to the village of Verkhniy Rubezh. There are 6 gateways on the channel.

The watershed was Matkoozero.

There are 20 locks on Vytegra. All locks had a chamber length of 32 m, a width of 9 m and a depth of 1.3 m at the threshold.

The system is fed from Lake Kovzh, for which its level was raised by 2 meters by blocking dams on Kovzha and Puras.

For safe communication around the lakes of Beloye, Onega and Ladoga - which often storms - bypass canals were dug:

The Syassky Canal, 10 km long, took 36 years to build, from 1765 to 1802. Under Alexander II, it was expanded and modernized.

The 53 km long Svir canal was built in 1802-10. It was modernized almost simultaneously with the previous one, after which it was renamed in honor of Alexander III.

Onega Canal. Its construction began in 1818, began on a site from the river. Vytegra to the Black Sands tract. The canal is 20 km long. From Black Sands to Ascension, they dug until 1852.

The Belozersky Canal was opened in August 1846. It passed through the southern shore of the lake with dimensions: width along the bottom 17 m, depth 2.1 m, length 67 km. It had two locks on the Sheksna side - "Convenience" and "Security", and one on the Kovzha side - "Benefit".

Here are the wooden floodgates …

The buildings correspond to the times, even steam excavators and dredgers worked …

But the Mariinsky water system is already late and it is not the largest and most ambitious. Photos of the Shliselburg and Old Ladoga canals, I will not show everything there clearly - Peter the Great caught up with the soldiers and peasants, they all built, as if there is granite not far from St.

But for example, the Belozersky Canal - granite.

The fateful gateway is a polygon's dream!

And this is Vyshny Volochek - an ancient canal - again granite!

Such photos are especially touching - granite shores and a woman rinsing linen ….. where is her granite washing machine?

Yes, from this cut granite one could fold a hundred thousand pyramids !!! Not only that, it turns out that in the 18th century they built from granite, and in the 19th century they began to make wooden sluices, in the 18th century powerful metal structures embedded in granite slabs, and in the 19th there are such peasants with shovels! And the barge haulers who pull the barges with their handles - probably with the sawn granite in the same way, only through the swamps on chariots!

Okay, when I see a steam excavator in the 19th century photo, I understand how the canals were dug, but in the 18th century they didn't seem to exist ?! And why were they digging with wooden shovels and carried on a stretcher to the top, and then evenly placing granite blocks by hand?

And I was also surprised by the sparse population of these areas - this is Venice, and where are the inhabitants, some miserable villages are standing along the canals! In short, questions, questions, questions, and they should be answered! It's all next to us! And all the supposedly greedy men, illiterate and wild … and who fed them, washed them, where did they live, where is the entire infrastructure?