Miracle bath, or how history is being destroyed before our very eyes

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

This megalith can be called a bath only conditionally, since the purpose of a 48-ton granite bowl (made of an WHOLE piece of granite) almost 2 meters high, more than one and a half meters deep and more than 5 meters in diameter still remains a mystery.

The technology of creating this multi-ton monolith remains no less a mystery: how was the stonecutter Samson Sukhanov able to create a bowl so perfect in the way of processing from a granite block?

The historian I. Yakovkin considered this product "one of the first in the world," and Professor J. Zembitsky said that "this work of a Russian artist deserves attention all the more since nothing so colossal of granite has been known since the time of the Egyptians."

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans tried to take the Tsar Bath to Germany, but they could not: the bowl was too heavy, not a single cable could withstand its weight.

Since then, she has been standing, half-forgotten and completely defenseless in front of vandals, in the Babolovsky Palace, almost completely destroyed and thrown into rubbish, for several decades …

People who are not indifferent to the history of their country are forced to risk their own lives in order to admire the grandiose granite bowl: wooden rotten beams hang from the ceiling, ready to break at any moment.

How did it happen that a unique structure, a monumental product made of granite, which has no equal in the world, drags out such a miserable existence, vegetating in obscurity, while other creations of master Sukhanov - the Alexandrian pillar, colonnades of St. Isaac's and Kazan cathedrals, Rostral columns - steel symbols of St. Petersburg from the moment you were born?

Why did Babolovsky Park, the largest of the remaining parks of the late 18th century, on the territory of which Tsar Bath is located, end up in private ownership, in the clutches of greedy foreign investors who wanted to build a golf club there? Golf club in the park. Where there are many, many trees. The fact that the trees will have to be cut down for the golf course is clear to any fool. Where did the committee for the protection of cultural and architectural monuments look when the construction project was approved? A project that violated all existing norms of Russian legislation …

Billions of rubles in our country are spent on the development of the Caucasus region. Maybe it is worth spending them on restoring your own, great history?

All those who are not indifferent can only advise one thing: hurry to see, hurry to take pictures and tell your friends about it. It is still possible for mere mortals to get into Babolovsky Park and admire the eighth wonder of the world. If we fail to defend history, then at least we will preserve the memory of it …