Granite Petersburg

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

The material was prepared as part of the support of the "Impossible Isakiy" project. The production of the film is in full swing, thanks to everyone who supports the project.

Sukhanov brought the method of breaking granite to extreme simplicity and ease. Probably, the Petersburg residents will not fail to take advantage of this important discovery and our capital will turn into new Thebes in speed, later offspring will argue whether people or giants have created this city.

Petersburg was built just a few hundred years before us. Our relatives four generations ago could participate in the initial stage of the construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral. This happened during Pushkin's lifetime in a very well-documented period. In those years, mountains of scientific and fictional literature were written in the modern language. But why not a word about the tools and the way of making perfect granite columns? Stone cutters of the next generations have neither documents nor oral knowledge.

Official documents depict the process of transporting columns from a quarry to a facility under construction as follows: the monoliths were allegedly loaded onto flat-bottomed barges and then a multi-ton cylinder allegedly rolled ashore along thin boards.

Let's take another look at the official pictures of granite billet logistics.

1. Transportation of granite blocks on special barges. Engraving by Karl Friedrich Sabat:

2. Unloading of two columns near the Admiralty - lithograph after the original by Montferrand:

(by the way, the length of the depicted column is not 17 official meters, but about 1.8x7 = 12plus or minus 2 meters for the inaccuracy of the estimate):

3. Installation of the 1st column of the north portico. Lithograph with tone. Bischbois, W. Adam, based on the original by O. Montferrand:

and, finally, 4. the original watercolor of Montferrand himself in 1824 - the unloading of the column for St. Isaac's Cathedral:

And here is an illustration that relates to the transportation of a workpiece for Alexander Column, but which also tells us about the unreliability of Montferrand's drawings: here we see how a monolith weighing at least 600 tons simply hangs in the air when the boards break under it. One gets the impression that such a "state of emergency at the facility" is described deliberately to give credibility to the official version.

When you look at these drawings, you understand: to draw is not to move granite.

Can these drawings reflect the reality of those years? Do we need any highly scientific analyzes to understand that such a logistics of granite blocks weighing 600, and even 114 tons (for Isaac) does not stand up to criticism?

However, for specialists in shipbuilding and related specialties who would like to participate in the assessment and reliability of special transport ships, here is a quote from Montferrand:

… The vessel carrying the monolithic pillar rod was 147 feet long and 40 feet in crossbeam, and is 13 feet 3 inches from keel to bridge.

On January 18, 1830, the commission that supervised the work received from the Minister of the Navy a plan and an estimate drawn up for the construction of the ship under the leadership of the chief engineer.

The ship was built in St. Petersburg at the merchant Gromov's shipyard by Colonel Glazin, one of the most prominent design officers of the state fleet. This flat-bottomed structure was capable of withstanding a maximum load of 65,000 pounds, that is, 2,600,000 pounds, with a displacement of no more than 7 feet 3 inches, which greatly facilitated passage through the numerous shoals encountered on the navigation route.

All measures were taken to ensure that on July 5, 1832, the ship dropped anchor at the Puterlak quarry.

The contractor Yakovlev, who was entrusted with the operation of loading and unloading the column, began work, employing four hundred people. To carry out the loading of the column, I ordered to build a pier, protruding into the sea for 30 fathoms. The pier was built from fragments of granite that broke off during the development of the rocks. It ended with a port 105 feet long and 80 feet wide. The structure consisted of a log-house set on piles, the bars of which, crossing, created a semblance of cages; these cells were filled with granite.

From above, the cages were overlapped with beams at a close distance, and on top of the beams, boards were laid in two layers, which made up the bridge of the port, at the end of which a pier protruding into the sea was built across it. This created a fairway for the ship. Capstans were installed on the pier for loading the column.

The pier, like the port, was 106 feet long. As for the fairway, it was only 44 feet wide to provide stability for the vessel during loading.

The fairway was cleaned by two teams working in shifts day and night. This accelerated rate of bottom clearance was undertaken to avoid delays.

To obtain the 10 feet of depth required for loading, two feet of extreme density clay had to be removed from the bottom.

Although the convoy had to travel only 300 feet on a straight road to get the convoy aboard from the site of its development, the endless roughness and unevenness of the rock along the entire route made this procedure extremely difficult. They had to blow them up along the entire length of 300 feet, and after clearing the rubble, lay the path with beams laid one to the other.

The descent of the column to the pier began even before the end of the lower section of the track, and they had to wield eight capstans, since, due to the difference in the diameters of the ends of the column, it always took a diagonal direction during descent. And proceeding from the fact that for the correct loading it was required to observe the absolute parallelism of the cargo at the edge of the berth, it was necessary to turn it repeatedly during the entire route of the column to restore the parallel. This turning procedure was carried out by means of a powerful wedge, fixed with iron, which returned the deflected column every 12 feet. Between the wedge and the column, boards rubbed with soap were alternately placed one after the other. Six capstans, using pulley blocks, pulled the column forward, while two others, placed at the back, kept it from rotating.

After two weeks of hard work, they finally achieved that the column rested on the edge of the pier …

By the way, it is curious that there are no quarries of adequate size, taking into account the total "granitization" of St. Petersburg, in the vicinity there are no.

The user under the nickname piligrim visited the place, which is now considered an abandoned Piterlux quarry, it is now in Finland - neither the volume of development, nor the nature of the granite itself is very suitable for the source of granite for the columns of St. Petersburg. There are no traces of "a breakwater protruding into the sea for 30 fathoms".

And Montfferand himself wrote very funny things about this:

… it would be a delusion to believe that granite colossi, obelisks and other Egyptian monoliths were broken out of the core of the mountain ranges. With the exception of a few places in the south of Suan, the Egyptians, in order to avoid the high costs associated with this work, were content with choosing granite from the distant rocks scattered throughout the country, the shape and size of which corresponded to each given case.

Likewise, modern contractors tasked with supplying granite do the same.

This explains the insignificant amount of traces of granite mining in Finland in comparison with the huge amount of its consumption in St. Petersburg

Be that as it may, if the famous monolithic temple at Sais was created from a single block of granite rocks running along the banks of the Nile, near Elephantiana, if the huge rock that serves as the pedestal of the statue of Peter the Great was hardly removed from the swamps where she was buried for many centuries, then these rocks are not in the least significant than that rock,from which the monolith of the Alexandrian column was subsequently carved.

Well, that is, the peasants were walking by, they saw a suitable piece, they took it, raised it, brought it, installed it, polished it, and here it is, the splendor of Petersburg in all its glory.

The embankments of the Neva, Moika, Griboyedov Canal (Catherine Canal), Fontanka - all this was dressed in granite during the time of Catherine II. For example, opposite the Marble (Konstantinovsky) Palace of the same Rinaldi, there is a pier on the embankment, where the date 1776 is engraved on the stone.

The 70s-80s of the 18th century are considered to be the years when Petersburg became not just stone, but granite. Granite has been used in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of cubic meters. It is known, for example, from the decree of 1768 on the foundation of the Ruskeala marble quarry, although marble was used much less than granite, but there is no decree or order to create the Peterlux quarry - the main source of granite according to the official version.

How can you not be amazed at the words of Alopeus (Brief description of marble and other stone blocks, mountains and stone rocks located in Russian Karelia, 1787, pp. 57-58):

In Imbilakht, on one rocky coast, there is a mountain of good, strong, gray-red granite. At the bottom of the mountain there is a great many square and oblong pieces that have fallen away from it, up to 3 arshins [about 2, 1 meters] long, which are so straight and smooth, as if they were deliberately cut out for some use. It's wonderful that the contractors who put the stones did not find the sowing mountains … Yes, and a whole mountain could be broken at low cost, because there are completely straight deep clefts on it.

A few words about the polemics of casting or a monolith of columns, which are already traditional among alternatives.

Why do I think this is not a cast? The fact is that the mineralogical composition of the rapakivi granite, from which the columns of St. Isaac's Cathedral are made, is well known. It consists of large (up to 5 cm) rounded, so-called ovoid, or ovoid, discharge of pink feldspar - orthoclase, overgrown with a white shell of another feldspar - oligoclase. These ovoids overwhelm the rock and are cemented by a medium-grained mass of pink and white feldspars, gray-black quartz, green-black mica, and mica-like hornblende.

With such a complex and heterogeneous structure, which is well studied by mineralogists, if we assume casting technologies, then they should create a 100% copy of natural material, with ovoid inclusions, crystals of different grain sizes and crystallization after casting, which, moreover, cuts ovoid inclusions in half.

Another argument against this technology is that one of the columns shows traces of joining of two parts, apparently the initial height of the column was not enough, or the column was damaged. In the case of casting, such a finishing touch does not make sense at all, since no one bothers to cast the column to the end.

Yaroslav Yargin