Ruskeala Mountain Park is a popular tourist destination. To see dense forests, sheer marble cliffs and a crystal-clear emerald lake, 500,000 travelers visit here each year. The Ruskeala landscape possesses a unique beauty that is the result of the interaction between people and nature.
Photo: M. Novoseletskaya, 2015
Ruskeala is one of the main attractions of Karelia. Interestingly, the name “Ruskeala” has nothing to do with marble and comes from the Finnish word ruskea — brown. According to one version, the area was named after the largest river in the northern Ladoga region, the Tohmajoki, whose waters have a reddish tint due to iron impurities. Ruskeala became famous thanks to the largest marble deposit in the North, covering a total area of 32 hectares.
The Tohmajoki River
Until the 18th century Ruskeala was Swedish territory, but after the Northern War it became part of the Russian Empire. Exploitation of the deposit began as early as the 17th century — the Swedes quarried marble for the production of building lime. Later Peter I gifted the lands to Field Marshal Alexander Borisovich Buturlin, who built the Ruskeala estate and founded the Ruskeala church parish.
Portrait of A.B. Buturlin, unknown artist. Collection of the State Historical Museum (SHM)
For a long time after the Northern War the deposit lay dormant, but after Catherine II ascended the throne marble extraction resumed. The elegant Ruskeala marble with fine veins was used for the construction and cladding of the majestic churches and palaces of Saint Petersburg: St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Marble Palace, and the Mikhailovsky Castle. Ruskeala marble was also used to decorate monuments and interior finishes: the “Belogorsky” and “Zelenogorsky” varieties were used when laying the famous mosaic floor in the Kazan Cathedral. Ruskeala marble was also made into decorative and applied art items: vases, candlesticks, pedestals and tabletops.
St. Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg
The mosaic floor of the Kazan Cathedral with a "3D effect"
In the 1820s the Ruskeala deposit shifted to the production of building lime. In the 1890s, in addition to lime production, the plant produced decorative chippings, gravel and facing blocks. Old extraction methods using quarries, mines and adits were replaced by drilling-and-blasting techniques, which in the 1960s led to the formation of the Ruskeala Sinkhole. The adit roof collapsed and transformed the system of underground galleries into flooded and frozen grottos and caves with their own microclimate.
Ruskeala Sinkhole: view from below
The marble lake, whose sheer banks seem cut with a knife, formed due to the flooding of the quarry by groundwater. According to the main version, the quarry was flooded by the Finns during the 1939 war. Groundwater slowly rose and over time formed a lake that warms to a comfortable temperature in summer. Park visitors swim, boat and dive underwater.
Source: LiveJournal
The Italian Quarry — the last quarry for cutting and extracting marble blocks, established in the 1970s. It got its name thanks to imported Italian wire-sawing machines. Marble quarried in the Italian Quarry was used to decorate the VDNKh pavilion in Moscow, to clad St. Petersburg metro stations "Primorskaya" and "Ladozhskaya", and the Brest Fortress memorial. In the mid-2000s extraction stopped and the site transformed into an amazing techno-natural tourist attraction.
Marble "walls" of the Italian Quarry
