Huge stone baths. Babolovsky Park in Pushkin and the legendary Tsar Bath. The difference in the versions of the creation of the Babolovskaya bath

Having read quite a lot about St. Petersburg and its suburbs, having a good library on this topic, I read this most interesting article for the first time. So I decided to share with the respected community. Maybe one of the residents of St. Petersburg saw this unique bath with their own eyes?

Sometimes you look on the Internet, and in passing you stumble upon amazing information. Over time, you think that you have already seen and heard everything amazing on the Internet, but it turns out that everything is still ahead.

For example, many people do not know about the masterpiece of stone craftsmanship of our ancestors - a giant bathtub, neither the masters of ancient Egypt nor other ancient cultures cared before making such a thing. And why this product is not widely advertised as the technological achievements of our ancestors - I do not understand. The size of the product is so huge that you can hardly believe it. And it is quite possible that this is a legacy from the more ancient, antediluvian inhabitants of this region.

This artifact is also called "Babolovskaya Chalice", "Bath of the Russian Empire", "Granite Masterpiece" and "Eighth Wonder of the World". Meanwhile, you will not find it in any popular guidebook for St. Petersburg and its suburbs.

Let's talk about it in more detail...

In Tsarskoye Selo, on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park, there are the ruins of the Babolovsky Palace.

In the south-west of the city of Pushkin, far from the tourist routes, is the last of the imperial parks. Compared to Alexandrovsky or Ekaterininsky parks, which abound with elegant architectural structures and sculptures, Babolovsky Park looks more than modest.

The history of the emergence of the Babolovsky Palace dates back to the 80s of the 18th century, when not far from the village of Babolovo (or another version: a huge territory of almost 270 hectares, got its name from the nearby, but not survived, Finnish village of Pabola), in three versts from Tsarskoye Selo, among swamps and lowlands overgrown with forests, Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin built a manor with a small landscape garden.

If you look through the wall gap inside the octagonal tower, then your eyes will see a giant granite bowl, a colossal monolithic pool, carved from a single piece of red granite, about two meters high and more than 5 meters in diameter. This is the famous Babolov bowl.

The stone palace was built in 1785 according to the project of I. Neyelov. Before that, there was a wooden manor in its place. The architect gave the stone building a "Gothic" look: windows with lancet endings, battlements. An octagonal tower with a hipped roof gave the palace a look of Gothic buildings. A large marble bathtub was installed in the main hall for bathing on hot days. Babolovsky Palace was a one-story summer building, consisting of seven rooms, each of which directly overlooked the park.

Near the palace, called Babolovsky, there is a man-made Big Babolovsky pond. It was made when the nearby Kuzminka River was blocked by a dam. Directly behind the mansion is another pond, Mirror, or Silver. From the palace to the park, the path passes along the Babolovsky bridge-dam. Through the grove, the road led to the kitchen building. It existed until 1941 and was destroyed by enemy shells. A little further you can find an alley of silvery willows, whose age reaches one and a half hundred years.

Initially, only a small area near the palace was cleared, and everywhere around there was a continuous spruce forest. A ditch with clear, very cold water also flowed through a ditch, and huge burbots were found in it. They called it "monk's": allegedly in the grotto from which it flowed, there was a figure of a monk. The expansion of the park began in the middle of the 19th century. Then they began to drain the surrounding swamps, uproot old trees, and plant new young oaks, maples, lindens and birches in their place. They paved roads and cut clearings for walking and carriage rides.

The architect-decorator Rondi was called from Paris, who presented a project for the creation of a public entertainment complex in Babolovsky Park. The new park was supposed to abound with rides, fountains and waterfalls. But, having received a cost estimate, the emperor abandoned the idea. To "save face", it was announced that the place was intended for secluded walks and enjoying the beauty of the surrounding nature.

In 1783, an English garden was laid out near the palace. On the side of the northern facade of the palace was located the Big (or Babolovsky) pond, formed by the Kuzminka river after the construction of a dam on it, to the south of the palace there is a Mirror (or Silver) pond. The palace experienced a rebirth after the restructuring carried out by V.P. Stasov in 1824-1825.

Ekaterina's grandson Alexander1 loved this place, and allegedly had intimate dates here. Alexander made a redevelopment of the palace and ordered a giant granite bath instead of white marble. The compositional center of the palace was an oval hall, the size of which was significantly increased by the architect in order to accommodate a new bathtub.

A unique granite monolith pool with a capacity of 8,000 buckets of water was commissioned by engineer Betancourt to the famous St. Petersburg stonemason Samson Sukhanov, known for supervising the manufacture of Rostral columns on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island and taking part in the creation of the pedestal of the monument to Minin and Pozharsky in Moscow. The master agreed to cut down the bathtub for 16,000 rubles. A block of red granite interspersed with greenish labrador, weighing more than 160 tons, was delivered from one of the Finnish islands and polished on the spot for ten years (1818-1828). The bath has unique dimensions: height 196 cm, depth 152 cm, diameter 533 cm, weight 48 tons. It was first installed and then erected around the wall. A cast-iron staircase with railings, equipped with viewing platforms, led to the pool. All parts were cast at C. Byrd's iron foundry.

In 1818, a granite block weighing more than 160 tons was delivered to Babolovo from one of the Finnish islands. The craftsmen had to cut off everything superfluous (120 tons). The work took 10 years and was completed on time with the highest quality. The result is a polished granite bath: height 196 cm, depth 152 cm, diameter 533 cm, weight 48 tons. Data on a displacement of 8 thousand buckets, according to the calculated data - 12 tons of water.

At the same time, the masters demonstrated an amazing feeling for the stone. The thickness of the walls of the bowl is minimal - 45 cm, which allows it to withstand the pressure of a multi-ton mass of water, but at the same time it is the limit for fragile granite. The art critic, Professor Ya. Zembitsky said that “this work of the Russian artist is all the more worthy of attention, since nothing so colossal of granite has been known since the time of the Egyptians.”

The architect Stasov wrote: “On the occasion of the highest command to make a stone dome, instead of the proposed wooden ceiling over the oval hall, which is being built around the installed granite bath at the Babolovsky pavilion, it became necessary:

1. Thicken the foundations and walls in proportion to the burden and thrust of such a dome and for this.

2. Break the rest of the former hall and some of the adjacent walls of the pavilion with their foundations ... "

The architect completed the work in 1829, retaining the Gothic appearance of the building with lancet windows and crenellated attic. The facades of the palace were plastered, trimmed to look like stone and painted brown.

Historian I. Yakovkin considered this product “one of the first in the world”, and Professor Y. Zembitsky said that “this work of a Russian artist is all the more worthy of attention since nothing so colossal of granite has been known since the time of the Egyptians.”

Before the war, the Babolovsky Palace housed the school of the 100th Aviation Assault Brigade of the Leningrad Military District of Pushkin. At the beginning of the war, she was subjected to severe bombardments.

The unique Babolovsky Palace was damaged during the war. Its stone vaults collapsed. Only one bath, which is almost 200 years old, has been perfectly preserved. During the Second World War, the Germans were going to take it out as a rare exhibit, but they could not. And then they were no longer up to it.

This object, popularly called Tsar-bath, is listed in the Guinness Book of Records, but has not yet been recognized as a museum exhibit. The authorities treat this unique object carved out of granite as if it were rubbish…

The difference in age between the St. Petersburg and Egyptian masterpieces, of course, is huge. If the sarcophagus in the pyramid of Cheops is at least 5,000 years old, then the granite Tsar Bath is less than 200 years old. But not everything is so simple! The dimensions, weight and technique of processing the bath are surprising. Russian stonemasons did not have to create anything like this either before the manufacture of the Tsar-bath at the end of the 19th century, or after it. Even modern craftsmen with advanced technologies and appropriate equipment for processing granite will find it difficult to fulfill such an order.

It is curious that modern scientists, after a thorough study of the sarcophagus inside the pyramid of Cheops, came to the conclusion that it was not intended for the pharaoh at all. What functions this granite box performed is still unclear, although there are a lot of versions. The same situation develops with the Tsar-bath! It is fraught with no less mysteries than the Egyptian sarcophagus.

Initially, a block of red granite interspersed with green Labrador, from which they were going to cut down a bath, weighed more than 160 tons. After completion of the work, the weight of the finished bath was 48 tons. Even in modern times, this is a large figure, comparable to the weight of a dozen elephants. Not every modern technique is able to lift this load.

Contemporaries are puzzled by the fact that there is no drain hole in the Bath, and there are also no technical possibilities for supplying and heating water. The “hole” at the bottom of the bathtub does not in any way draw on the drain hole and is most likely made relatively recently.

Today there are two versions explaining the purpose of the Babolov bowl.

The first version is household. By tradition, the Romanov Family spent the summer seasons in Tsarskoe or Peterhof. Monarchs sweat too. On hot days, there was a need to freshen up in cool water. Since the august persons, especially ladies, should not be naked in public, they could do their refreshing in this pool. Why is the pool not made of polypropylene? - Yes, because there were no other materials besides granite then. Why wasn't the water heated? — So because this pool was planned to be used only in the summer and only for cooling.

And the granite bath was such a kind of font with constantly cool or even cold water. Such a thickness of granite absorbs heat for a very long time, one can say that it is a kind of cold accumulator. Here we must remember that the next tsar, Nikolai Pavlovich, was no longer resting in Tsarskoye, but in Peterhof (a cottage in Alexandria) in the summer. And there were many opportunities to swim. Although an interesting pavilion was arranged for the ladies on hot days - Tsaritsyn on Olgin's pond. A different air cooling system was used there.

Most likely, after the completion of the main work, in connection with the death of the Customer (Alexander1), the heirs abandoned the construction of the pool, deciding to demonstrate the bath as an object of stone-cutting art.
The second version is "Masonic". Its supporters consider the Babolovsky palace with a bowl as the future main Masonic temple. At the same time, “specialists” see numerous Masonic signs in the scenery of the palace. This version does not agree well with the fact that in 1822 Alexander I issued the highest rescript "On the destruction of Masonic lodges and all sorts of secret societies." It is hard to believe that Alexander1, destroying the lodges, left one for himself.

There is a third version - humorous-cosmic. Someone, Y. Babikov, writes: “There is no doubt that the bowl itself is an element of an antenna converter-emitter of viton microwave oscillations for ultra-long-range space communications ..”

Version four: according to the original plan, in all likelihood, Vanna was supposed to have a drain. It was planned to supply and drain water by gravity with the appropriate valves (this can be seen from the diagram). But then perhaps they were afraid to drill - it will suddenly crack!

By the way, many wonder how they heated the water? Indeed, to fill such a stone bowl, you need almost 8,000 buckets of water, which is quite a lot, and even if you pour warm water, while the bath is filling, it will already cool down.

- a land of paradoxes! Only we have the Tsar Bell, which never rang, and the Tsar Cannon, which, according to legend, fired only once in history. However, both the bell and the cannon are in the Kremlin, and the people of Russia are terribly proud of them. While another royal artifact, the Tsar Bath, completely undeservedly vegetates in oblivion - in the dilapidated Babolovsky Palace on the outskirts of Tsarskoye Selo ...

FOR INTIMATE MEETINGS

Numerous visitors to Tsarskoye Selo do not indulge in Babolovsky Park: it is neglected to such an extent that it rather resembles a forest. But here it is always quiet and calm. And if you walk along the main alley, you will come out to a pond formed in the place where the Kuzminka River is blocked by a dam bridge.

On the other side, red brick ruins are all that remains of the Babolovsky Palace. In fairness, it should be said that the crowds of people around him never walked. Firstly, it is not customary to idly wander around the royal residence. Secondly, this palace was originally built for intimate meetings of monarchs, a quiet rest after a hunt, and not a ball and other noisy court entertainments. By and large, it can be called a palace with a huge stretch: it has only 10 rooms, and three of them are reserved for the “bath” room. An interesting detail: from every room of the palace you can freely go to the park. Why it was necessary to do this is a big question. Maybe the representatives of the royal family practiced blind dates? And an extra door is an additional opportunity for a "retreat"?

The first wooden palace appeared on this site in 1782. And was presented by Catherine II to her favorite Grigory Potemkin. The wooden building, modest but tasteful, cost the treasury 3,984 rubles, but it was possible to live in it only in summer. Therefore, in 1785, a stone building in the Gothic style was built in its place according to the project of Neelov. This palace already cost 15,000 rubles - fabulous money at that time. But on the other hand, it was an original building - with a turret, which housed a bathtub lined with marble ... Alas, this zest was not enough for the Empress to fall in love with the Babolovsky Palace. Almost all the time it was empty, and therefore fell into decay ...

NEED A BIGGER BATH!

A new life was breathed into it by the beloved grandson of Catherine II - Alexander I. He decided to rebuild the Babolovsky Palace for himself. And he began by ordering a new bath - "bigger". When the architect V.P. Stasov, who was entrusted with the reconstruction project, found out what a “bigger bath” was in the mind of Alexander I, he realized that in order to implement the emperor’s idea, the palace would simply have to be dismantled!

Can you imagine starting your house with plumbing installations? Not? This is because you are not an emperor. But Alexander I had no doubts. So a unique palace with a hipped tower built around a granite bath appeared in Babolovsky Park.

The bath itself was ordered by the then popular stonemason Samson Sukhanov and his artel. The work took a long 8 years - from 1811 to 1818. It did not stop even in the war of 1812. Sukhanov estimated the cost of manufacturing a granite bowl at 16,000 rubles!

A 160-ton dark pink granite block was found on one of the Finnish islands. Where the bath was hewn out of it - directly in the quarry or near the installation site - is not known for certain. But the result is a bowl that has no equal in the world.

Its weight is 48 tons, diameter is 5.33 meters, depth is 1.52 meters, height is 1.96 meters. It included up to 800 buckets of water. The work done by the masons can be called truly infernal. Only to give the granite block a cupped shape, it was necessary to make tens of billions of blows with a mallet on the scarpel (this is such a tool, a steel rod, expanded at one end in the form of a sharply honed blade).

It is necessary to hit the same number of times so that the outer contours become perfectly rounded. At that time, there were no hard-alloy stone-cutting tools. Tools made of simple steel, which the masters worked with, had to be sharpened after every 3-4 strokes on granite. You just wonder how, under such conditions, they managed to make a bowl of an ideal geometric shape!

How such a hulk was delivered to Babolovo is unknown. After all, neither cranes nor other technical devices existed then ...

WONDER OF SCULPTURE

The result exceeded all expectations: when he saw the bath, the emperor was delighted. His mood was shared by all who saw this miracle. And Otechestvennye Zapiski reported to the general public: “Finally Sukhanov finished this summer the beautiful, the only bath for the Babolovskaya bath ... Many of the St. Petersburg residents went on purpose to see this work of the Russian Sculptor. It is all the more worthy of attention because since the time of the Egyptians nothing so huge of granite has been known. Foreigners did not want to believe that Sukhanov was able to produce this miracle of sculpture or sculptural art ... "

A cast-iron staircase with railings, equipped with viewing platforms, led to the pool bath. In a word, they did everything to make it convenient for the royal family to swim. Which is exactly what she did. She didn't care how the tub filled with water.

But contemporaries are racking their brains over this question: it is unlikely that this hulk was filled by hand every time. The surviving descriptions state that the water came from a lock near the bridge. But how this happened in practice, no one knows. How the water was drained is also a mystery. After all, there is no hole for this in the bottom of the bath. And it is physically impossible to tilt it.

SCHOOL OF PILOT

After the 1917 revolution, the palace did not become a museum. A pilot school was located here. This decided the fate of the unique structure. During the Great Patriotic War, the palace was actively bombed, and it quickly turned into ruins. But a miracle! The tub itself was not damaged. By the way, the Germans, who had incomparably greater technical capabilities than the engineers of the 19th century, were forced to abandon the idea of exporting a unique artifact to Germany: they did not have any suitable equipment or vehicles.

Today, the remains of the building with the Tsar Bath inside are surrounded by a fence and are waiting for the start of restoration, which does not begin in any way. It's a pity! A unique stone structure could attract many tourists and people interested in history. After all, unlike the rest of the tsar-objects of Russia, the miracle bath was actively used for its intended purpose!

Given the uniqueness of the stone bath, the process of its creation, of course, interested modern specialists working in the field of granite processing. No official research has been done. However, on the Internet you can find a lot of testimonies of experts who unanimously claim that it is technically impossible to carve such a stone bath by hand! And polish even more! To achieve such accuracy and smoothness is possible only with the use of machine processing.

Some especially zealous researchers compared the Tsar-bath with a sarcophagus in the pyramid of Cheops, the manufacturing technology of which is also unknown.

Finally, the version that the giant bathtub is a legacy of past civilizations of the Earth and was found in swamps near Tsarskoe Selo has become widespread.

However, this version is easily refuted by financial documents confirming that a lot of funds were allocated to create an amazing bowl.

Tsarskoye Selo (the city of Pushkin) in summer resembles a southern city. You will not find empty yards here. In each - flower beds, shrubs, trees.

Public gardens, alleys, streets, even squares are buried in greenery. Wide shady boulevards beckon with coolness.

Please note: the dacha of General Pyotr Bagration is hiding behind the trees

How many parks? Aleksandrovsky, Ekaterininsky, Buffer, Separate (Lower). Each of them could decorate any city.

But there is one park about which little is known. Not every Petersburger knows about the existence of this. So I, until I moved from St. Petersburg to Pushkin, did not know anything about Babolovsky Park. Did I meet the name in books about Tsarskoye Selo.

I propose to take a short walk to this little-known park, where we will see the Babolovsky Palace (more precisely, what is left of it) and the Tsar Bath.

Today's story I'll start with a legend. More precisely, from the legend that I heard for the first time about 12 years ago. Later, another one was added - from a TV show. It is interesting that in the literature about Tsarskoye Selo, which is now more than enough, information about Babolovsky Park is very, very scarce. And I found information about the Tsar Bath of the Babolovsky Palace in printed form in a single publication - "An informal guide to the suburbs and suburbs of St. Petersburg."

Legend

Let me emphasize again that this is ONLY a legend. Why will become clear later.

Once upon a time, on the site of a modern park, there was a Menagerie, bordering on Catherine's Park. Ekaterina II donated these lands to Prince Potemkin, who built a palace there for the rest of the highest persons, tired after the hunt.

When Pavel Petrovich had an heir - the future Emperor Alexander I - The Most Serene Prince of Tauride offered the Tsar-bath as a font for the baptism of an infant.

This bowl got its name not by chance. Hewn from a monolithic granite block, this bowl has a height of 5 meters and 6 meters in diameter (according to other sources, 2 and 5, respectively). The total weight of the polished beauty is 50 tons (48 according to another version).

But no matter how different the information, the Tsar-bath is included in the Guinness Book of Records.

The further use of this huge bowl is interesting.

Being a creative person, the prince liked to surprise his guests with both generosity and various surprises. The chambers of the one-story palace were located one after the other in a long luxurious enfilade. And so, when the guests sat down at the tables to eat after the "works of the righteous", the long halls were filled with music.

But there were no musicians!

The entertainer, the owner, came up with a tricky trick: the musicians were located in the Tsar-bath. Behind the high sides they were not visible, and the sound, starting from the walls of the bath, carried through the halls.

According to another legend, Catherine II loved to bask in this bowl, following the example of Cleopatra, taking milk baths ...

But, alas, alas, alas! All these legends have no basis.

"Then why confuse me?" my attentive reader will ask.

I don't confuse. I'm intriguing))) As I said, there is very little information. There is almost nothing left of the palace, and it is problematic to see the Tsar Bath. And the object is very interesting! So I built my story not according to the rules.

The real history of the palace and the park is not so original.

In 1780, by order of Catherine II, a small wooden house was built on the bank of a pond formed with the help of a dam on a small river Kuzminka. Three years later, the house was demolished, and a stone building was erected in its place, which had seven rooms and a special round hall for a marble bath.

In 1783-1785. the building was erected. The architect of the project was I.V. Neyelov. The building was built in the English Neo-Gothic style. The red-brick facades with white trim stood out beautifully against the greenery. The asymmetric layout of the palace is interesting.

Photo from http://forum.awd.ru/

Initially, the palace was intended for housing. When Catherine II, whose big heart longed for new love, needed more freedom, she decided to remove Grigory Potemkin to the outskirts of the residence, she granted him the Babolovsky Palace. But, neither the building of the palace, nor the Babolovskaya manor was ever the property of the Prince of Taurida, remaining under the jurisdiction of the Tsarskoye Selo palace department.

Under Alexander I, the palace with the English Garden adjacent to it entered the newly created 7th part of the Tsarskoye Selo Garden. Subsequently, the significantly expanded park began to be called Babolovsky.

Photo from http://forum.awd.ru/

A great lover of cold bathing, Alexander I, installed a huge bathtub made of polished granite in the Babolovsky Palace. Made in 1824 by the artel of Samson Sukhanov, the bath-pool required the restructuring of the round bathing hall. The project, in addition to increasing the size, providing for the installation of a vaulted dome and strengthening the foundations, was carried out by the architect V.P. Stasov. The work was supervised by V.M. Gornostaev.

During the war, both the park and the palace were badly damaged. Many trees were cut down, the park fell into disrepair, the walls of the palace were destroyed. But, if the park was cleared, then time did not spare the palace ruins.

The last photo is not very clear: on the left, along the path, a row of old silvery willows, one of the few reminders of human “man-made”.

Currently, the park is more like a mixed forest. Unless the paths remind of the once “cultural” space, but the alleys near the palace are well-groomed.

The palace, after the war, was gradually destroyed, through the windows one could see the Tsar Bath.

Photos from spbland.ru

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a photo of the time of my acquaintance with this attraction of that time, I had to use the I-photos.

and now the Babolovsky Palace is hidden behind a fence, it is impossible to see the bath.

However, I was lucky. Together with me, a persistent couple walked around the palace in the hope of finding a convenient gap.

With their help, I managed to get two exclusive shots.

Finally, I will tell you one more legend. She seems plausible enough.

In September 1941, Tsarskoye Selo was occupied by German troops. A post was organized near the Babolovsky Palace, guarding this man-made miracle. The Nazis wanted to take the Tsar-bath to Germany. However, the power of twentieth century technology was not enough for this transportation. So the Tsar-bath remained in its place in the Babolovsky Palace. God willing, it will come to restoration)))

The walk turned out to be very long, judge for yourself: I won’t say the distance in kilometers, but it was more than an hour.

But the object itself did not take much time, it is not very interesting to consider the fence, even a new one))).

Last look at the area...

Dam. The bowl under the bridge with its outlines resembles the Tsar-bath

Although the grass is cut only along the paths, the park in the palace area seems to be more well-kept.

Back I was already on the bus, and it, of course, was faster. Only walking along the paths of a huge park was much more interesting.

Where to look:

On foot along Parkovaya street, along Catherine's park. You can also walk through the park to the Pink Guard House, and then along the alley Babolovskoye Highway everything is straight and straight ...

You can also get from the railway station of Pushkin, or the Catherine Palace by bus188 and 273 to the stop Starogatchinskoe shosse.

What is common between the Tsar Cannon, the Tsar Bell and the Tsar Bath? None of these artifacts was used for its intended purpose: the Tsar Cannon never fired, the Tsar Bell never rang, and most likely no one ever bathed in the Tsar Bath.

But if the first two - exhibits of the Moscow Kremlin - are known all over the world, then the Tsar Bath modestly hides on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park in Tsarskoye Selo, away from tourist routes. And this is all the more strange because Babolovskaya bowl- a true masterpiece of stone-cutting art. But who and when made it is a big mystery.

Miracle in ruins

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Many generations of scholastics struggled in vain over this eternal question. But in our case, the “egg” was exactly before the “chicken”. That is, first they installed a huge round granite bath and only then erected walls and a domed vault around it. However, first things first.

Babolovsky Park is not spoiled by the attention of the guests of Tsarskoye Selo. It is not replete with architectural sights, and in general it is very neglected, it looks more like a forest. But here is silence, peace and fresh air. And if you walk along the main alley - Babolovskaya clearing - almost to its end, and then turn right, you can go to a large pond, formed in the place where the Kuzminka River is blocked by a dam bridge.

On the other side - the ruins of red brick - all that remains of the Babolovsky Palace, bombed during the Great Patriotic War by the Nazis and still not restored. However, the ruins are surrounded by a fence, and a sign hangs on the gate stating that the building is under restoration. There are guards and guard dogs.

But if you manage to negotiate with them and look through the gap in the wall inside the octagonal tower, a real miracle will open up to your eyes - a giant perfectly round bowl, carved from a single block of granite, as the official story says, by order of Emperor Alexander I, by the masters of the St. Petersburg artel Samson Ksenofontovich Sukhanov.

"The Work of the Russian Sculptor"

Stonemasons worked on the royal order for seven years - from 1811 to 1818. A 160-ton dark pink granite block was found on one of the Finnish islands. Where the bath was carved out of it - directly in the quarry or near the installation site - is not known for certain. But the result is a bowl that has no equal in the world.

Its weight is 48 tons, diameter - 5.33 meters, depth - 1.52 meters, height - 1.96 meters. It included up to 800 buckets of water. The work done by the masons can be called truly infernal. For example, just to give a granite block a cupped shape, it was necessary to make tens of billions of blows with a mallet on the scarpel (this is such a tool, a steel rod, expanded at one end in the form of a sharply honed blade).

It is necessary to hit the same number of times so that the outer contours become perfectly rounded. In addition, at that time there were no hard-alloy stone-cutting tools. Tools made of simple steel, which the masters worked with, had to be sharpened after every 3-4 strokes on granite. You just wonder how, under such conditions, they managed to make a bowl of an ideal geometric shape!

No wonder contemporaries admired this unique creation. Here is what Pavel Petrovich Svinin wrote in “Notes of the Fatherland” for 1818: “Finally, Sukhanov finished this summer a beautiful, unique bath for the Babolovskaya bath ... Many of the St. Petersburg residents went on purpose to see this work of the Russian Sculptor. It is all the more worthy of attention because since the time of the Egyptians nothing so huge of granite has been known. Foreigners did not want to believe that Sukhanov was able to produce this miracle of sculpture or sculptural art ... "

To accommodate the bath, it was necessary to rebuild the palace, carried out in 1824-1829 according to the project of the architect Vasily Petrovich Stasov. Moreover, a bath was first installed, and only then the walls of the pavilion with a stone dome were erected.

Mysteries of the Babolovskaya bowl

And yet this magnificent bowl is fraught with many mysteries. Historians believe that it was used to bathe members of the royal family on hot summer days. After all, it is not appropriate for royal persons to appear in a negligee in front of the eyes of an idle public! But the question arises: how was it filled? Were all 800 buckets poured into it manually, so to speak, on demand?

The writer and journalist Mikhail Ivanovich Pylyaev briefly and very vaguely talks about the method of filling the pool: “When the right gateway near the bridge is opened a little, the water quickly fills the bath.” It is also not clear how the water then drained: after all, there is no drain hole in the bath.

In general, the Babolovsky Palace is not a palace at all. You can’t call a house so loudly, where there are only 10 rooms (or even seven, if you count the entire right, “bathroom”, part for one room). This is not a bathhouse, but rather a poetic place of solitude, romantic dates, a quiet rest after hunting, a ball and other noisy court entertainments. So there is a suspicion that they never washed in this “bath”, and did not bathe in the bath.

An even greater engineering mystery is how the granite block was delivered to the walls of the Babolovsky Palace. It is well known what incredible efforts it took to bring the famous Thunder-stone for the pedestal of the monument to Peter I to St. Isaac's Cathedral.

But it was transported along the Neva on a barge, and then it remained to drag it some hundred meters. And in our case, a 160-ton block had to be pulled for several tens of miles over rugged terrain - and this was in an era when there was neither steam nor electricity!

And even if we assume that the bowl was cut down directly in the quarry, as a result of which the load became four times lighter, the task of transporting it still seems overwhelming.

It should be noted that during the Great Patriotic War, the Germans, who had incomparably greater technical capabilities than the engineers of the 19th century, were forced to abandon the idea of exporting a unique artifact from the palace to Germany: they did not have suitable equipment and vehicles.

Doubts were repeatedly expressed that the Babolovskaya bowl was made by hand. Here is what one turner writes (spelling and punctuation are preserved): “For us, sorry for the expression “they’re pretending” that this master allegedly made it: Sukhanov ... did it for seven years, he planed like “papa Carlo” polished and so on ... utter nonsense ... with all responsibility as a (universal turner of the 5th category) I declare that this is machine processing, the concave, convex surfaces of this bath, the most accurate circle around the entire diameter, exactly the spherical surface of the lower part of the bath, inside along the bottom how the finest (illegible) along the entire diameter ... such a product cannot be made by hand, and even more so polished ... it seems that only yesterday it came out from under the machine ... polishing (dark, not visible in the photo) Isaac columns are grade 4-5. This cannot be achieved without high-speed polishing and grinding tools.”

But if the respected craftsman is right and the bowl is machined, where did such a huge lathe come from? It remains to be assumed that this artifact is much older than previously thought, and we inherited it from some highly developed civilization that disappeared from the face of the Earth a long time ago.

Note that only the sarcophagus in the pyramid of Cheops, which is at least 5,000 years old (and most likely much more), can be compared with the grandeur of the granite miracle of the Babolovskaya bowl. By the way, modern researchers have come to the conclusion that this granite box was not at all intended for the burial of the pharaoh. And what functions he actually performed is unclear.

The same situation develops with the Babolovskaya bowl. There are many versions about its purpose. For example, it is assumed that it lay somewhere in the surrounding swamps from time immemorial and was accidentally discovered at the beginning of the 19th century. And the writer Yuri Babikov said: "There is no doubt that the bowl itself is an element of an antenna converter-emitter of viton microwave oscillations for ultra-long-range space communications."

Doubts just exist. One thing is undeniable: before us is a masterpiece of stone-cutting technology. It is extremely difficult to do something like this even with the modern development of technology, on modern machines.

And if the stone cutters of the 19th century knew how to do such things, why was this skill lost by their descendants? And finally, why is this artifact hidden from human eyes for many years and is almost in a landfill? There is no clear answer to these questions.

Valery NIKOLAEV

Many do not know about the masterpiece of stone craftsmanship of our ancestors - a giant bathtub, neither the masters of ancient Egypt, nor other ancient cultures had anything to do with making such a thing. And why this product is not widely advertised as the technological achievements of our ancestors - I do not understand. The size of the product is so huge that you can hardly believe it. And it is quite possible that this is a legacy from the more ancient, antediluvian inhabitants of this region.

In Tsarskoye Selo, on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park, there are the ruins of the Babolovsky Palace.

In the south-west of the city of Pushkin, far from the tourist routes, is the last of the imperial parks. Compared to Alexandrovsky or Ekaterininsky park, which abound with elegant architectural structures and sculptures, Babolovsky park looks more than modest.

At the same time, the masters demonstrated an amazing feeling for the stone. The thickness of the walls of the bowl is minimal - 45 cm, which allows it to withstand the pressure of a multi-ton mass of water, but at the same time it is the limit for fragile granite. Art historian, Professor Y. Zembytsky said that “ this work of a Russian artist is all the more worthy of attention, since nothing so colossal of granite has been known since the time of the Egyptians«.

1. Thicken the foundations and walls in proportion to the burden and thrust of such a dome and for this.

2. Break the rest of the former hall and some of the adjacent walls of the pavilion with their foundations ... "

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

The unique Babolovsky Palace was damaged during the war. Its stone vaults collapsed. Only one bath, which is almost 200 years, well preserved. During the Second World War, the Germans were going to take it out as a rare exhibit, but they could not. And then they were no longer up to it.

Today there are two versions explaining the purpose of the Babolov bowl.

Version one- household. By tradition, the Romanov Family spent the summer seasons in Tsarskoe or Peterhof. Monarchs sweat too. On hot days, there was a need to freshen up in cool water. Since the august persons, especially ladies, should not be naked in public, they could do their refreshing in this pool. Why is the pool not made of polypropylene? - Yes, because there were no other materials besides granite then. Why wasn't the water heated? - So because this pool was planned to be used only in the summer and only for cooling.

And the granite bath was such a kind of font with constantly cool or even cold water. Such a thickness of granite absorbs heat for a very long time, we can say that it is a kind of cold accumulator. Here we must remember that the next tsar, Nikolai Pavlovich, was no longer resting in Tsarskoye, but in Peterhof (a cottage in Alexandria) in the summer. And there were many opportunities to swim. Although an interesting pavilion was arranged for the ladies on hot days - Tsaritsyn on Olgin's pond. A different air cooling system was used there.

Second version- Masonic. Its supporters consider the Babolovsky palace with a bowl as the future main Masonic temple. At the same time, “specialists” see numerous Masonic signs in the scenery of the palace. This version does not agree well with the fact that in 1822 Alexander I issued the highest rescript "On the destruction of Masonic lodges and all sorts of secret societies." It is hard to believe that Alexander1, destroying the lodges, left one for himself.

There are also third version, - humorous-cosmic. Someone, Y. Babikov, writes: “ There is no doubt that the bowl itself is an element of an antenna transducer-emitter of viton microwave oscillations for ultra-long-range space communications.«

Version fourth: according to the original plan, in all likelihood, Vanna was supposed to have a drain. It was planned to supply and drain water by gravity with the appropriate valves (this can be seen from the diagram). But then perhaps they were afraid to drill - it would suddenly crack!

There is an assumption that a fire was made from below and heating the granite, the water was gradually heated. Indeed, there is a niche under the bathroom. Full of garbage, unfortunately, but it is clear that the king of the bath is on 4 granite cubes and there is a small distance from the floor. But it's really a short distance. There will not be enough firewood to heat a bath of water. Moreover, if you look closely, the lower part of the king bath is completely unfinished. There are many places on it that would get soot from kindling and the granite here would be very black, and it would be impossible to clean it. Yes, and the room is small, if you kindle a fire in it, then the whole room will be filled with smoke and it will be very difficult to breathe, not to mention water procedures.

The king-bath continues a series of famous, but useless, objects. After all, they never fired from the Tsar Cannon, the Tsar Bell never rang, and they never bathed in the Tsar Bath. But if the first two rarities are seen by grateful tourists in the Kremlin, then our royal bath is hidden from human eyes among a pile of garbage in the dark inside of a dilapidated palace.

Since the fall of 2014, the Babolovsky Palace has been surrounded by a wooden fence, a guardhouse with a guard has been set up inside, and the entrance for visitors and tourists is closed. Categorically! For restoration.

And some simple questions:

How "from one of the Finnish islands delivered a granite block weighing more than 160 tons"? Almost 30 km cross-country.
- The work was done, of course, by hand, only a stone, a hammer and a chisel, and, of course, "by eye", although with amazing accuracy. How is this even possible?
- And, finally, the simplest question would seem: why is it so difficult?

Maybe it's not a bath at all, but something else? But we, modern people, due to our stereotyped thinking, are not able to understand.