What do the Tsar Cannon, Tsar Bell and Tsar Bathtub have in common? None of these artifacts were used for their 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 - the exhibits of the Moscow Kremlin - are known all over the world, then Tsar Bath modestly hides on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park in Tsarskoe Selo, away from tourist routes. And this is all the more strange, because the Babolovskaya bowl is a true masterpiece of stone-cutting art. But who did it and when is a big mystery.
Miracle in ruins
Which came before: chicken or egg? Many generations of scholastics fought in vain over this eternal question. But in our case, the "egg" was definitely before the "chicken". That is, first they installed a huge round granite bathtub and only then erected walls and a domed vault around it. However, first things first.
Babolovsky Park is not spoiled by the attention of Tsarskoye Selo guests. It is not replete with architectural sights, and in general it is very neglected, more like a forest. But here there is silence, peace and fresh air. And if you walk along the main alley - Babolovskaya Prosek - almost to its end, and then turn right, then 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, there are ruins of red brick - all that remains of the Babolovsky Palace, which was bombed by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War and has not yet been restored. However, the ruins are surrounded by a fence, and there is a sign on the gate stating that the building is undergoing restoration. There is a guard and guard dogs.
But if you manage to come to an agreement with them and look through the hole in the wall inside the octagonal tower, your gaze will see a real miracle - a giant bowl of perfectly round shape, hewn from a solid granite block, as the official history says, at the behest of Emperor Alexander I by the masters of the St. Petersburg artel of Samson Xenofontovich Sukhanov.
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Work of the Russian Sculptor
The masons worked on the tsarist order for seven years - from 1811 to 1818. A 160-tonne block of dark pink granite was found on one of the Finnish islands. Where the bath was squeezed out of it - directly in the quarry or near the installation site - is not known for certain. But the result is a bowl that is unmatched 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 stonemasons can be called truly hellish. 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 a scarpel (this is such a tool, a steel rod, expanded at one end in the form of a sharpened blade).
The same number of times must be hit so that the outer contours become perfectly rounded. In addition, at that time there was still no carbide stone cutting tool. The tools made of simple steel, which the craftsmen used to work, had to be sharpened after every 3-4 blows on the granite. You just wonder how, in such conditions, they managed to make a bowl of an ideal geometric shape!
No wonder the contemporaries admired this unique creation. This is what Pavel Petrovich Svinin wrote in Otechestvennye zapiski for 1818: “Finally this summer Sukhanov graduated from the wonderful, unique bath for the Babolovskaya bath … Many of the Petersburg residents went to see this work of the Russian Sculptor on purpose. It is all the more noteworthy because nothing so huge of granite has been known since the time of the Egyptians. Foreigners did not want to believe that Sukhanov was able to produce this miracle of sculpture or sculpting art …"
To accommodate the bath, the palace had to be rebuilt, carried out in 1824-1829 according to the project of the architect Vasily Petrovich Stasov. Moreover, first a bath was installed, and only then the walls of the pavilion with a stone dome were erected.
Riddles of the Babolovskaya bowl
And yet this magnificent bowl is fraught with many mysteries. Historians believe that it was used for bathing members of the royal family on hot summer days. After all, it is not appropriate for monarchs to appear in negligee before the eyes of an idle public! But the question arises: how was it filled? Was it possible that all 800 buckets were poured into it by hand, so to speak, on demand?
The writer and journalist Mikhail Ivanovich Pylyaev tells about the way of filling the pool in a short and very vague way: “When the right sluice at the bridge is slightly opened, the water quickly fills the bath”. It is also unclear how the water was 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, "bath" part for one room). This is not a bathhouse, but rather a poetic place of solitude, romantic dates, quiet rest after a hunt, 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 very rugged terrain - and this was in an era when there was no steam or electricity!
And even if we assume that the bowl was cut directly in the quarry, as a result of which the load became four times lighter, still the task of transporting it seems overwhelming.
Note 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 preserved): “Forgive us for the expression“vaping”that this master allegedly made it: Sukhanov… did it for seven years, scoffed like“Papa Carlo”polished, and so on… sheer nonsense… I declare with full responsibility as a (universal turner of the 5th grade) that this is machining, concave, convex surfaces of this bath, the most precise circle around the entire diameter, just like the spherical surface of the lower part of the bath, inside along the bottom as the most precise (illegible) throughout diameter … such a product cannot be made by hand, let alone polished … it seems that only yesterday it came out from under the machine … polishing (dark, not visible in the photo) like Isaac's columns of class 4-5. This cannot be achieved without high-speed polishing tools.”
But if the respected craftsman is right and the bowl is machined, where did such a huge lathe come from? It remains to assume 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 Cheops pyramid, which is at least 5000 years old (and most likely much more), is comparable to 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 is developing with the Babolovskaya bowl. There are many versions of its purpose. For example, it is believed 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 transducer-emitter of viton microwave oscillations for ultra-long-distance space communication."
There are doubts. One thing is indisputable: before us is a masterpiece of stone-cutting technique. 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