When we talk about the great artifacts of antiquity, as a rule, the conversation turns to the Great Pyramids, the Baalbek Monolith, the ruins of antiquity, megaliths and polygonal masonry, but I found a more "Great" artifact - the Mariinsky water system!
Once I saw the Onega and Staroladozhsky bypass canals, which run along the edge of the lakes and end in Shliselburg. These canals in many places are clad in granite, like the canals of St. Petersburg, there are bridges above them, locks and moorings are arranged on the canals. The scale of the work amazed me! Then I learned that all this is not all, that at the same time, the end of the 18th century, Kronstadt was being built with its forts made of cut granite on the embankments, at the same time bast peasants were building Petersburg and without hesitation they dressed the canals in granite! Many people wrote about the strangeness of the construction of St. Petersburg and its incomprehensible technologies! But when in my head it all came together in one time and place, the volume of work, their quality and grandeur simply amazed me to the core! But this turned out to be just a fraction of whatwhat actually happened in this region in the late 18th and mid-19th centuries … the time of construction or the development of the former Mariinsky system! Why did I catch on to this water main - as if its story is simple and clear - Aleksashka Menshikov took up and began to build bypass canals, then the Oldenburgs continued, and the Soviet builders finished it! Is it that simple? No, it's not easy, and that's why - as we see on the map, this system includes the Volkhov River and the Neva River! These are very unusual rivers - the Neva is the deepest and shortest of all rivers on earth … it starts from a lake and flows into the Gulf of Finland … well, okay, it happens! But the Volkhov River is generally strange - it flows out of Lake Ilmen and flows into Lake Ladoga, the river resembles a channel so much that it is often called a channel, and the river flow is sometimes in one direction, then in another,but it is in its own, very necessary place and is part of the general water system. Naturally, no where you will not find a mention of the construction of such a canal, how can the "ancient" city - Veliky Novgorod stand on this river!
Here is a modern scheme and the Volkhov River is included in it - as straight as a canal, more direct than the famous Volga - Baltic Canal!
This scheme helped a lot in understanding the issue - it shows a general scheme that includes everything from Kronstadt to Rybinsk, a single water transport system that unites, as they say, natural and artificial objects and the Mariinsky only part of it.
The Volkhov River and the Rurik settlement …
Promotional video:
Here is a description of the Mariinsky system - the length was 1145 km, along the route. From Rybinsk to St. Petersburg, on average, it took 110 days. In this case, it was necessary to pass 28 wooden locks.
The whole system looked as follows: Locks on Kovzhe - St. Constantine, St. Anna and one half-gate.
9 km from St. Anna dug a connecting channel to the village of Verkhniy Rubezh. There are 6 gateways on the channel.
The watershed was Matkoozero.
There are 20 locks on Vytegra. All locks had a chamber length of 32 m, a width of 9 m and a depth of 1.3 m at the threshold.
The system is fed from Lake Kovzh, for which its level was raised by 2 meters by blocking dams on Kovzha and Puras.
For safe communication around the lakes of Beloye, Onega and Ladoga - which often storms - bypass canals were dug:
The Syassky Canal, 10 km long, was built for 36 years, from 1765 to 1802. Under Alexander II, it was expanded and modernized.
The 53 km long Svir canal was built in 1802-10. It was modernized almost simultaneously with the previous one, after which it was renamed in honor of Alexander III.
Onega Canal. Its construction began in 1818 and began on a site from the river. Vytegra to the Black Sands tract. The canal is 20 km long. They dug from Black Sands to Ascension until 1852.
The Belozersky Canal was opened in August 1846. It passed through the southern shore of the lake with dimensions: width along the bottom 17 m, depth 2.1 m, length 67 km. It had two locks on the Sheksna side - “Convenience” and “Security”, and one on the Kovzha side - “Benefit”.
Here are the wooden floodgates …
The buildings correspond to the times, even steam excavators and dredgers worked …
But the Mariinsky water system is already late and it is not the largest and most ambitious. Photos of the Shliselburg and Old Ladoga canals, I will not show everything there clearly - Peter the Great caught up with the soldiers and peasants, they all built, as if next to St. Petersburg and granite is not far away and the tradition of rolling the coast into granite from nothing to do!
But for example, the Belozersky Canal - granite.
The Fate Gateway is a polygon's dream!
And this is Vyshny Volochek - an ancient canal - again granite!
Such photos are especially touching - granite banks and a woman rinsing linen … where is her granite washing machine?
Yes, from this cut granite one could fold a hundred thousand pyramids !!! Not only that, it turns out that in the 18th century they built from granite, and in the 19th century they began to make wooden sluices, in the 18th century powerful metal structures embedded in granite slabs, and in the 19th there are such peasants with shovels! And the barge haulers who pull the barges with their handles - probably with the sawn granite the same way, only through the swamps on chariots!
Okay, when I see a steam excavator in the 19th century photo, I understand how the canals were dug, but in the 18th century they didn't seem to exist ?! And why were they digging with wooden shovels and carried on a stretcher to the top, and then evenly placing granite blocks by hand?
And I was also surprised by the sparse population of these areas - this is Venice, and where are the inhabitants, some miserable villages are standing along the canals! In short, questions, questions, questions, and they should be answered! It's all next to us! And all the supposedly greedy men, illiterate and wild … and who fed them, washed them, where did they live, where is all the infrastructure?
Continuation: "Neva - canal. Mariinsky water system".