What do the Tsar Cannon and Tsar Bell have in common? None of these artifacts were used for their intended purpose: the Tsar Cannon never fired, the Tsar Bell never rang …
But there was one more subject that few people know about. This is the so-called. Tsar bath. And little is known about it because if the first two artifacts are exhibits of the Moscow Kremlin and are known all over the world, then Tsar Bath modestly hides on the outskirts of Babolovsky Park in Tsarskoe Selo (now the city of Pushkin), away from tourist routes.
And this is all the more strange, because the Babolovskaya bowl is a true masterpiece of stone-cutting art. By the way, the same thing has in common with the above two artifacts: the Tsar Bath, most likely, has never been used for its intended purpose, i.e. no one has ever bathed in it. For it was extremely difficult to do this. But first things first.
Babolovsky Park is not spoiled by the attention of Tsarskoye Selo guests. It is just one of five parks in this city. Compared to Alexandrovsky or Catherine’s, replete with graceful architectural structures and sculptures, Babolovsky looks more than modest and, in general, is very neglected, more like a forest.
And if you walk along the main alley - Babolovskaya Prosek - 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 are the ruins of red brick. This is all that remains of the Babolovsky Palace, built in 1785 according to the project of I. Neyolov and bombed during the Great Patriotic War by the Nazis and has not yet been restored. But he was very handsome! The architect gave the stone building a gothic look: lancet-topped windows, jagged parapets …
An octagonal tower with a hipped roof also gave the palace a look of Gothic buildings. The Babolovo Palace was a one-story summer building, consisting of several rooms, each of which directly overlooked the park.
Now the ruins are surrounded by a fence and there is a sign on the gate stating that the building is being restored. There is a guard and guard dogs. But if a curious visitor manages to come to an agreement with the guards and look through the hole in the wall inside the octagonal tower, his gaze will see a real miracle - a giant perfectly round bowl, hewn from a solid granite block.
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As the official history says, this bath was made by order of Emperor Alexander I by the master of the Petersburg artel Samson Ksenofontovich Sukhanov. Sukhanov was known for supervising the production of Rostral columns on the spit of Vasilievsky Island and took 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 thousand rubles, which was then installed in the main hall.
It is believed that the stonemasons worked on the tsarist order for ten years - from 1811 to 1818. According to other sources - ten years: from 1818 to 1828, a 160-ton granite block of dark pink color interspersed with greenish labrador was found on one of the Finnish islands. Where the bathtub was squeezed out of it - directly in the quarry or near the installation site - is not known for certain.
Some sources claim that the work was carried out in a quarry. The result is a bowl that is unmatched in the world.
Its weight is 48 tons, diameter - 5.33 m, depth - 1.52 m, height - 1.96 m. The thickness of the walls of the bath 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 volume of the bath is 34 cubic meters.
Those. it included up to 2800 12-liter buckets of water. (The figure 8000, which is full of official sources, raises doubts that the authors of the articles taught mathematics well in school.)
The work done by the stonemasons can be called truly hellish. For example, just to give the granite block a cupped shape, it was necessary to make tens of billions of blows with a mallet on a scarpel (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 simple steel tools used by the craftsmen had to be sharpened after every three or four blows to the granite. You just wonder how, in such conditions, they managed to make a bowl of an ideal geometric shape!
So it was not for nothing that contemporaries admired this unique creation. This is what Pavel Petrovich Svinin wrote in Otechestvennye zapiski for 1818 (?): “Finally, this summer Sukhanov graduated from the beautiful, 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 in 1824-1829. designed by architect Vasily Petrovich Stasov. And first a bath was installed, and only then the walls of the pavilion with a stone dome were erected.
A cast-iron staircase with railings and viewing platforms led to the bath, which looked more like a pool. All details were cast at Ch. Byrd's iron foundry.
This magnificent bathtub is full of 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 negligee before the eyes of an idle public! But the question arises: how was it filled? Were all three thousand buckets filled by hand?
The writer and journalist Mikhail Ivanovich Pylyaev tells about the method of filling the pool briefly and very vaguely: “When the right sluice at the bridge is slightly opened, the water quickly fills the bathtub”. It is also unclear how the water was then drained: after all, there is no drain hole in the bath! Again, were you manually scooped out?
In general, the Babolovsky Palace is not a palace at all. You can't call a house so loudly, where there are only ten 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.
But the Thunder-stone 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 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.
Even today, 48 tons is a huge weight, comparable to the weight of fifty Zhiguli. Not every modern technology is capable of lifting such a load.
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 to Germany: they did not have suitable equipment and vehicles.
There is also a problem with the manufacturing time of the bath. Did the emperor order a mini-pool and wait ten years? And, by the way, he did not wait - he died in 1825, because the second version of the production time (1818-1828) fits more logically into the dates of the palace rebuilding for a bath - 1823-1829.
Doubts were repeatedly expressed that the Babolovskaya bowl was made by hand. Here is what one high-class turner writes (spelling and punctuation preserved): “Forgive us for the expression“puffing”that this master allegedly made it: Sukhanov… did it for seven years, scoffed 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 a 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 (inaudible) along the entire diameter … such a product cannot be made by hand, let alone polished … it seems that just yesterday it came out from under the machine … polishing … like Isaac's columns of class 4-5. This cannot be achieved without high-speed polishing tools.”
But if the respected, though not very literate, master is right and the bowl is made by means of machine processing, where did such a huge lathe come from?
It remains to assume that this is a product of legendary and mythical granite casting? Or this artifact is much older than it was thought until now, and we inherited from some highly developed civilization, which long ago disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Note that only the sarcophagus in the Cheops pyramid, which is at least five thousand 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 about this. 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. Therefore, many experts insist on adding the bath to the list of modern Wonders of the World.
And if, after all, only hammers and chisels were used, then the question arises: why is it so difficult? For a simple bath! Maybe this is actually not a bath at all, but something else? But we, modern people, due to our stereotyped thinking, are not able to understand this.
And if the stone cutters of the XIX century. were able to do such things, why was this skill lost by their descendants? After all, not thousands of years have passed to lose knowledge! And finally, why has this artifact been hidden from human eyes for many years? Why is it not in any popular guide to St. Petersburg and its suburbs?
Why is this unique object listed in the Guinness Book of Records still not recognized as a museum exhibit and the authorities treat it like rubbish? What is it? An amazing indifference to your history, or a clear example of the silence and deliberate concealment of an object that defies scientific explanation?
There is no clear answer to these questions …