The Earth Story

Giant malachite vase The Hermitage in St Petersburg (ex Leningrad) is one of the great museums of the world, stuffed with the treasures of both Tsars and Soviets. Housed in what was originally the Winter Palace, the collection retains some of the original furnishings from the imperial home. Amongst these treasures are a series of huge carved stone vases, many of them sculpted over many years of work from Russian malachite mined near Yekaterinburg in the Urals and mounted in gilt bronze. Loz Image credit: Dezidor http://www.alexanderpalace.org/petersburg1900/21.html

Dragon

This abstract sculpture carved out of California Mojave blue chalcedony was created by the lapidary artist Slava Tulupov. The last decades of the 20th century saw a renaissance in this traditional art worldwide, with fascinating abstract art taking its place alongside the more usual animals, boxes or cameos. The St Petersburg school draws on traditional Russian lapidary art as exemplified by the atelier of Carl Faberge back in the belle epoque, as well as more modern influences from the USA and Idar Oberstein in Germany.

Tulupov was born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), and started samizdat gem carving back in the days of the USSR, when it was illegal. Reading discretely circulated auction house catalogues to educate himself about the 'Tsarist bourgeois art' he loved, he studied jewellery and objets d'art as part of an architecture course. By the mid 80's he had started making jewellery, and trying to learn the lapidary art. Despite only having one book and no equipment, he and a friend made their own gem carving machines. A few years later, people were mistaking his pieces for Faberge work. He moved to the USA in 1991, and presented a tribute to Faberge exhibition four years later.

Dragon was awarded first place in the 199 AGTA Cutting Edge competition carving category in and first place in the 2005 Jewelry Olympus international competition in St. Petersburg. It has been exhibited in the Hermitage and Carnegie museums, among other places.

Loz

Image credit: Hermitage museum.

http://www.professionaljeweler.com/archives/articles/2000/mar00/0300gn2.html

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/04/2011/hm4_1_298.html

Lake Ladoga: Europe's largest.

Located 40 Km East of St. Petersburg (ex Leningrad), and known as Lake Nevo in Tsarist times, it is 219Km long by an average 82 wide. Its average depth is 51 metres, descending to 230 at the deepest point. It occupies a glacier carved basin dating from the ice age and has fyords breaking through the cliffs lining its Northern shore. The southern shore is low lying scrubland. The entire area is filled with the many lakes and rivers of a typical post glacial landscape, which has evolved since the ice melted between 12500-11500 BP. Dotted with over 650 islands, its level can vary by over a metre due to strong seasonal winds. Some of the islands are home to ancient Orthodox Christian monasteries, with beautiful architecture in the Novgorod style.

It contains important fish resources, and links through the Karelian isthmus to the White sea canal, built by slave labour in the Stalinist era. It is drained by the Neva, on whose marshy delta Peter the Great built his capital, flowing past the winter palace and Krondstat into the Baltic. It also has an endemic species of ringed seal. Long disputed between the Scandinavian countries and Russia, it finally went to the Russians after the winter war with Finland in 1940-1.

The lake freezes every winter, and this fact played a vital role in the allied victory in the second world war. After the Nazi invasion, Leningrad was surrounded and eventually cut off from the rest of the country. The situation was very disorganised during the last months of 1941, and the city began to run out of food long before the lake froze. When it did, lorries were sent out to test the ice, over a hundred of which went to the bottom, but once a sufficient depth of ice was reached and new road and rail links built to the opposite lake shore, a trickle of supplies started to flow through. This was not enough for many Leningraders, and an estimated million people starved between November 1941 and June 1942, by which time much of the civilian population had been evacuated across the lake. During the summer, supplies continued to flow by barge, helping the city survive its 900 day siege.

The ice road (known as the Road of Life) allowed enough military supplies through to keep the soldiers fighting through the winter. It has been argued that this helped save Moscow from capture in December 1941, by delaying German forces in the North long enough for Soviet troops to be transferred from the Far East to man the Moscow counteroffensive which broke the Nazi advance. Along with the early harsh winter, this prevented a swift German victory. This would have allowed them to turn their forces elsewhere rather than remaining bogged down in Russia until they were pushed out and destroyed, with consequences that can only be imagined.

Every landscape is a palimpsest, starting with the underlying geology, moving though geography and biology/ecology into human history, with each stage loaded with fascinating stories to fill us with wonder and awe. Lake Ladoga is no exception, and its intense modern history helped found the basis of the human geography we currently live in.

Loz.

Image credit: Yonesh/Wikimedia Commons.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/327552/Lake-Ladoga

The Malachite Room The old Winter Palace of the Russian Czars is now the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and retains some of the wonderful fittings built during their reign. The Malachite Room was originally designed by Alexander Briullov in the late 1830s as a drawing room for the wife of Nicholas 1, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. The later Romanov brides were dressed there before appearing at their weddings. It was used after the revolution for meetings by Kerensky's Provisional Government, so these walls probably have some interesting tales to tell. The Bolsheviks arrested the government during their coup in the adjoining private dining room. Sixteen marble columns, fireplaces and some fittings were all carved from two colours of malachite from the Ural mountains were designed into the room, creating a lovely mixture of green and gold. For a post on the giant malachite vases also in the Hermitage see http://tinyurl.com/mf3ku35. Loz Image credit: Nathan Messer. http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/08/hm88_0_1_62.html http://www.saint-petersburg.com/museums/hermitage-museum/state-rooms/

Giant malachite vase The Hermitage in St Petersburg (ex Leningrad) is one of the great museums of the world, stuffed with the treasures of both Tsars and Soviets. Housed in what was originally the Winter Palace, the collection retains some of the original furnishings from the imperial home. Amongst these treasures are a series of huge carved stone vases, many of them sculpted over many years of work from Russian malachite mined near Yekaterinburg in the Urals and mounted in gilt bronze. Loz Image credit: Dezidor http://www.alexanderpalace.org/petersburg1900/21.html

Paraceraurus This critter is the fossil shell of a trilobite from the species Paraceraurus exsull. Trilobites were one of the dominant species in the world’s oceans for several hundred million years. They first appear in fossils in the middle of the Cambrian era, ~520 million years ago, and the final species went extinct at the end of the Permian, 251.2 million years ago. This particular species is from the middle Ordovician, about 475 million years old. Rocks near St. Petersburg, Russia, host a variety of these fossils. The rocks are limestones deposited in a shallow basin, in water depths of 10-30 meters. As the spines are particularly fragile, the environment was believed to be a protected, quiet-water setting where the organisms could grow up, live, and die without their shells being torn apart. Trilobites are believed to have lived a variety of lifestyles, and there are currently over 20,000 recognized species of them. Some were predators, others scavengers, others simply filter-fed or subsisted on plankton. Their fossils are found world-wide in rocks of the right age; they grew hard exoskeletons made of calcium carbonate, and those skeletons are a mandatory element of most fossil collections. -JBB Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trilobite_Ordovicien_8127.jpg Read more: http://www.fossilmall.com/EDCOPE_Enterprises/trilobites/RTrilo8/russiantrilobites8.htm http://research.amnh.org/paleontology/trilobite-website/twenty-trilobite-fast-facts