Most people who know shungite history know about Peter the Great founding Marcial Waters in 1719. Fewer know what he did with the rock thirteen years earlier.
The 1706 fountain order
In 1706, Peter, by then Tsar of all Russia for 24 years and three years into the building of his new capital St Petersburg, ordered Ivan Mateev to bring
aspidniy kamen (the old Russian name for shungite) from its deposit in Olonets to the Summer Palace in St Petersburg. The stone was used to line the interior surfaces of the palace fountains.
The Summer Palace and its gardens were Peter's personal residence and his favourite project. He worked on it himself, drew up plans, brought in foreign architects, and stocked it with curiosities and innovations from across Europe and Russia. The choice to use Karelian shungite for the fountain interiors was a deliberate one, Peter believed in its purifying properties on water and wanted that property in the palace's central decorative water features.
The earliest documented imperial recognition
1706 is, by this account, the earliest documented use of shungite by the Russian state. It predates Peter's first visit to Marcial Waters by 13 years. It places shungite in the palace at a time when Peter was rebuilding Russian governance from scratch and personally curating what would become Russian high culture.
The Summer Palace today
The Summer Palace (Летний дворец) still stands in the Summer Garden in St Petersburg. The original fountains were destroyed in a 1777 flood and were not reconstructed in their 18th-century form. Modern conservators have studied the surviving palace records and infrastructure, but the original shungite fountain linings are no longer in place.
The specific Mateev / 1706 / Summer Palace fountain story is preserved in regional historical literature about the Olonets mining works and the early Karelian-court connection. If anyone has a primary Russian state archive citation for the 1706 decree itself, it would settle the documentary record.
Sources
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Аспидный камень: что известно об уникальных свойствах шунгита (RIA Novosti)
, Russian state news agency on the 1706 fountain history and broader aspidnyi-kamen tradition.
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Аспидный камень: уникальные свойства шунгита (Sozero)
, popular Russian write-up of the same material.
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"Источник, настоянный на черном камне" (Argo)
, historical context from Russian regional press.
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Шунгит (аспидный камень), Kajal
, vendor reference also citing the 1706 Peter / Summer Palace tradition.
Editor's note (2026 audit): Possible anachronism: Summer Palace BUILDING was 1710-1714. 1706 order to 'line the palace fountains' predates the palace by 4-8 years. Summer GARDEN was begun 1704, likely correct attribution. Suggested edit: Reframe to 'Summer Garden fountains' rather than 'Summer Palace fountains'.
Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.
