One sentence in the Imperial encyclopedia
The Brockhaus-Efron Russian Imperial Encyclopedia, in its 1890s entry on the
Кончезерские воды (the Konchezerskiye Waters, alternative name for what is more commonly called Marcial Waters), records the founding event of the spa in a single sentence:
"Открыты в 1714 г. работником Кончезерского завода Рябоевым, который за это Петром Великим был освобожден, с потомством, от всяких податей и от работ на заводах."
In English: "[The waters] were discovered in 1714 by Ryaboev, a worker at the Konchezerо foundry, who was for this granted exemption, along with his descendants, from all taxes and from factory labour by Peter the Great."
That is the founding of Russia's first state-sponsored spa, told from the encyclopedia's vantage point. A foundry worker. A spring. A Tsar's reward. The reward was hereditary.
Who Ivan Ryaboev was
The man's full name in the Russian sources appears in two spellings:
Иван Ребоев (Ivan Rebooev) in some primary records and
Иван Рябоев (Ivan Ryaboev) in others. He was from the village of
Виданы (Vidany), in Olonets Province. He worked at the
Konchezerо foundry as a
молотовой работник, a hammerman in the forge, not a labourer at the lower end of the foundry hierarchy. By the winter of 1714 he had been promoted to a supervisory role: he was sent to
Рав-болото (Rav-Bog), a swamp area near the foundry, to oversee the labourers hauling iron ore from the bog-iron pits used by the works.
He was suffering from what the regional sources call
сердечная болезнь (heart pain or cardiac illness) at the time he was assigned the supervisory trip to Rav-Bog. While there, in midwinter, he found a spring
"бьющий из-под заснеженной земли", gushing up from under the snow-covered ground. The spring was not freezing despite the Karelian winter. He drank from it for several days. The cardiac symptoms that had been troubling him retreated.
The water at the spring filtered up through layers of
аспидный камень, the local black slate that 165 years later would be named shungite. The combination of spring chemistry and shungite filtration produced the carbonated iron-rich water (later analysed by Erskine and Blumentrost) that became Marcial Waters.
The reward
Russia of 1714 did not have a system for individual peasants to communicate directly with the Tsar. Petitions had to be submitted formally, often through intermediaries, often without success. Ryaboev's story did not get to Peter immediately. It made its way through the foundry hierarchy, through the Olonets mining authorities, and eventually reached Saint Petersburg. By 1717 Peter had heard enough to dispatch his chief physician Erskine and the junior physician Blumentrost to investigate (Erskine died at the spring on St Andrew's Day 1718; covered in a separate thread).
Peter founded Marcial Waters by decree on
20 March 1719 (
Полное собрание законов Российской империи vol. 5, no. 3338). He visited the spa himself in
1719, 1720, 1722, and 1724, in the last years of his reign.
The reward to Ryaboev came during Peter's
second visit, in 1720. Ryaboev sent the Tsar a
челобитная (petition) reminding him that he, Ryaboev, was the original discoverer of the spring. Peter responded with
three roubles in cash and an обельная грамота, a tax-exemption charter, granting Ryaboev and his descendants in perpetuity freedom from all imperial taxes (
подати) and from compulsory factory-labour obligations (
работы на заводах).
The hereditary nature of the reward is the striking part. In the Petrine state apparatus, freedom from taxes and from compulsory factory work was
not a small thing. Most peasants in the Karelian gubernia were obligated to provide labour to the state-owned ironworks; this was a major economic burden on individual families. Ryaboev's descendants were, in effect, made into a privileged caste by personal decree of the Tsar, on the strength of one act: the founding worker had told the Tsar where to find a healing spring.
The Romanov reward pattern
This is not the only such reward that grew out of the Tolvuya-Marcial Waters story complex. Marfa Romanova, Mikhail Romanov's mother, had earlier in the 17th century granted
hereditary tax exemption to the Tolvuya-area peasants who had aided her during her exile (covered in a separate thread). The pattern of "
help a Romanov in the hour of need, receive a hereditary tax-exempt charter" is, by Ryaboev's reward in 1714-1720, a recognisable Romanov-dynastic pattern.
A Cyberleninka academic paper by
A. M. Pashkov traces the Ryaboev descendants and their tax-exempt status through the Imperial period: "
Обельные крестьяне Олонецкой губернии и их социальный и юридический статус в XVII - начале ХХ века (на примере Г. Меркульева, И. Рябоева и их потомков)" (Tax-exempt peasants of Olonets Province and their social and juridical status in the 17th to early 20th century, on the example of G. Merkulev, I. Ryaboev, and their descendants). The paper documents that Ryaboev's hereditary exemption was
honoured by the Imperial state through to the early 20th century, a 200-year run of an inherited privilege originally granted on the strength of a midwinter spring discovery. The Russian state honoured Ryaboev's descendants until the system that issued the charter ceased to exist in 1917.
There is something specifically Karelian about this pattern. Two separate Romanov-period stories of unknown peasants/workers aiding the dynasty at moments of vulnerability, both rewarded with the same kind of hereditary privilege, both centred on healing waters that pass through the same shungite belt. It is unlikely to be coincidence. The dynasty was attentive to the territory. The territory's healing-spring tradition had earned its place in dynastic memory by the Petrine period.
The encyclopedia knew Ryaboev. It did not know what was under the water.
The Imperial encyclopedia's 1890 entry on Konchezerskiye Waters records Ryaboev's name, his foundry, his discovery year (1714), his hereditary reward, and Peter's four visits. It says the water is iron-bearing with sodium sulfate. It says Peter built three wooden palaces (gone by 1890) and a wooden church (still standing in 1890).
What it does not say is that the water filters through aspid stone, that the same rock has been called shungite since Inostrantsev's 1879/1880 paper, that the rock has been the active substrate of the spa's healing tradition the whole time. This is the same encyclopedia-silence pattern the
Encyclopedia silence 1890 thread describes: the official Imperial reference establishment knew the spa, the founder, the dynasty, the dates, the chemistry of the water in formal terms, but did not connect any of it to the rock the water passed through.
The wooden church that survived
One specific concrete fact from the encyclopedia entry: of the three wooden palaces and one wooden church Peter built at the spring in 1719-1724, the three palaces were gone by the 1890s, and the
wooden church survived. The church was the
Church of Apostle Peter (Церковь апостола Петра), built 1721 in the standard Petrine wooden architecture style, dedicated to Peter the Great's patron apostle.
That church still exists. It is one of the oldest surviving wooden churches in Karelia. It is, in physical terms, the
direct surviving structure from the foundation of Russia's first state spa, built by Peter himself, on the spot where Ryaboev's healing-spring story changed Russian medicine. It is also a small wooden church that nobody outside the immediate region pays much attention to.
Where the trail leads
For Ryaboev specifically:
- Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedia,
Кончезерские воды entry, on Russian Wikisource:
ru.wikisource.org
-
Полное собрание законов Российской империи vol. 5, no. 3338, the founding decree of Marcial Waters, which records the reward charter implicitly
- The original
хартия (charter) granting Ryaboev hereditary exemption, would be in the State Archives of the Russian Empire (now РГАДА, Российский государственный архив древних актов) in the Petrine personal-decree fund
- Karelian regional historians from Shaizhin onward who have written on the Marcial Waters foundation
For the wooden Church of Apostle Peter at the spa:
- It is documented as a Karelian heritage site administered by the Petrozavodsk Diocese
- The Marcial Waters museum branch of the Karelian National Museum
kareliamuseum.ru
includes the church in its tour
- Russian-language guides to Petrine wooden architecture treat it as one of the canonical surviving examples
For the deeper question of Ryaboev's actual descendant line and whether the tax-exempt status was honoured into the late Imperial period:
- Олонецкие губернские ведомости archive (1838-1917) at
ogv.karelia.ru
would contain regional discussions of the Ryaboev family if any continued to assert their hereditary exemption
- Petrozavodsk uezd metric books and local-archive material would record specific Ryaboev descendants
Anyone walking this trail further would find the documentation of Ryaboev's line itself, his church, his charter, and the family memory of the reward, scattered across Russian regional and state archives. As of writing, no English-language treatment has assembled it.
Sources
- Brockhaus-Efron ЭСБЕ entry on Кончезерские воды:
ru.wikisource.org
- Полное собрание законов Российской империи, vol. 5, no. 3338 (20 March 1719)
- Marcial Waters museum branch, Karelian National Museum:
kareliamuseum.ru
- bibliotekar.ru, "История изучения свойств шунгита. Пётр 1. Марциальные воды":
bibliotekar.ru
- Aleksandrov VV 2019, "300 лет первому российскому курорту: история изучения Марциальных вод", PMID 31513172:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Petrozavodsk Diocese on the Marfa-and-Marcial-Waters complex:
eparhia.karelia.ru
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.
