Before the rock had a scientific name
The name "shungite" was given to the rock in 1879 by professor Aleksandr Inostrantsev of St Petersburg University, who took it from the Karelian village of Shunga where the cleanest outcrops are found. That is the date most modern accounts treat as the start of shungite's scientific history.
It was not. The rock had been described, in print, by a member of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences,
87 years earlier. The man who did it was
Nikolai Yakovlevich Ozeretskovsky.
Who Ozeretskovsky was
Ozeretskovsky (1750-1827) was a naturalist of the Russian Imperial Academy, trained in the late-Enlightenment tradition that produced the great cataloguing expeditions of the Russian north. He was a contemporary of Peter Simon Pallas, the German polymath whose name is more familiar in Western histories of Russian natural science. In the division of labour of the time, Pallas explored the Urals and Siberia. Ozeretskovsky was assigned the Russian north and Karelia.
He travelled the region in 1785, spending a long season working his way around the shores of Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega, recording everything he saw: villages, fish, plants, geology, Karelian and Russian customs. The expedition he led was an early example of what would later become the standard Russian academic-expedition format.
The 1792 book
In 1792, Ozeretskovsky published
Путешествие по озёрам Ладожскому и Онежскому (Journey through Lakes Ladoga and Onega), in St Petersburg, through the Imperial Academy of Sciences press. It is a substantial volume, around 300 pages, with regional maps and a careful style of observation that moved between geography, mineralogy, ethnography, and economics as the journey demanded.
In its mineralogical sections, Ozeretskovsky describes the
black carbonaceous earth he found on the shores of Lake Onega and on Kizhi Island. He notes its colour, its texture, its faint metallic conductivity, and the local people's use of it. The full text is freely available on booksite.ru:
booksite.ru
(5 chapters, no registration). Reading it directly, two specific shungite-related passages stand out.
The 1792 quote on the rock
In Chapter 4, surveying the rock-formations of the Tivdia marble quarries and the Lychny Island deposits, Ozeretskovsky writes (verbatim):
"…под шиферами или сланцами в нарочитой глубине обыкновенно находят либо аспид, либо каменное уголье, которых поискать здесь было бы не бесполезно."
Translation:
"…beneath shifers or slates at notable depth one usually finds either aspid, or stone-coal, which it would not be useless to search for here."
So Ozeretskovsky did, after all, record one of the rock's older names,
аспид, aspid, alongside his own observational designation
каменное уголье (stone-coal). He recommends digging deeper at the site to find more of either material. The rock had two recorded names by 1792.
The Marcial Waters vitriol factory
In a separate passage, Ozeretskovsky describes a working industrial operation at Peter the Great's Marcial Waters spa complex (covered in the
Romanov debt Karelian spring thread):
"купоросная чёрная земля, над оной рудой лежащая, толщиною в сажень и в полсажени, употребляется при Марциальных водах на фабрике для варения из неё зелёного купороса."
Translation:
"a vitriol black earth, lying above [the iron] ore, in thickness of a sazhen' or half-sazhen', is used at Marcial Waters at the factory for boiling green vitriol from it."
Купоросная чёрная земля, "vitriol black earth", is the same Karelian rock under another of its 18th-century industrial-trade names. It is being industrially extracted in a layer 1-2 metres thick (a sazhen' is 2.13 metres) at the iron-ore site, and processed at a state-licensed factory.
The factory was producing
green vitriol, ferrous sulphate, FeSO₄, by boiling the iron-and-carbon-rich rock in water. Green vitriol was a major 18th-century European commodity: textile dye-fixative, the iron-and-gallnut ink that was the standard ink of European writing for centuries, tanning agent, medicinal preparation. The Marcial Waters factory was supplying the Russian-Imperial state's vitriol needs from a Karelian shungite-derived feedstock.
This is one of the earliest documented industrial-scale uses of the Karelian rock. By 1785-1792, when Ozeretskovsky witnessed it, the operation was already running. The rock was being commercially extracted, processed, and turned into a state-supply industrial chemical, more than 130 years before the Soviet "Trust Shungit" of 1928-1937 (covered in the
Soviet trust thread).
The book is also held in the digitised collections of the Russian Presidential Library:
prlib.ru/en/node/441246
.
Why this matters for shungite history
Most modern histories of shungite begin in 1879 with Inostrantsev's naming paper. That makes the rock seem like a Victorian-era discovery. Ozeretskovsky 1792 pushes the documented written history back nearly a full century.
The implication is straightforward. By the late 18th century, Russian Imperial science had already noticed and described the unusual black rock of Karelia. The rock had a place in Karelian folk knowledge for centuries before that. The 1879 Inostrantsev paper named the rock; it did not discover it. It is a useful corrective for anyone reading the modern wellness-industry framing that suggests shungite is a recent rediscovery of a forgotten material. It was never forgotten. It just hadn't been given its current name yet.
Sources
- Ozeretskovsky NY 1792,
Путешествие по озёрам Ладожскому и Онежскому, Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences. Digitised by the Russian Presidential Library:
prlib.ru
- Inostrantsev AA 1879, "Новый крайний член в ряду аморфного углерода" (A New Extreme Member in the Series of Amorphous Carbon), Горный журнал (Mining Journal) 1(5-6):314-342
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.
