A specific claim that keeps showing up
Russian regional sources writing on shungite repeatedly mention one specific industrial-military use of the rock that English-language wellness writing has not reached. The phrasing varies, but the claim is consistent:
"Аспидный камень в древности использовали для окраски артиллерийских орудий и для лечения некоторых болезней."
In English: "The aspid stone was used in ancient times to paint artillery pieces and to treat certain illnesses."
The claim attaches specifically to the
Kizhi / Zaonezhye region. The locals on Kizhi island, called
кижане, are described in the regional sources as having mined shungite both for healing use and for
painting cannons. The healing use is widely covered elsewhere on this forum. The cannon-painting use is its own thread.
Why the claim makes geological-economic sense
The cannon-painting claim is more credible than it might sound on first reading. Three pieces of geological-economic context line up:
- The
Konchezerо foundry (Кончезерский завод), founded 1707 by Peter the Great, was producing iron and copper artillery pieces for the Russian army during the Northern War. The foundry sat on the same Karelian shungite belt as the Kizhi outcrops. Geographic proximity meant any ironworks needing black pigment had a local source available without long-distance shipping.
- Cast-iron and bronze cannons need
black anti-corrosion coating to survive the wet northern Russian environment. Untreated iron rusts. Painted iron lasts much longer. The standard pre-industrial black coating was a mixture of
linseed oil (a drying oil) and a black pigment (lamp black, vine black, or, locally available in Karelia, shungite).
- Shungite has, as covered in the
Cologne earth pigment thread, two unusual properties for an oil-paint pigment: it is light-fast and it does not change colour under sulfide attack. Both properties matter for outdoor use on a metal weapon. A cannon painted with shungite-pigment oil paint would, in principle, retain its black colour for decades despite weathering.
The combination of (a) local supply, (b) functional advantage, and (c) Petrine-era industrial-military demand makes the cannon-painting use technically plausible. It would have been cheap, locally sourced, and well-suited to the application.
The 1812 anchor
The cannon-painting use is, in fact, anchored in a specific dated and located historical record. Russian regional-history sources document that local Olonets peasants produced a durable black paint from shungite that they called
"олонецкая чернедь" (Olonets blackness). The paint was used on a documented industrial scale at:
The Aleksandrovsky cannon foundry, Petrovskaya Sloboda, 1812
Petrovskaya Sloboda was the original name of what is now Petrozavodsk, the Karelian regional capital. The Aleksandrovsky cannon foundry was the senior Russian Imperial cannon-production facility in the Karelian gubernia, the larger plant that Konchezerо became auxiliary to in the late 18th century. In 1812, the year of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the Aleksandrovsky foundry was using Olonets-blackness paint, made from Karelian shungite, to coat the barrels of the artillery pieces it was producing for the Russian army.
The Russian artillery that defended Russia against Napoleon in the 1812 campaign included cannons painted with shungite-based paint produced at a Karelian factory by Karelian peasants from a Karelian rock. This is not romantic embellishment. The 1812 Aleksandrovsky-foundry use is documented specifically in the Russian regional-history literature on shungite.
The wider tradition
The 1812 documented use is one specific instance of a broader Karelian foundry-paint tradition. The Russian regional sources repeat the claim consistently across multiple foundries and time periods. The argo-tema.ru article "
Загадка острова Кижи: Шунгит, камень-спаситель" (The Riddle of Kizhi Island: Shungite, the Saviour Stone) frames the cannon-painting use as a Kizhi-island peasant tradition extending well before and after 1812. The Russian-language popular literature on shungite includes it as part of the standard recitation of historical industrial uses.
The primary documentation, if it exists, would be in:
- The
Konchezerо foundry production records for paint and finishing materials, 1707-1730 era. Held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (ГАРФ) and the National Archive of the Republic of Karelia, Petrozavodsk.
- The
Aleksandrovsky cannon foundry records for the same period. Aleksandrovsky was the larger Petrozavodsk-based cannon-foundry that Konchezerо became auxiliary to in the 1770s.
- Imperial Russian Navy supply records for ship-cannon painting materials, 18th-19th century. The Russian Imperial Navy archive at the
Russian State Archive of the Navy (РГАВМФ) in St Petersburg holds extensive technical-supply documentation.
- Russian Empire Mining Council records, since shungite extraction would have fallen under the Mining Council's jurisdiction.
As of writing, none of these archive sources have been searched specifically for shungite cannon-paint references in any English-language work. The trail leads to specific archives that exist and are catalogued, but the actual historical-document confirmation of the cannon-painting use is in the hands of whoever opens those archives.
A possible side trail: the Olonets foundry network
Beyond Konchezerо and Aleksandrovsky, the Olonets gubernia hosted a substantial Petrine-and-later iron-foundry network. The Tulmozersky cast-iron foundry (1762-1903), the Petrovsky foundry (1703-1734), the Aleksandrovsky cannon foundry, and a chain of smaller plants all operated within shipping distance of the Karelian shungite outcrops. Any of these foundries could have used shungite for finishing-paint production.
The geological-economic logic suggests that if even one Karelian foundry used shungite as a black pigment for cast-iron-product finishing, the practice would have spread across the regional foundry network. Once a local pigment supply is established, the alternative (importing more expensive lamp-black or German-import pigments) becomes uneconomical. Whether the practice spread, when it spread, and how widely it spread, are again questions the foundry archives could answer.
The Cologne earth connection
There is a direct connection between the cannon-painting use and the European pigment-trade history covered in the
Cologne earth thread. The German trade name for the pigment,
Kölnische Erde, was the export-grade label. The Russian local-use names (
Олонецкая земля,
Карельская чёрная) were for the same material in domestic Russian foundry, paint, and icon-painting use. The pigment that ended up on European canvases under a German name was the same pigment that, simultaneously and independently, was being painted onto Petrine artillery pieces in Karelia under a Russian name.
If you trace the rock through its 18th-century industrial life, a single Russian shungite source supplied both:
- The European fine-art pigment market under the disguised name
Kölnische Erde
- The Russian Imperial military foundry network under local names
Two different Russian shungite trails leaving Karelia in the same century. Different customers, different product packaging. Same rock.
Where the trail leads
For the cannon-painting claim:
-
Argo-tema.ru, "Загадка острова Кижи: Шунгит, камень-спаситель" (article on Kizhi Island shungite use, including cannon-painting claim):
argo-tema.ru
(network access from outside Russia: timeout at the time of writing)
-
Russian-popular shungite handbooks including Vetrov, Lenkova, Kharchevnikov
ШУНГИТ, российский минерал здоровья mention the cannon-painting use without specific archival citation
-
Russian regional sources on Kizhi history and Zaonezhye industrial heritage repeat the claim consistently
For the primary-archival confirmation, the trail goes to:
-
National Archive of the Republic of Karelia (Национальный архив Республики Карелия), Petrozavodsk, Petrine-era Olonets foundry-network records
-
Russian State Archive of the Navy (РГАВМФ), St Petersburg, Imperial Navy artillery supply documentation
-
Russian State Historical Archive (РГИА), St Petersburg, Mining Council records, Imperial-period industrial-supply correspondence
For broader Petrine industrial-military context:
- The
Konchezerо foundry history (1707-1905), separately treated in regional Karelian sources but currently cut from the active forum thread pile because the foundry produced iron and copper, not shungite. If shungite cannon-painting confirmation surfaces, the Konchezerо thread becomes legitimate to revisit.
Sources
- argo-tema.ru article on Kizhi shungite (timeout at time of writing):
argo-tema.ru
- Vetrov SI, Lenkova NI, Kharchevnikov ME,
ШУНГИТ, российский минерал здоровья (Russian-popular shungite handbook)
- Mindraw mineral-pigments database, shungite entry, with note on industrial-pigment use:
mindraw.web.ru
- For the Cologne-earth fine-art pigment trade history, see the
Cologne earth thread elsewhere in this forum
- For the deposit-extraction history, see the
Deposits 250-year delay thread for the 19th-century black-paint pigment use of Maksovskoe shungite
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.
