The shungite-Russia story usually starts with Peter the Great in 1719. The 1719 imperial visit, however, only happened because of one man five years earlier.
The find
In 1714, a worker named Ivan Ryaboev (Иван Рябоев) at the Konchezersky iron foundry in Olonets was crossing the Ravdosuo bog when he noticed water that did not freeze even in winter. He drank from it, felt a noticeable improvement in a long-standing ailment, and reported it to the foundry manager.
The manager passed it up to Wilhelm de Hennin (Вильгельм де Геннин), commandant of the Olonets mining works. De Hennin happened to know Peter I had a standing decree to find healing waters in Russia for use as a domestic alternative to expensive German spas. He wrote to Admiral Apraksin, Apraksin to the Tsar, and a chain of inspections began.
Ryaboev's reward
When Peter formally founded the Marcial Waters resort in 1719, Ryaboev was granted exemption from labour duties for himself and his descendants, a substantial reward in early-18th-century Russia, where state foundries operated essentially on conscripted labour.
Why this matters
The Russian shungite literature credits Peter as the patron of the resort, but the actual discovery was a peasant noticing an unfrozen patch of bog. The whole modern industry, including everything you can buy today as "Karelian shungite," traces back to that observation.
Sources
-
National Archive of the Republic of Karelia
-
Presidential Library of Russia
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.
