The Olonets iron foundries: how shungite ended up at the centre of Russian industry

Shungite did not arrive in the Russian state's awareness through medicine. It arrived through war, specifically, through the iron-making industry that armed Peter the Great's Northern War campaigns.

The Olonets mining region

The Karelian region of Olonets had iron-bearing ores in addition to shungite-bearing rocks. From the 17th century onwards, small-scale iron working was a Karelian-Russian rural industry. Local bog iron was smelted in folk furnaces using charcoal from the surrounding forests.

When Peter the Great needed cannon and naval armament for the Great Northern War (1700-1721), he turned to Olonets. Russia could not import enough iron from Sweden, Sweden was the enemy, and Western European supply was unreliable. The solution: scale up the existing Olonets mining region.

Konchezersky foundry

The Konchezersky iron foundry (Кончезерский завод) was established in 1707, four years after the founding of Petrozavodsk. It produced iron for Russian state use. Its workers, both Russian and Karelian peasants under the duty-labour system, included Ivan Ryaboev, the man who in 1714 noticed the unfreezing healing spring on the Ravdosuo bog and reported it up the chain to commandant Wilhelm de Hennin.

The spring became Marcial Waters in 1719. The same foundry workforce, in the course of their iron-mining work, worked through layers of shungite-bearing rock. Their daily contact with the carbon-rich rock generated the local knowledge that the Russian state eventually formalised.

Petrovsky foundry (Petrozavodsk)

The larger Petrovskie Zavody in Petrozavodsk (founded 1703) was the main iron-and-cannon producer for the Russian navy and army during the Northern War. Cannons from Petrozavodsk armed the Russian fleet at the Battle of Hangö (Gangut) in 1714, the first major Russian naval victory, against the Swedish fleet.

Without Olonets iron, the Russian Empire's naval expansion in the early 18th century would not have been possible. Without the same mining region, Russia would not have engaged with shungite at the imperial scale.

Why shungite is part of this story

The foundry operations crossed shungite-bearing layers. Some shungite was used as a flux additive, the carbon-rich rock could supplement charcoal in iron smelting. The conductive, non-burning carbon of shungite made it useful in furnace linings. Workers found themselves handling shungite by the tonne while doing their daily iron-making work.

The rock's reputation as a healing material spread laterally through this workforce. By the time Peter visited in 1719 to inaugurate Marcial Waters, generations of Karelian foundry-workers had been intimately familiar with shungite for at least a century, in some cases, for centuries.

The legacy

The Olonets iron-mining tradition continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. By the late 19th century, the region was supplying iron for Russian railway expansion. Shungite mining grew alongside as a sister industry. The same broader Karelian community supplied workers to both, and the tradition of shungite for personal use, water purification, and folk medicine continued through it all.

Today the Konchezersky foundry site is a regional historical monument. Petrozavodsk has been continuously inhabited since 1703 and is the regional capital. The shungite mining operations at Zazhoginskoye and other sites trace back to the same Peter-the-Great industrial network that cast cannon for the Battle of Hangö.

Sources

- Welcome Karelia , regional history.
- Presidential Library of Russia , for Peter's Olonets mining and Marcial Waters context.
- NPK Karbon-Shungit: history of the deposits .
- National Archive of the Republic of Karelia: Marcial Waters .

Editor's note (2026 audit): Claim that 18th-century Olonets foundries used shungite as flux additive is regional-tradition assertion without primary archive cite. Suggested edit: Add primary cite for 18th-century shungite-as-flux use, or hedge to 'regional tradition holds'.

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.