Ruskeala Mountain Park

Interesting facts

Auguste de Montferrand, architect of St Isaac's Cathedral, is said to have personally chosen the Ruskeala marble samples for his building.

The main quarry pit stretches about 460 metres from north to south, reaches up to 100 metres wide and drops more than 50 metres from rim to floor.

Four varieties of marble were cut here: ash-grey, grey-green, white with grey veins and a bluish-white grey.

By 1846, after a water-powered sawmill and lime kilns were built, around 800 workers were employed at the quarries.

Ruskeala marble lines the window sills of the Hermitage, the floor of the Kazan Cathedral and the halls of Primorskaya and Ladozhskaya metro stations.

Most of the underground galleries flooded after the Second World War, and their combined surveyed length runs to several kilometres.

Since June 2019 a steam-hauled heritage train, the Ruskeala Express, has run from Sortavala station to its own stop at the mountain park.

The old quarry office building was built from small blocks of the same marble that was extracted on the site.

The quarry and its surroundings served as a filming location for the 2010 Russian fantasy film Dark World.

Russia issued a postage stamp showing the Ruskeala park in 2020 to mark the centenary of the Republic of Karelia.

Why it is worth it

Ruskeala isn't a natural lake at all — it's a flooded marble quarry, and the marble itself has a real biography. This stretch of Karelia passed from Sweden to Russia after the Great Northern War, and in 1765, under Catherine the Great, the quarry was opened to supply decorative stone for the empire's new capital.

That stone ended up in buildings anyone can name: St Isaac's Cathedral, the Marble Palace and St Michael's Castle in St Petersburg were all clad, at least partly, in marble cut from this exact site, along with decorative material later used in Moscow's metro stations. What visitors photograph today as a scenic canyon is, quite literally, the extraction site of some of Imperial Russia's most recognizable architecture.

Mining continued into the early 1990s before finally stopping, and groundwater filled the abandoned pit into the canyon seen now. The turquoise tint comes from fine marble dust suspended in and coating the surrounding rock, scattering light through water clear enough to see 15–18 meters down — clarity that today draws cave divers into the flooded tunnels beneath the main canyon, remnants of the underground galleries once dug to follow the marble deeper into the hillside.

Good to know

Beyond the open-air canyon, a separate network of underground marble tunnels and caverns is open for guided tours with helmet lamps — a completely different way of experiencing the same quarry.

Best time to visit

Winter (roughly December–March) brings an illuminated ice-and-light program with ice formations over the frozen canyon walls; summer is better for boating and diving in open water.

Getting there

27 km from Sortavala. Joensuu Airport (JOE) is about 94 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Ruskeala Mountain Park is a tourist complex located in the Sortavalsky District of the Republic of Karelia. Its central feature is a former marble quarry, now flooded by groundwater and designated as a cultural heritage site. The park is one of the earliest examples in northwestern Russia of the commercial development of a historical and cultural heritage site.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0