Culture

Yes, you read correctly. Not credit, creedite. If you type the word ”creedite” into the Internet, the search engine will immediately bring up lists of banks offering various loan programs, assuming that you need money, and assuming also that you just misspelled the word. But no, creedite is a word indeed: Creedite is a rock that American mining engineers Larsen and Welsh stumbled upon absolutely by accident in 1916. The find was made near the town of Creede, which at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was known as one of the most crime-ridden towns in America…

St. Petersburg Mining University will host the UNESCO World Heritage Young Professionals Forum. The event will be held in person from June 12 to 20, 2022, and will be a prologue to the 45th-anniversary session of the Committee on Cultural Heritage, which will be hosted by Kazan.

Amongst St. Petersburg Mining Museum exhibits, there is a unique 18th-century box. Its history is intertwined with both the Italian Medici family and the royal dynasty of the Russian Empire.

An exhibition of the Urban Sketchers international community of artists began its work at the Mining Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibition presents paintings in the technique of rapid drawing, depicting the interiors and exhibits of one of the largest natural science museums in the world.

Pictures of historical exhibits from the Mining Museum will be included in the catalogue commemorating the 300th anniversary of the petroleum industry in Russia.

In The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Alexander Pushkin wrote about a squirrel cracking wondrous nuts. It is not by chance that the gemstones appeared in the fairy tale. In August 1931, when Pushkin finalised his poem, Saint Petersburg had been already taken over by the ’emerald fever’.

St. Petersburg Mining Museum’s researchers have recreated the look of rare 19th-century fluorite vases. …Matthew Boulton, an English manufacturer, was one of the first in Europe to start making decorative items from fluorite, a rare naturally occurring mineral. In late-18th-century Birmingham, his factory produced such art objects as candelabra, bowls, potpourri vases. They were not made by hand, though. The workers carved them using machines powered by a steam engine.

To get an idea of how Earth looked like in the distant past, one just has to look attentively at today’s living creatures. Some ancient animals still resemble their progenitors. Some organisms are no longer found. The others have survived without losing their original form.

In 1918, the Soviet government relocated from Petrograd to Moscow. Subsequently, some of the Mining Museum’s most valuable objects were transferred to the Diamond Fund, which did not, however, stop the natural-scientific repository from replenishing its collections. By early 1941, the Museum had accumulated 130,014 exhibits, of which 25,540 were on display - samples of minerals, rocks and fossils, models and prototypes of mining and metallurgical equipment. The Mining Museum was highly popular at the time, by no means inferior to the Hermitage or Tsarskoye Selo.

”In the depths of Siberian ores Keep proud patience”, wrote Alexander Pushkin. This message was brought by Alexandra, Nikita Muravyov’s wife, in February 1827 all the way from St. Petersburg to Nerchinsk. Here Muravyov’s brothers, Nikita and Alexei, Ivan Annenkov, and Konstantin Torson were imprisoned in the forced-labour camp.