Almost two centuries ago, Russia made France a generous present - about 80 tons of the precious red quartzite, without charging the former military enemy a single ruble for mining it in the country. Seven years before the event, the reburial of Napoleon I's ashes, brought from St. Helena, took place in Paris in 1840. The construction of the tombstone for the great emperor was delayed: the difficulty consisted in finding the right material to create the sarcophagus.
According to the architect Louis Visconti, it had to be made of red ancient porphyry. This stone was considered royal, symbolizing the power and wealth of the pharaohs of Egypt and later the emperors of ancient Rome. The necessary rock was neither found in Greece or Corsica, nor in the French or Roman quarries, which were all exhausted by that time. Suitable samples were only found by that time in Russia, in the Karelian village of Shoksha.
Despite the fact that the rock ultimately turned out to be not porphyry but quartzite, the French were completely satisfied with the appearance of the stone. The emperor even gave them the permission to mine it. Nicholas I ordered not to charge any fees for mining the stone, considering the fact that the once great military leader, who had tried to turn Russia into a trophy of his glory, would now find a tomb made of stone of Russian origin to be felicitous.
The necessary material was selected and delivered to Paris within a year; and the process of constructing the tombstone stretched out for twenty years, so that even its architect did not live to see the official opening.
Red quartzite from Karelia had already been known for almost a hundred years before Europeans became interested in it. Local factories used it for finishing blast furnaces, creating molds and interior linings for baths as a material capable of maintaining a constant temperature, retaining its original properties and shape and not emitting dangerous impurities. It did not fade over time, and its polished surfaces remained mirror-like for decades.
In 1768, in connection with the construction of the new St. Isaac's Cathedral, 361 pieces of Shoksha stone were delivered to St. Petersburg. They decorated the lower part of the iconostasis and the steps to the altar. Some of the stone was also used for decoration of the Mikhailovsky Castle. At that time there were no factories working or sawing blocks in the quarries in Shoksha. The works were done only in the warm time of the year and were completely stopped during the winter. It took more than a hundred days of work and at least 3,000 broken tool heads to create the flat surface of a four square meter stone. Despite the complexity of the material, it began to be used in the decoration of many other famous monuments of the northern capital. In the Kazan Cathedral it paved the floor, it was used for columns in the Hermitage and decorated the pedestal of the monument to Nicholas I. Shoksha quartzite, similar in strength to granite and resistant to moisture, soon became an ideal material for finishing the facades of buildings and interiors, and gained the title of one of the most beautiful facing materials in the world.
In the 21st century, quartzite is still used to pave streets, squares, walkways, and tombstones and monuments. The stone is no less important in industry as well. One of the varieties of quartzite is ferruginous quartzite. This ore makes up the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, one of the largest iron ore basins in the world. Despite the high metal content in this type of quartzite - about 36.5%, it belongs to the hard-to-enrich ores.
Translated by Diego Monterrey, for Northwest Forpost.
