Marcial Waters — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 3

The First Russian Spa, and the Spring It Was Built Around · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

Marcial Waters sits on the northern shore of Lake Onega in Karelia, near Petrozavodsk, between St. Petersburg and the White Sea. I traced it to one man. Ivan Reboev was a serf at the copper smelter in Konchezersk, and by the spring of 1714 his heart was giving out; he could not climb the foundry stairs without stopping twice. Sent to the Ravboloto marshland to watch the haulers bringing up bog iron, he found an ice-cold spring and drank from it. On the third day he could climb the bank without his chest tightening. On the fourth he carried his own pack. The bedrock that water came through was named shungite two centuries later, and identified later still as one of the only natural sources on Earth of the C60 fullerene.

The report went from the plant manager Zimmerman to the commandant Villim Gennin to Admiral Fyodor Apraksin, who carried it to Peter the Great. Peter sent two court physicians in late 1717, Laurentius Blumentrost and Robert Areskin, who tested the water for eighteen months. On the twentieth of March, 1719 Peter decreed Russia's first state-sanctioned spa and named it after Mars, god of war and iron. Reboev was freed from serfdom. Peter visited four times and spent more than ninety days of his life at that spring.

The wooden palaces rotted and villagers built homes on the foundations, calling the place Dvortsy. The Church of the Apostle Peter, consecrated on the eighteenth of February, 1722, was by 2026 the only Petrine structure still standing. A museum opened in 1948, a Soviet sanatorium in 1964, and the water still reads in the antioxidant range on an ORP meter.

From the chapter

In late 1717 he dispatched two of his court physicians to the spring. The first was Dr. Laurentius Blumentrost, his personal physician and the future founding president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The second was Dr. Robert Areskin, the Scottish-born chief medical officer of the empire. The two most credentialed scientists in Russia spent the next eighteen months testing the water. The samples were dense in iron and rich in carbon. Two and a half centuries before anyone could measure oxidation-reduction potential, the doctors found a water that did things to wounds, to the digestion, to chronic ailments of the joints, that the pharmacopoeia of 1718 had no language for. Their conclusion, in the formal language of the report Blumentrost delivered to the Tsar, was that the water of the Olonets spring was “of great force against heart disease, liver disease, rheumatism, and heaviness of the joints.” They added anemia, scurvy, dropsy, and ailments of the bladder as the testing continued, conditions for which Peter himself was beginning to be treated by his court doctors and which Western medicine of the period could do almost nothing about.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 3

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.