The Bronze Horseman and the Thunder Stone: old mysteries and new studies

Speaking of the Bronze Horseman, various guides and reference books traditionally repeat one and the same thing. ‘The pedestal of the monument to Peter the Great in Senate Square is a rapakivi granite monolith boulder weighing one and a half thousand tons. Its fragments are found in Olgino, on the shores of the Gulf of Finland’. However, the studies by a group of geologists led by Andrei Bulakh, Professor at St Petersburg University and a great connoisseur of the natural stone used in the construction and decoration of St Petersburg, showed that none of those statements complied with real-life observations.

Svetlana Janson, a mineralogist and an explorer of the Bronze Horseman pedestal, will continue her story about the old mysteries and new discoveries related to the famous Thunder Stone.