The marble here was found in 1765 and worked from 1769, and it went into buildings you already know: St Isaac’s Cathedral, the Winter Palace, and later several St Petersburg Metro stations. The main pit runs about 460 metres north to south, up to 100 wide and over 50 deep. Then in the twentieth century they went at it with dynamite, which shattered the massif and made the good stone unworkable, so the quarries were abandoned and the groundwater came up. What is left is a flooded canyon of white and grey marble walls going straight down into water clear enough to see 15 to 18 metres, which people now dive and boat through. Sortavalsky District, Karelia, which was Finnish territory before the Winter War. The Tohmajoki alongside it runs over cascades of three to four metres, and the whole thing is a mountain park.
Karelia, Russia
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