Petrovsky Pond (Lipetsk)

Petrovsky Pond and the Old Church of the Assumption. View from the Upper Park (from a postcard from the beginning of the 20th century)

Petrovsky Pond is a lost sight of the city of Lipetsk . It was located on the site of the Lower Park .

Petrovsky Pond was built in the 18th century to supply water to the nearby Lipsky Ironworks . The area of ​​the pond was 70 ha . In tsarist Russia, it was the largest man-made reservoir.

According to eyewitnesses, the water in the pond was characterized by high transparency and the absence of ichthyofauna . The latter circumstance was probably related to the high salinity of the water in the pond. It is known that in the area of ​​the Ancient Assumption Church several large sources of glandular water beat. Contemporaries also noted folk tradition, according to which, the absence of fish in the pond was due to the fact that the pond was built on the orders of the Antichrist ( Peter I ).

On April 25 ( May 8 ), 1805, Alexander I signed a decree on the opening of the Lipetsk Mineral Waters resort. The pond is part of it, but it is used for a different purpose: healing mud was extracted from its bottom at the end of the 19th century . According to experts, there were about 125 thousand cubic meters. sap of ferruginous silt. According to more recent estimates - 945 thousand tons.

In June 1879, 11 leaders of the Land and Freedom party gathered in the resort of Lipetsk under the guise of vacationers. Having rented pleasure boats, the members of the organization found a quiet backwater on the pond, where they approved plans for a coup by physically eliminating senior officials, starting with the sovereign. Later, this congress was called the "People's Volunteer." On June 17, 1972, in commemoration of the centenary of the first congress of the Narodnaya Volya party, a monument to terrorist Narodovoltsy was erected on the territory of the poured pond.

In the 1930s , healing mud was no longer used, and the pond was overgrown and boggy.

During the reconstruction that began in the late 1950s , drained swamps, built a stage and film projection, dance floor, created a garden sculpture. In the late 1960s , Petrovsky Pond was filled up. After clearing and deepening the channel of the Voronezh River, too much sand was formed; they poured them a pond. Then, according to the project of N.R. Polunin , the alleys were planned here and planted with trees.

Filling the pond caused a rise in groundwater in the Nizhenka area. In the Lower Park , flooded trees began to die en masse. Within 30 years, almost all the trees on the historic alleys of the park died.

Today, there are plans to restore the pond, however, in a reduced form (it is planned that it will occupy an area of ​​about 15 hectares) ^[1] .