Blog about Urals

For a long time we’ve been planning to go to the Tyumen region, remarkable for the deposits of oil, and also for our local “Urals Sea”- the hot springs of Tyumen. The road from Yekaterinburg to Tyumen takes a 5 hours fast car drive, so we decided to leave early in the Saturday morning. Spring came to our lands so we departed in a good mood.

So, what exactly is the hot springs, and how were they formed in Tyumen? As I’ve already mentioned, the Tyumen region is rich in oil. In the 70s of last century, geologists began to explore regions where oil could be extracted. They began to drill wells into the ground. But it turned out that out of some wells made by geologists very hot water run. The fact is that these wells were drilled in the regions, called geothermal areas where magma is located close enough to the surface and heats the overlying rocks. The ground waters circulate in pores and crevices of rocks and are heated. Going out to the surface ground waters form lakes of hot water with high content of mineral salts. Such steamy lakes could be often found in the Tyumen woods in the winters. The view is impressive.
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We’d like to tell you about the most famous and historically significant place in Yekaterinburg – the Church on the Blood. This place is a shrine where the pilgrims from all over Russia gather.

The Church was built on the site of the house of engineer Ipatieff, where the royal family Nikolai II, his wife, sun and four daughters were assassinated and the 300 year old monarchy of the Romanov dynasty came to an end.

In April 1918 because of the onset of white army the Ural Regional Council (Urals Bolsheviks – Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party) decided to confiscate the house to carry out a hasty assassination over the royal family in it.

Yakov Yurowski was appointed a commandant of the house. He offered to invite the royal family into the basement in pretence of giving them a shelter, then he told them that «their friends» (the white army) were coming up and therefore they are sentenced to death, the shootings followed.
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Last week we decided to go to Ganina Yama – that particular place where the Bolsheviks tried to hide dead bodies of Tsar Nicholai II and his family, leaving them in an abandoned mine. These events gave ill fame to new soviet authority and are related with one of the most frightening pages of russian history.

The mine is located in a pine forest and is now called Ganina Yama (in translation Ganya’s Pit). «Ganya» -  is the short name for Gavriel. In the era of the Urals “Gold Rush” (the middle of XIX century) a contractor Gavriel bought this plot of land hoping to find a gold in it. Soon it became clear that the mine doesn’t contain gold, but it contains iron ore. By the beginning of 20th century the mine got abandoned and became overgrown with a forest.

Early on the morning of July 17, 1918, Ganina Yama met remains of the Tsar, his family and their faithful servants. The bodies were thrown into the mine, after a while got dismembered, and then within two days destroyed by fire and sulfuric acid.

As we arrived at the place, we were amazed – how many people came here from different parts of Urals and Russia, despite the inclement weather. We left the car, took a breathe of the fresh crisp forest air and went to the very complex.
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