On your way to Moscow by the Trans-Siberian Railway (connecting the capital with Eastern Siberia and Far East, the longest railroad in the world-9,288.2 km), the first European city will be Kungur-a district center of the Perm Territory on the banks of the Sylva River and its tributaries Iren and Shakva.

According to historians, Kungur was set up in 1647-1648 by Prokofy Yelizarov, a voivode of Sol Kamskaya (today Solikamsk), and his assistants, who caught runaway peasants from the possessions of Stroganov manufacturers and from church lands. 1222 of caught peasants were delivered to Stary Posad settlement, near the Kungurka River, and they were granted lands and exempted from taxes for three years. In 1649, the settlers built a fortress that became a shelter for "fugitives and vagabonds" from Vyatka, Solvychegorsk and other

northern settlements, who, like local residents, wanted to live "under the tsar's protection", not to be serfs.

However, in 1662, the aboriginal population--Bashkirs and Tatars--turned against Moscow officials who collected tribute there, devastated all local Russian villages and almost wiped Kungur off the face of the earth. Only those who escaped and hid in the forests or caves survived after that massacre and petitioned the tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to rebuild the town. The tsar, who wanted to have a reliable outpost in the faraway corner of his lands, ordered to build a town there "and guard against Bashkir attacks... and arrange a small prison inside the fortress". An appropriate place was found a little bit aside from the former town, on a high bank of the Sylva River at the confluence with Iren. In 1675, there was built a wooden fortress with eight towers, a church, voivode's house and other public facilities inside.

In 1703, Semyon Remizov, a cartographer, geographer and historian from Siberia, made the first plans of the town and its outskirts, including a plan of a unique cave in the Ice Mountain. Soon after, this place was visited by Vasily Tatishchev, the first Russian encyclopedist and associate of Peter I, who made a lot to turn Kama Territory* into a major mining center of Russia. As head of the Ural and Siberian state plants, in 1720-1723 and 1734-1735, he made up a series of local maps, organized surveying of copper and iron ores, established steelworks, opened the first in Kungur "arithmetical" school (1721), etc.

The town grew and soon became one of the major business centers in Ural (both by area and population), a "merchants' republic", as it was called at that time. Local fairs were famous for a great variety of goods, above all, bread: local fields gave rich crops of winter rye, the cheapest in Russia, and other grains. It was not by chance that the "horn of plenty pouring out spikes of different brends symbolizing fertility..." was approved for the town's emblem in 1783.

* See: O. Bazanova, "At the Foot of the Stone Belt", Science in Russia, No. 2, 2012.--Ed.

A century later the Big Siberian Tract was laid there-a direct overland route from European Russia to the Chinese border, a "great tea route". It is worth saying that this aromatic drink had been known on the Sylva banks for a long time (the first supplies to Russia began in 1679, when Moscow and Beijing signed a relevant contract), but initially it was not popular due to its high price. However, by the late 18th century, it became very popular in Siberia, then in Moscow, and in the second half of the 19th century, owing to the active development of the railway transport, it attracted all strata of the population.

In 1840, the young merchant Alexei Gubkin established the Tea Trade and Industrial Partnership in Kungur--one of the first importers of Chinese camellia tea leaves. Several decades later it turned into one of the national leaders in this sphere, and the town itself on the Big Siberian Tract became a "tea capital of the Russian Empire": it was a transit point of almost 80 percent of this aromatic product. The energetic enterpreneur made a lot for his native city: he built orphan asylums and other charitable institutions, in the lean year of 1877 gave bread to over 600 families of his countrymen, that very year set up the first vocational school of Ural (designed by Roman Henrichsen, architect from St. Petersburg) and regularly paid allowance to students and teachers. Mechanical workshops set up under the vocational school turned later on into a machine-building plant, and the training building is now occupied by a motor transport college.

Alexei Gubkin's grandson Alexander Kuznetsov continued traditions of his relative and constructed a five-domed church with a tent bell-tower over his grandfather's tomb designed by Alexander Turchevich, Governor's architect (it is being restored now). In 2007, in honor of the initiator of tea business, a cast-iron monument was opened in Kungur (Perm sculptor Nikolai Khromov). By the way, the famous French writer Alexander Dumas (the father), who visited our country in 1858-1859, recalled: "the best tea is... in Russia", since

at that time it was brought to Russia from China by land, not by sea as to other countries, for long sea transportation impaired its quality.

Alexander Kuznetsov left after him a two-storeyed stone house with an attic (the 1860s, Perm architect Nikolai Chernitsky): the house was surrounded by a garden with a picturesque flower-bed and a small lake, where fish and waterfowl were bred in the owner's life time. This estate was considered the richest in the town and even got the name "Kuznetsov's palace". In 1873, local nobility received there the grand Prince Alexei Alexandrovich, who was making a round-the-world journey. Today the building is occupied by municipal institutions.

Due to a great number of churches, merchants' mansions, medical institutions, educational establishments, plants and other objects of the 18th-19th centuries, Kungur preserved its historical image; from 1970 it makes a part of the list of small historic towns of Russia*. The most significant federal and regional monuments of Kungur include first of all a fivedomed Tikhvinskaya Church of 1758-1767 with a bell-tower and chapels constructed in 1883. Quite recently, in 2008, an elegant golden carved iconostasis made by painters of Palekh Icon-Painting School (Ivanovo Region)--a world-known center of varnish painting-was installed there.

Near the church, there is a house with an attic and a balcony decorated with a forged grid that belonged to the

* Historic towns--settlements with architectural monuments, town planning ensembles and complexes representing monuments of culture and history, including preserved natural landscapes and ancient soil layers of archeological and historical value.--Ed.

merchant Dubinin (1878-1883). At present, it houses the Kungur Administration. The earliest civil construction of the town is the former Town Council (1758-1762), since 1955 it is used as a regional museum of local lore--a two-storeyed building in the Baroque style*. We have to mention here Gostiny dvor (1865-1876, architect Rudolf Karvovsky)--it is the only facility of that type preserved in Ural.

The oldest stone residential building in Kungur is a two-storeyed house of the Khlebnikov family construct-

* See: I. Terekhova, "Russian Baroque", Science in Russia, No. 2, 2009.--Ed.

ed in the 1780s in the style of Classicism (in 2007 it was reconstructed according to the original project; today the building is occupied by municipal institutions)*. It was the place where Kirill Khlebnikov, a scientist, writer, one of the managers of the Russian-American Company (established in the late 18th century, engaged in the fur business), spent his childhood. This remarkable man from the Urals, corresponding member of St. Petersburg AS, will go down in history, first of all, as the "chronicler of Russian America" (existed from 1799 to 1867). He visited not only the Aleutian Islands and the Alexander Archipelago, Pacific coast of the present-day USA, but also Mexico, Peru, Chile and remote territories of our country--Yakutia and Kamchatka.

Kirill Khlebnikov was both an entrepreneur and a researcher: he visited many interesting places, where he compiled ethnographic, entomological and mineralogical collections and sent them to the institutions of the Academy of Sciences. He left research works that promoted significantly the national science of the first half of the 19th century, the enormous correspondence, for example, letters from navigators Vasily Golovnin, Ferdinand Wrangel (corresponding members of St. Petersburg AS) and Ludwig Hagemeister; a translator to the Yakut language and a publisher of worship books, founder of churches and schools of the missionary Innokenty Veniaminov at the Russian Far East. As for the "Russian and foreign books..., maps ... and paintings...", Khlebnikov signed them to his native town-in 1840 the first public library was established on the basis of this vast collection.

The life of the merchant and scientist, full of sea and land journeys, meetings with interesting people became a guiding star for his grand-nephew Alexander Khlebnikov. In 1896, he left for the USA across Siberia, Primorye and Japan, ten years later he returned to his native town and focused on the clearing of the Ice Cave, propagation of its unusual beauty and uniqueness in the press. In 1914, he established a "museum" in the cave (the only museum of that kind in the world) and served there as a curator and a guide.

This system of karst** caverns, one of the largest in the European Russia, attracts visitors for a great variety of ice forms (leaflike, pyramidal, rectangular, needleshaped, and other crystals, complex forms--joints). The Diamond and Polar Caves are most beautiful, even in hot weather they are covered from top to bottom with a

*See: Z. Zolotnitskaya, "Lofty Simplicity and Dignity", Science in Russia, No. 3, 2009.--Ed.

** Karst--a complex of processes and phenomena manifested in dissolution of rocks by water, formation of caverns and a specific relief in places, formed by gypsum, dissolved in water, limestone, marble, rock salt, etc.--Ed.

sparkling hoar-frost (formed from water vapour precipitating on all surfaces given the 100 percent air humidity), glittering stalactites and stalagmites--a real "Santa's palace"! Why is a low temperature kept up here? The point is that ice and snow accumulating every winter at the entrance area (according to scientists, this phenomenon has been occurring for 10-12 thous. years) fail to melt during the summer.

The cave occupies about 206 thous. m³, its area is 65 thous. m², extension of surveyed passages is 5.7 km, its vault has over 146 "organ pipes"--3-9 m wide and up to 20 m long vertical cylindrical channels. It is also famous for its underground lakes (their member can reach 70, depending on the season) fed by the Sylva River, 48 grottos (10-20 m high) formed at the intersection of galleries or in case of their blockage.

The first people who described this unique natural monument were Vasily Tatishchev, who in 1720-1723 regularly visited Kungur, and his successor at the position of the head of Ural manufactures (1722-1734) Dutch Georg Wilhelm de Hennin. They explained the mechanism of formation of emptiness in the bowels of the earth (by way of dissolution by water and coming down of rocks), thus attracted attention to similar phenomena on the part of national scientists. In the 1730s, the caverns were visited by the participants of the second Kamchatka expedition--German scientists on the Russian service Gerhard Friedrich Miller* (Academician of St. Petersburg AS from 1725) and the natural scientist and ethnographer Johann Georg Gmelin (Academician from 1727). The latter measured air temperature, mapped the underground structure and was the first who mentioned the local name of the cavern--Ice Cave--in the report (soon after this name became an official name of this cavern). In 1770, this place was visited by an outstanding traveler and natural scientist Ivan Lepekhin (Academician from 1768), who explored in detail and measured all grottos and tunnels, and then published his findings in a four-volume paper Travel Diaries Throughout Russia in 1771-1805.

In the 19th century, in particular in 1879, archeological excavations were carried out there by Ivan Polyakov, a zoologist, anthropologist and ethnographer, curator of the Museum of Zoology under St. Petersburg AS, which became a significant step in exploring the Kungur cave. The scientist found out that it was never inhabited by people, noted gypsum crystals on all surfaces of the underground cavity and found a correlation between the level of underground lakes and the Sylva River. Three years later, the famous mineralogist, founder of structur-

* See: O. Bazanova, "True to History, Impartial, Modest", Science in Russia, No. 3, 2006.--Ed.

al crystallography Yevgraf Fyodorov (Academician from 1919) analyzed the reasons of frost accumulation in the depths, formation of emptiness of different forms, studied non-melting ice, specified Sylva's role in dissolving the rocks and introduced the term "karst" in the scientific vocabulary.

In 1925, the Kungur phenomenon was visited by a prominent national mineralogist, one of the founders of geochemistry Academician Alexander Fersman, who noted abundance of forms of ice crystals. Three years later, participants of the expedition, organized by the State

Hydrological Institute (St. Petersburg), studied water regime of the underground cavity and established: retention of cold there is explained by characteristics of its structure, conducive to intensive tightening of an outer frosty air. In the 1930s, scientists of the Perm State University made the first chemical tests of water from underground lakes and ice that showed a high content of mineral salts (2 g/l).

In 1948, within easy reach of the cave there was established the Ural Branch of the Karst-Spelaean Station under Lomonosov Moscow State University (from 1952,

Kungur Scientific Research Station) headed by Vera Varsanofyeva, the first woman in our country, who was awarded a degree of the doctor of sciences in geology and mineralogy (in 1935) and launched scheduled and detailed studies of the unique natural object. In 1998, it was decided to systematize the information accumulated for 50 years in a computer database. It took four years to build it up and in 2005 a joint monograph Kungur Ice Cave: Experience of Regular Observations was published. At present, micro-climatic conditions, destruction processes, including formation of fractures in the roof, walls, etc. are registered by an automatic monitoring system, designed at the RAS Institute of Mining jointly with the ISS International Company (South Africa).

In 2003, the first floor of the Research Station was occupied by the Museum of Karst and Speleology famous for its vast collection of mineralogical samples-limestone, travertine (polycrystal fragile fine-grained rock), gypsum, salts, mineral formations (stalactites, stalagmites, "tubes", "bunches", "brushes", "roses", etc.) from the underground systems of the Ural region, Volga region, Arkhangelsk Region, Spitsbergen, Western Ukraine, Crimea, Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy and Turkey. You can also see there measurement equipment and personal belongings of scientists, pieces of art, photographs, maps and plans, documents, field diaries, books, registers of the 1930s. One of the most valuable exhibits of the museum is a French engraving of the second half of the 18th century representing a drawing of this underground cavity, made by Remezov in 1703.

The exposition allows to get acquainted with the fauna of the underground "kingdom of frost"--fish, bats and rodents, including the only local residents--crayfish of about 2 cm long, called Crangonyx Chlebnikovi. Employees of the museum will also show you a water bulb with a tiny white creature swimming in it. It was discovered in 1926 by the zoologist and hydrobiologist Yevgeny Borutsky in the Big Mechkinskaya Cave not far from Kungur Cave, and called it in honor of the already-mentioned promoter of the latter. These invertebrates inhabit stagnant water with a temperature of not more than 5 °C and increased mineral content (up to 2.4 g/l) and eat detritus (particles of a dead organic matter) mainly of vegetable origin, for example, semi-decomposed wood fiber.

The Kungur Cave is both unique and accessible to scientists and simple visitors: as early as the mid-19th century the local resident Romanovsky used to take interested people there. In short, as the writer and historian, a Kungur resident, Valentin Rapp has pointed out, it is a place where "that small stream, which gave life to a deep river of Russian tourism, has originated".