Ordinskaya Cave

The cave hides in a karst sinkhole on the slope of Kazakovskaya hill near the south-western edge of the village of Orda. It was cut in gypsum and anhydrite of Permian age and consists of two worlds: the 'dry' one — three hundred metres of the Kristalny and Ice Palace grottoes with the Ledyanoye, Glavnoye and Teploye lakes — and the underwater one, where galleries bear the names of the explorers' cities: the Chelyabinsky, Krasnoyarsky, Moskovsky and Sverdlovsky passages. The numbers here are Russian records: four thousand six hundred metres of passages surveyed, with a siphon between the halls stretching 935 metres — the longest in the CIS. The first person to descend, in January 1993, was the Perm caver Alexander Samovolnikov; from 2002 the diving centre 'Nautilus' of world champion Andrey Gorbunov began developing the underwater part, building the country's first divers' base by the entrance. The cave's fame spread beyond Russia: in 2006 the British cave diver Martin Farr described it, comparing its galleries with the best caves of Australia, in 2007 the American Jill Heinerth dived here, and the underwater photographer Viktor Lyagushkin published a photo book about it. For most visitors, though, Orda remains a quiet place with a sinkhole, pine trees and a river: the main wonders are below the water.