Kungur Karst Line

Description

A two-day route through the southeast of Perm Krai, where salt trade, gypsum karst and factory antiquity stand side by side: a merchant city, a cave with national records, and a village where Demidov history and the most famous legend of Prikamye converged. About 125 kilometers on roads — Kungur is convenient as a base, from it roads diverge to Orda and to Molebka. Start at Kungur, founded in 1663 and since 1970 in the list of historical cities of Russia. The city grew on salt and tea trade: Kungur merchants kept caravans along the Sylva and Kama, and profits settled in stone mansions, trading yards and temples. The best view is from the mountain above the Sylva, where you see how the river bends and domes rise; the city itself deserves at least half a day even without the famous ice cave standing nearby. Further — Ordinskaya Cave in a karst funnel near the village of Orda, on the slope of Kazakovskaya Gora. The numbers here are record-breaking: four thousand six hundred meters of passages explored, and the siphon between halls stretches nine hundred thirty-five meters — the longest in the CIS; the dry part is three hundred meters of grottoes with lakes, the rest goes under water. The cave was opened in 1993, since 2002 the underwater part is mastered by the diving center of world champion Andrey Gorbunov, and its fame has gone far beyond Russia. Underwater halls are only for certified speleodivers with the local base, but the dry part also gives a full idea of why Perm karst is called standard. Finish at Molebka at the confluence of the Molebka River into the Sylva: the name is from the prayer stone, on which for centuries the Mansi performed rituals, and in 1779 the Demidovs built an ironworks here. Cast iron was carried by barges along the Sylva and Kama, in the early twentieth century production closed, and the village fell silent — more than two hundred residents, an ancient dam, forested banks. The second fame came in the nineties: the surrounding forests were declared the "M-triangle", a place of inexplicable phenomena. Science has not confirmed these stories — treat them as a legend, but the atmosphere of a remote factory and forest here is real.