The connection of times through iron mining

It was a great summer day and towards evening I went to one of my favorite places near the city. This is the high bank of the Volga, which is called in our places as "Kozlovy Gory".

I will not delve into the etymology of the name now.

This is a very beautiful place. Tall pines and almost no undergrowth. Through the leaves you can see how the great Russian river Volga glistens in the sun.

The steep cliff of the coast is especially picturesque. Pine trees growing on the shore, their roots crawl out of the ground and hang over a cliff.

We arrived just to sit in nature, drink tea and maybe bake potatoes in ash.

This is an old Russian recipe. Take the potatoes and put them in the ashes of the fire. After some time, the potatoes are baked inside, covered with a coal crust on the outside.

If such a potato is broken, then inside the potato will be beautiful white and baked.

Carefully peel the potato from the burnt skin, salt it and eat with pleasure.

But in order to cook this yummy, you need to make a bonfire. It's not a problem. We have matches, a little brushwood I can gather around the pines. Cones will go into action. There are a lot of cones around.

Since the weather builds very warm, the brushwood is dry. Cones light up and burn very actively. But we still need normal firewood. I found a big dry bough, and dragged him to the bonfire site.

It was necessary to chop it into logs somehow, and then it was time to talk about what helped me in this.

The main assistant is an ax. But in the modern life of a city dweller, the word ax means almost nothing. We already forgot what kind of instument.

It's good that I have one friend who is engaged in the manufacture of axes and, in general, the history of the Kuznetsk craft and ancient methods of manufacturing metals.

But then he gave me an ax, with which I chopped wood. This ax lies in my trunk and I got it all a couple of times, but every time this ancient tool helps me out, I understand that we are still those cavemen who just learned how to make fire.

Listening to the master blacksmith, about how, in ancient times, in his opinion, metal products were received, I am more and more immersed in the history of my native land.

The fact is that in the Kostroma region, a field was developed for the extraction of iron and the production of metal tools and weapons. The center of this mining was located near the city of Galich and in the vicinity.

I talked about visiting the Zheleznoborsky monastery. It was the extraction of iron ore from the floodplains of the rivers that the local inhabitants were engaged in.

The ax that I got out of the trunk of my car is an inexpensive thing. It is simple and functional.

But there are also more beautiful and difficult to manufacture axes. Here, for example, an ax made of damask steel. Such steel is obtained by repeated forging of several layers of steel. As a result, steel takes on a very interesting pattern.