For a master stone-carver and a historian of the science of rocks, for an ethnographer engaged in the study of trades and for an art critic jasper has a story of its own to tell.

Man has known jasper for thousands of years. He formed his elementary working habits as he pursued his search for better ways of treating it. This gave birth to a trade and a craftsmanship. Which, in its turn, led, at a later date, to the creation of masterpieces of genuiune artistry. It look about one hundred years to subjugate jasper. The primitive ideas of the earlier periods were abandoned in favour of laboratory research by a modern petrographer as the steadily augmenting known-how was handed down from one generation to another.

Jasper was duly appreciated in the Palaeolithic age for its durability, uniform structure and hardness and for this reason became the basic material of its stone industry.

The ancient world discovered the beauty of polished surfaces and, enchanted by the wealth of this stone,s colours and lines, came to link jasper with various superstitions and beliefs. Antiquity gave it its name and left to posterity a vast variety of forms of cut jasper. The middle ages, for their part, "canonized" jasper, as it were, by declaring it one of the twelve "sacred" stones worthy of being word by priests as ornaments in their attire. During the Renaissance the beauty of jasper inspired vivid poetic associations which helped to convert the mere artisan of yesterday into a genuine master of the stone, the veritable poet of jasper. In the 18th century novel qualities of jasper became revealed: its monolith form, enormous reserved and limitless variety. Descriptions of its deposits were undertaken and a classification of the stone was produced on the basis of its continuing study. The following centuries saw a search for an answer to one of the most amazing riddles: the varied nature and origin of jasper.

My narration in thus of the history of Urals jasper, the first ancient seats of the jasper industry in the southern Urals, of the jasper mounds, of the old burial mounds where numerous vari-coloured piece jasper lay hidden for ages...

At prezent as many as sixteen manufacturing enterprises use Urals jasper. But thanks to its "Urals Gems" Production and Technical Association which, incidentally, grew out of a lapidory factory founded as far back as 1726, it is the Urals that, as was the case in the past, is today the main centre of stone-cutting in the country. Half of the jasper reserves in Russia falls to the share of the Urals. More than two hundred deposits and outcroppings extend in a single line, forty kms wide, from the Near Arctic all the way down to the steppes of Kazakhstan and the Mugodzhar mountains. Especially well known throughtout the world are the varieties of jasper that come from such provenances as Urazov, Orsk, Kalkansk, Koshkuldinsk, Yamsk, Malomuinakovsk and Ashkulsk. Made famous by talented Urals craftsmen they invariably represented and continue to represent Russian industries at international art, trade and industrial exhibitions which were, or are, held in France, Britain, Canada and Japan. Work of jasper are to be found among the exhibits displayed in the Hermitage and the Armoury, in the Louvre and the Vatican. Jasper was also used for decorative purposes. It is to be found, for example, in the rich ornaments of outstanding monuments of architecture in Moscow and S.-Petersburg, London and Paris, Istambul and Delhi. Interest in jasper is growing with every passing year. The jasper palette of the Stone Belt is being constantly enriched. About one hundred of new varieties of jasper have been explored to date. Of these, one third is earmerked for development. The tapping of these new resources, it is estimated, will make it possible not only to meet the demand for jasper of the whole of the stone-cutting industry of Russia but also to satisfy the ever growing requirements of the foreign market.

It can be confidently asserted that rich artistic traditions, the creative searching of talented craftsmen of to-day,s Urals, these veritable innovators in their field, knowledge of the latest developments in progressive technology, mining and processing of jasper on the one hand, and the inexhaustible reserves of the newly discovered deposits on the other, will serve to create every pre- requisit for the further promotion of the jasper industry, its artistic level and culture in particular.

Foto of Jasper (for piece)
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Foto of stone-carved things
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