Since ancient times, the inhabitants of the Kulunda steppe have known that table salt lies at the bottom of Lake Burlinskoye. There are several legends about the formation of the bitter-salt lake, here is one of them.
Legend
A poor shepherd and the Bai’s daughter fell in love with each other, but the girl’s rich father did not approve their marriage. The lovers then decided to flee to the steppe, away from the Bai’s anger, but on the way, the Bai’s servants overtook them and killed the shepherd. The girl cried bitterly over the body of her lover and all the tears formed a lake.
Foundation history
The high quality of table salt attracted the attention of the miner Prokofy Demidov, and transports with salt were pulled from Central Russia to St. Petersburg.
Once having tasted the salt brought from the Burlinskolye salt fields of distant Siberia, Empress Catherine II said: “From now on I command to serve only this salt to the table.”
For more than two hundred years, salt has been mined here, and the village of Bursol has existed for the same amount of time. The settlement was founded in 1768.
Salt mining
Initially, there were hard labor conditions here. Kazakhs and Russians worked in the extraction of salt. Old-timers still remember how they took out salt with their hands, twelve to fourteen hours a day, standing up to their waist in water. Salt was mined only for a few weeks of the year – when the days were hot and dry. The layers of salt were chipped off with crowbars and shovels, piled on wooden platforms, and then loaded into a basket and dragged ashore by camels. Annual production is 7-10 thousand tons of salt.
As the labor costs were low, entrepreneurs were unwilling to replace manual labor with machines, but no matter how good camels and horses served here, they had to say goodbye as they were replaced by technology.
In 1928, the field engineers invented the first salt combine. Its introduction significantly increased labor productivity. Salt production by the end of the second five-year plan went up to 65.9 thousand tons. Then the motorists appeared and a railway track was laid along the bottom of the lake.
In 1947, the team of engineers from N.A. Krameninnikov made the country’s first self-propelled salt-combining machine. “Combine Krameninnikon”, as it is called, has received all-Union recognition. It is widely used in all lakes of the country with plates of salt up to 50 centimeters. Solecombine loosens and crushes the seam itself, lifts it onto a rocking grate, washes it and loads it into salt wagons. In the salt industry, there are many mechanisms and devices designed by innovators. They do not have factory marks, for example, motor trucks, entire units of the processing plant.
The salt field has supplied its products to 16 territories and regions of Siberia, the Far East and the Far North, as well as to Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Korea and Japan.
Location
Burlinskoe Lake is located 19 kilometers northwest of Slavgorod. Its area is 3838 hectares, the average depth is 1 meter.
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