Shungite Karelian Chunk

Black as coal but nowhere near as light, this raw chunk of shungite carries a faint graphite luster where the fracture catches the light, and a surface that can leave a soft charcoal smudge on the fingers if handled too long. It is heavier and harder than it looks, a carbon-rich stone that behaves far more like stone than like the coal it superficially resembles. Shungite occurs in commercial quantity in essentially one place on earth, the Karelia region of northwest Russia, a fact behind a great deal of recent folklore built on a much older local tradition. Locals have long told of Peter the Great sending soldiers to the shungite-dark waters near Lake Onega, where a spa was later built on the belief that the mineral-rich water eased fatigue and skin complaints. Geologically, shungite is unusual: a deposit roughly two billion years old, made almost entirely of an unstructured, non-crystalline form of carbon, unlike coal or graphite, which are far younger and more ordered in structure. It sits at the boundary between mineral and something closer to fossilized organic matter, unlike almost anything else that passes through an apothecary's shelves. By newer custom, a piece is sometimes set beside a router or a desk, believed to draw off the static of a long day at a screen; by older custom, it simply sat in the corner of a Karelian home as a plain, dark guardian. Either way, it asks only to be left in place.