Today I want to tell you about the history of the most delightful and fickle proficiency of the leaving season - making ice statues. To my mind it is  marvellous but thankless art ( because of its short life). The first ice sculptures were originally crafted by Chinese hunters and fisherman in 1600’s in Heilongjiang on the Chinese border with Russia. They used buckets of ice to dig a hole into and then put a lit candle inside creating a lantern. After the first Chinese people did this for a practical use other’s started to hang decorative lanterns from their homes, and it even spread further when people began to parade them in carnivals. As the decorative trend spread the town of Harbin in Heilongjiang grew into a large city and become the home of the annual International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, which today holds thousands of artists work. 

  However, Russians claim that St. Petersburg was where ice sculptures originated from and was the palace of the first monumental scale ice palace. The palace was exquisitely designed, by Piotr Eropkin, and featured some fantastic creations such as ice cannons that shot real ice cannon balls and an elephant that, through a canal with pipes connecting it all up, sprayed water from its trunk. It’s hard to dispute if St. Petersburg really did found ice sculptures, but they were certainly the pioneers of the first grand ice sculptures in the world. Here on the photos you can see a look of nowadays ice sculptures.