The desert lighthouse of Astrakhan – a fascinating anomaly in Russia’s Astrakhan region

Driving through the steppes of Russia’s Astrakhan region, one of the last things you expect to see is a 20-storey brick lighthouse towering over the arid and desertic landscape.
As you can imagine, It’s the type of building you normally see near the coastline, but in this case, the nearest coastline is about 30 kilometers or, if you prefer 18.6 miles, away, so far that you can’t even see the sea from the top of the structure!
However, although Petrovsky Lighthouse is an architectural anomaly, one that can easily be explained.

The first wooden lighthouse at Vyshka was erected in 1741, following a 1722 decree by Peter the Great to establish a navigational aid near the Four Hills (Chetyre Bugra) island at the entrance to the Volga from the Caspian Sea, aimed at supporting military and trade shipping during the Persian campaign.
This initial structure served as a critical beacon for vessels navigating the shallow 2.74-meter (or if you prefer 9-foot) roadstead, where larger ships offloaded cargo due to the delta’s low depths, but its wooden build proved vulnerable to frequent Caspian storms and winds, necessitating repeated repairs and reconstructions throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries.
As predicted, a devastating hurricane in 1852 destroyed the existing wooden lighthouse, prompting plans for a more durable replacement, whosw construction began in 1872 under the Directorate of Lighthouses of the Caspian Basin and completed in 1876.
The new lighthouse featured an octagonal brick tower tapering toward the top, rising from a rusticated white stone pedestal to a metal lantern house with an observation platform that still exist today and cast-iron spiral staircase. At 60 meters tall, it housed a first-order Fresnel optical apparatus powered by petroleum oil, producing a constant white light with flashes visible up to 13 nautical miles (about 24 km) at a focal plane of 40 meters above sea level.
However, the waters of the Caspian Sea had been receding for a long time, but at the beginning of the last century, the water in the area had become so shallow that the port had to be closed.
Petrovsky Lighthouse continued to operate until 1930, by which time the Caspian Sea had receded completely.
It became the home of a small radio station during the 1990s, but ever since it stopped operating as a lighthouse in the 1930s, it has remained closed.
Today, it is a designated national monument and stands as a preserved monument to early Caspian navigation as well as unusual tourist attraction.

Images from web – Google Research