Kapova pesera

Kapova Cave, also called Shulgan-Tash, opens in the southern Urals near the Belaya River. It held a place in Bashkir mythology. In the eighteenth century it also drew the attention of investigators studying the Russian Empire's natural features. Pyotr Rychkov explored the cave in winter and published an account in 1760, describing its first level. Ivan Lepekhin visited and described it ten years later. Such investigations made the cave an object of geographical and natural-history inquiry.