The beautiful, unique Kerch has a lot of pleasant surprises for its guests. In addition to the remains of ancient civilizations, ancient architecture, beautiful landscapes, warm and clean sea, it is also amazing natural objects.
In the vicinity of Kerch you can see the most interesting natural phenomenon — mud volcanoes, which is a very peculiar sight. This is a rare geological phenomenon, which seeks to see with their own eyes all tourists coming on vacation in Kerch.
Valley of mud volcanoes is located 8 km from Kerch near the village. Bondarenkovo (Bulganak). It is also called Bulganak valley of mud volcanoes, Valley of Volcanoes, Bulganak mud hills, Bulganak volcanoes. In practically flat terrain there is a shallow basin of several square kilometers, reminding a fantastic landscape from some distant unexplored planet. The accumulation of mud volcanoes here is the largest in the Kerch area.
The view opens a desert landscape with strange, volcano-like elevations and a large lake filled with mud instead of water, here and there jets of mud burst to the surface, burst mud bubbles, making noisy, strange sounds. It is in such phantasmagoric, fairy-tale places that one remembers how amazing our Earth is.
There are many big and small mud volcanoes in Bulganak valley. Some of them look like ordinary puddles of mud because of their gentle edges, but they remind of their nature, when the thick mud starts bubbling, small fountains rise above the surface. Others resemble real magmatic volcanoes in miniature, only instead of lava, their craters are filled with thick mud. Mud volcanoes are several meters high and their craters are up to 15-20 meters in diameter. The level of mud in the craters is constantly changing: it can flow over the edges, spread out in many wide streams, spurt out in large and small fountains, and simply blow up in the form of bubbles that burst noisily.
Jules Verne wrote about the amazing sounds of mud volcanoes as follows: «…a strange sound brought them out of their half-asleep state. It was a kind of whistling comparable to that which seltzer water makes when it comes out of a bottle, but ten times stronger. One would have thought that compressed steam was bursting from some boiler through a pipe…» and described an adventure among them in his novel «Keraban the Stubborn». Homer did not ignore this fantastic phenomenon in The Odyssey, describing mud volcanoes as entrances to the earthly kingdom of Hades.
Mud volcanoes are not as widespread as magmatic volcanoes, in Ukraine they can be seen only on the Kerch Peninsula, in Russia — only on Sakhalin and near Taman, in the former Soviet Union — in Azerbaijan. Their age is about 25-30 million years. Such volcanoes are formed due to tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust, as a result of which gases, water and clay mass are squeezed to the surface through the ruptures of folds. The mud bursting out of the bowels of the earth, from a depth of up to 6-9 km — so deep are the roots of mud volcanoes — is rich in substances important for human health — iodine, soda, borax and others. The air in the Volcano Valley of Kerch is saturated with healing iodine vapors, and the mud has long been used for the treatment and prevention of various diseases.
To see the mud volcanoes of Kerch will be interesting for any guest of the city. Especially impressive is the beating fountain and gurgling mud of small tourists. These are fantastically natural attractions of Kerch, known far beyond the Crimea. Bulganak Valley of Volcanoes is an amazing corner of our planet.