Essentuki

a city in Stavropol’ Krai, RSFSR; a resort in the Caucasian Mineral Waters group. It lies in the valley of the Podkumok River at an elevation of 600–650 m, a railway station on the Mineral’nye Vody-Kislovodsk line, 43 km to the southwest of Mineral’nye Vody. Population, 66,000 (1971; 16,000 in 1939).

Essentuki is a health resort that offers mineral waters for baths, although they are used mainly for drinking. The summers are warm (average July temperature, 20°C) and the winters, mild (average January temperature, −4°C); the precipitation averages about 520 mm annually. The therapeutic agents are carbonated waters (mostly sodium chloride hydrocarbonate) with the following chemical compositions:

(spring No. 17),

(spring No. 4),

(spring No. 20). Waters are bottled and used for drinking. The pump rooms for these springs are located in a spacious park.

The carbonated water of the wells of Essentuki Narzans (a kind of mineral water) Nos. 1 and 2 are used for bathing, as is the water from the sodium-calcium sulfate-hydrocarbonate Gaazo-Ponomarevskii spring. There is pelotherapy (Tambukanskoe Lake silty mud) and treatment available for patients with gastrointestinal, liver, and biliary disorders and metabolic disturbances (obesity, gout, and sugar diabetes). There are sanatoriums for adults and children, boarding houses, bathhouses, mud-treatment clinics, inhalation therapy, and mechanotherapy institutes.

Essentuki has plants for bottling mineral water, in addition to canning, milk, brewing, and meat combines and knitwear, garment, and fashion footwear factories.

Essentuki arose in the 1830’s at the site of a military fortification that had been built in 1798. Its development as a health resort began in the second half of the 19th century, and it became a city in 1917.

Essentuki consists of three sections: the former cossack village, with village-type houses, the health resort, and the industrial section (Novye Essentuki). The health resort section has a park (40 hectares; planting was begun in 1849), a number of eclectic resort buildings dating from the turn of the 20th century (the N. A. Semashko mud-treatment center, the pump room for spring No. 4, both 1913–15). The Soviet period has seen the construction of numerous sanatoriums, such as the Moscow (1964), the Kalinin (1965), and the Ukraine (1972), boarding houses, a theater seating 1500 (1960’s), and a Narzan gallery; in addition, the park has been expanded. New Essentuki contains residential microraions (neighborhood units in urban planning) built with large-block and large-panel prefabricated five-story homes (second half of the 1960’s; Stavropol’ Institute of Construction Design).