The discovery of a stone woman - eduard

this is an old post from 09/22/2010

Firstly, I have joy: the camera is working again, the Sun, I am so grateful to you for your help!

On September 15, 2010, with one local historian, we went to his homeland, to the village of Volchya Gora, which is not far from Berendeev, Yaroslavl Region. From Alexandrov by train we reached the stop pl. 142 km and then walked a couple of kilometers. The weather was wonderful, calm and sunny, despite the fact that there were gray days before and after. Can't say yet what's coming Golden autumn, most likely, this is an instant "Indian summer".
Our goal was to visit the native places of my friend and, if possible, to explore the surroundings of Wolf Mountain. Passing through a small but mossy copse near the railway, we enter a field with oaks.

It was morning, it was not hot, not cold, the insects did not interfere, it was easy and familiar from an excess of feelings that he had finally got to his native place, he was talking about his life, and I listened to him and took a picture.

Wolf Mountain itself is located on the Berendey swamp. The Berendeevo swamp is an oval with a "ship" clearly visible on it - this is Volcha Gora. In the vicinity of the mountain there was a pagan temple, around it you can find boulders that sometimes resemble sitting people, sometimes different figures (depending on the imagination). Among the stones there are also "Blue stones". There are bluish-colored boulders in a clay quarry north of Wolf Mountain, and near the village of Chernetskoye there is a whole “cemetery” of such boulders. The mountain itself is a kind of "place of power", in different periods of history a lot happened in those places interesting events. And also there in 1966 Yu.A. Senkevich came, and then in the "Club of Travelers" they showed Volcha Gora. This is the view from her.

Gradually, we approached the village of the same name, which, in my opinion, gave the impression of being abandoned and forgotten. Approximately half of the houses are non-residential, some have completely collapsed or burned down. There were very few people, but my companion met 2-3 acquaintances, they recognized each other and shared memories for some time: how is he now, is this one alive and do you remember how it was then ...

Finally, we approached his house, no one lives there anyway, opened the door and got into the past. We walked around, looked at how it was now, he told me some stories from the past, how he grew up here and what this house means to him. Of course, everything is turned upside down there, but there are traces that this place was once inhabited.

The most such time of the year, when ripe apples are already falling with might and main, we picked them a little and I made the first snack. Then, we went, in fact, to the top of this mountain, where there is a round red-brick water tower.

If you shoot it from a certain angle, then it will look like something ancient oriental. It turns out that this is the highest point of the Klin-Dmitrov ridge - its height is 306 meters above sea level. The winds blow here and the most picturesque views of the surrounding swamps open from here. So, we approached the southern slope with a cliff and settled down for a halt. We are surrounded by the Berendeyevo swamp. From a distance, it does not look quite like a swamp, more like an overgrown plain, but in fact it is full of swampy places.

While my friend was resting, I, full of spirit, enthusiastically climbed the nearest slopes and took pictures of local beauties. Here, right below, a fragment of a narrow-gauge rail sticks out of the slope - peat was mined here and paths passed, in some places wooden sleepers are visible across the paths along embankments among the swamps. And a lot of stones of unknown origin and purpose. Who knows what else this land hides?

Having a snack, we go further, it becomes warmer, the sun is still warming. We pass by rickety fences, but there are also newly built houses, which for some reason do not want to be photographed. Hunting to shoot these old places, where everything is so saturated with history.

Having passed along the road and filming another video, we go downhill and see 2 destroyed buildings. Of particular interest are the ruins of gray stone. These are the remains of an old bathhouse, which was built in 1943 by captured Germans, employed here in peat extraction. They say that in its foundation they put an ancient pagan artifact - the Stone Baba. It is not possible to check whether this is exactly the case, but usually such legends do not arise from scratch.

On one of the former narrow-gauge railway lines, we go further south into the swamp and see how peat is smoldering in one place. There, this happens all year round and it is deadly dangerous to go off the path, not only because of falling into a swamp, but you can also fall into the inferno of smoldering peat. So we stomp along the path, it’s warm, we see how a very dark snake crawls into the grass from the path, I don’t know what kind of snake it is, but just in case we pay more attention under our feet. Along the way, two more of the same snakes come across, and if you also look around, you will see this.

In this hot summer, there were no strong fires here. Maybe because the swamp is flooded, as evidenced by ditches filled with water, which cut the entire swamp into sections. So you can move for a long time in the direction of the place that the acquaintance called as "garage", but we already decide to turn back, because there is still a lot to go, and a lot has been covered. An acquaintance of mine is in years, but he keeps a good temper and keeps fit by hiking in our neighborhood. Having reached the mountain along the road and climbing it again, we turn off and go the other way through abandoned and useless orchards, and under our feet there are scatterings of apples.

By the way, while I was wandering around nearby places, I took a picture of a curious stone of an unusual shape, which my friend, a local historian, drew Special attention. Maybe the truth is also some pagan power stone or something else?

We hurried to the platform, because we didn’t know exactly what time the rare electric trains pass here, so as not to be late and not to wait until the evening. Right in the woods near the railroad, some grayish snake with a light mark on its head rushed from under the feet to the side, but it was not possible to photograph it either - it was too fast and nimble creatures. While we were waiting for the train, we rested a little and ate our supplies. The train was late, they say that they are constantly late here from Yaroslavl.

The trip was a success: a friend visited his homeland, and I got a lot of impressions from visiting such a place. Then, on the Internet, I found

Description of the surrounding area

If it were possible, at least for a moment, to turn the wheel of history ten, twenty thousand years ago, then we would find ourselves on the shore of the beautiful and deep Berendeev Lake. And on high mountain-the peninsula, later named Volchya, was inhabited by people - strong, free and good-natured. Lived lived...

There was a legend about Tsar Berendey, about the wise princess Marya ... The legend is long. The native Berendey people want to believe that those fabulous events took place right here, in these parts. That Tsar Berendey, who had a beard to the waist, lived on the shore of this lake, on a high mountain, in marble palace. From here, from a height, he surveyed his possessions with a regal gaze, and sometimes, with an army devoted to him, he traveled around the lands of the kingdom ... It was from this legend that the name of the kingdom was born in Ostrovsky's play "The Snow Maiden".

A long time ago ancient lake turned into a peat bog. Berendeyevo swamp is located in the south Yaroslavl region, between the village of Davydovsky and the villages of Fedosovo, Pogorelka, Chernitskaya, Rodiontsevo, Miloslavka. The rivers Kirzhach and Trubezh flow from it. One flows into the Klyazma, the other into Lake Pleshcheyevo.

Swamps, swamps from ancient times for a person were not necessary, unsuitable for life land. For people, they were also an unsolved mystery. Since ancient times, people have endowed swamps with various legends, fairy tales and traditions. Many researchers have tried to unravel the mysteries of the swamps.
For a long time there have been legends and tales about the Berendey swamp, about its innumerable riches buried in swamps. Two centuries ago, one of the descendants of the Cabinet Secretary of Peter the Great N.P. Makarov, these legends prompted him to search for treasures on the banks of the Berendeev swamp and a hill that cuts into the swamp massif as a peninsula and is called on all large-scale geographical maps That's right - Wolf. Why is it so named? Legends say that on winter and autumn nights, the eerie howls of gray predators could be heard from here. So people called this mountain Wolf .. On this hill, in the middle of a dense forest, Makarov came across well-packed sites, garbage and wooden pavements. In 1820, D.I. Khvostov, who found earthen fortifications of the ancient town here.

In April 1848, A.N. Ostrovsky, who local residents also heard many legends and fairy tales. Their characters formed the basis of the play-tale "The Snow Maiden". A.N. visited again. Ostrovsky in 1868, when a railway and Berendeyevo station were built in these places.

In 1926, on the instructions of the regional newspaper Severny Rabochiy, the writer M.M. Prishvin write essays on peat mining. And he heard different legends here. Prishvin wrote about the "Berendeys" of the Soviet era in the stories "Forest drops", "Ship Grove" and "Pantry of the Sun". He liked it so much wild beauty this region, that he, being almost seventy years old, in 1941 settled in a manor-museum.

In the same place, near the Berendeev swamp, many were looking for a stone woman. Its location, according to eyewitnesses, is contradictory. Someone saw her at the foot of the Wolf Mountain, someone in the Clay Wasteland, and others in the vicinity of the village of Chernetskoye. Old-timers claim that it was exactly 60 years ago. In 1928, local historian L. Hamelman also undertook a search for a "woman". He did not find her, but he wrote down the story of a blind hundred-year-old resident of the village of Chernetsky F.P. During the construction of the Northern Railway, it was broken into pieces and they were laid in the foundations. railway bridge across the river Trubezh. And he allegedly transported these stones through the swamp.

There is a lot of information about the impressive boulders found at the foot of the Wolf Mountain. Some are shaped like sitting animals or fantasy characters. There are blue boulders in a clay quarry north of Wolf Mountain, and near the village of Chernetskoye there is a whole “cemetery” of such stones. They also report a bizarre stone with the outlines of a human face, which is located near the village of Bagrimovo. But, unfortunately, on this trip we were not able to check the information about the boulders. I hope that the Berendeyevo kingdom will still receive us as guests.

Not far from Berendeyevo, in the village of Davydovo, there is a ruined church with some preserved paintings. We decided to save you from counting domes, so we just give the coordinates, for those who are interested in this: N 56° 35.431" E 39° 05.421"

And in a clay quarry at coordinates N 56 ° 35.321 E 38 ° 59.705 "on slopes overgrown with grass and trees, mushrooms and strawberries grow.

Used information from the sites: www.dazzle.ru and www.pki.botik.ru

Cache Description

Cache contents

This stash contains a "themed" container. And this means that you don’t have to put any nonsense in them, but only the one that I wish. :-))) This container consists entirely of goodies associated with a swamp or forest:
1. Book "Who eats what"
2. A book of poems about animals
3.Notepad - frog
4.Cube for records "Frog"
5. A lizard toy growing in water.
6. Clockwork bird
7. Frog-sharpener

Encyclopedic YouTube

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✪ Hike to the Kubrinsky swamps.🌞 Autumn 2017🌞

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Hydrology

It is believed that 4-4.5 thousand years ago the swamp was still a lake, although it began to overgrow.

The alternation of transgressions and regressions (for peatlands - flooding and desiccation) in the center of the Volga-Oka interfluve quite exactly corresponds to the same fluctuations noted in the peatlands of Sweden by E. Granlund, as well as the curve of humidity of the continents of the Northern Hemisphere, the rhythm of which was determined in 1850-1900 A. V. Shnitnikov.

The swamp has always been a natural accumulator of the water balance of a large territory of the Zalessky region. It, like a lake in ancient times, gives life to two rivers - the Small Kirzhach and the Trubezh. But due to an engineering miscalculation of the 50s, when the main flow was directed to the Maly Kirzhach River by drainage channels, the Trubezh River became irrevocably shallow, and Pleshcheyevo Lake began to shallow and overgrow.

Development

In 1918, during a period of economic and energy crisis, on Volchya Gora, they began to cut down the forest, build worker barracks and develop peat. Peat was mined by hand: knee-deep in ice water, pieces were cut with shovels and taken away on wooden wheelbarrows, then the pieces were stacked. When they reached high humidity in peat and stumpiness, they stopped mining here and moved to other places. Already in 1938, 70 thousand tons were mined using the lump method for the amount of 246,160 rubles of the 1938 ruble exchange rate. At the beginning of the 1950s, the peat enterprise began to use a more progressive method of peat extraction using electric and then diesel peat harvesters. The development of a peat bog by a milling method, when peat chips were obtained, made it possible to open large areas Berendey swamps and develop the peat deposit completely, to layers of sapropel or lake sand.

Of the dozens of peatlands surveyed in the Pereslavl region in the early years of Soviet power, the Berendeyevo swamp is the largest and the very first to undergo industrial development. According to a detailed study of "Lengiprotorf" in 1939, almost 20 years after the start of development, "reserves of raw peat were determined at 173.5 million cubic meters." The swamp was used for industrial extraction of peat to power the Yaroslavl power plants and boiler houses of some large factories. Now there is a large peat enterprise, a briquette plant, an extensive railway junction and a socialist town with several villages around them.

With the development of the milling method appears new settlement with multi-storey buildings built of cinder-block bricks, shops, a school, a cultural center, repair shops and a hospital campus. In the early 60s, in order to ensure the fire safety of the peat bog, an artificial reservoir-lake was created, a favorite place for recreation and fishing for residents Central village. And on its shore, near the village of Davydovo, a briquette plant is being built, producing peat briquettes for heating settlements Soviet Union.

The development of the peat bog by the milling method contributed to unraveling the mysteries of the Berendeev swamp. From 1964 to 1979, more than 20 archaeological sites were discovered from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age 10 - 5 millennium BC.

Flora

The following types of orchids are noted in the swamp: Dactyl-root meat-red, Dactyl-root spotted, Dactyl-root Traunsteiner, Dremlik marsh, Cache ovoid, Ofris insectiferous, Lyubka two-leaved.

A detailed and poetic description of the landscape and flora of the Berendeev swamp at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is contained in the essay by botanist A.F. Flerov.

Archeology

The Berendeevo swamp is well known in paleogeographic and archaeological literature from numerous publications, articles and references. Systematic excavations on the peat bog were not carried out until the summer of 1979, although the first finds have been known since 1954.

In the mid-60s, in the western sector of the swamp, during milling peat extraction, several Mesolithic and Neolithic monuments were simultaneously uncovered and destroyed. Some of them (Berendeevo I, II, IIa, III, IV) were partially studied, while the rest are now completely destroyed. Only a small collection remained of them, collected on peat fields by a local enthusiast A. M. Bakaev. Judging by these finds, there were about 10 ancient settlements on the paleolake, in addition, single tools and fragments of Neolithic ceramics were found at 7 points.

In 1964, Sasha Bakaev, a student of the 5th grade of the Berendey eight-year school, brought to the Pereslavl Museum a whole portfolio of objects characteristic of the Neolithic era. Together with his comrades, he found them in a swamp during the development of peat by machines. The museum found it necessary to send its researcher to Berendeyevo. He later wrote that he was surprised at the richness of the camp of people who lived here 4-5 thousand years ago:

It is located 1.5 km south of Wolf Mountain. When extracting peat at the parking lot, a layer of about 1-1.5 meters deep was removed. When the peat machines reached the sand, objects incomprehensible to the workers began to come across on the surface: bone arrows, arrowheads, daggers, ceramics, individual bones of various animals. The abundance of objects on the surface of the parking lot amazed me. In just an hour and a half, my backpack was full ...

The hydronym is close to the name of the Berenda tract in the valley of the Brovarka River. Interesting legends recorded back in the 19th century are associated with the Berendeev swamp, which directly indicate the residence in this area of a different ethnic (non-Slavic and non-Finno-Ugric population), possibly “Pereyaslav Torks” (known in the annals as black hoods or berendichi). This is mentioned by the Geographical and Statistical Dictionary Russian Empire, reporting that in that part of the Berendeevsky swamp, which belongs to the Pereyaslavsky district, a hill rises, overgrown on all sides, except for the top, pine forest; on this top there are remains of ancient settlements. According to oral local legends, on the top of the mountain was the city of Berendey, and Tsar Berendey lived in it. It was on this folklore-historical basis that the well-known Russian fairy tale about the forest king Berendey arose. Obviously, the Torks got here during the wars of Yuri Dolgoruky and Andrey Bogolyubsky at the table in Kyiv, i.e., much later than the first decades of their stay on the lands granted to them by the Russian princes.

The mountain on which the village of Berendeevo is now located was in the past a peninsula jutting into former lake. The eastern and southern slopes of this cape are steep, rising 25-40 meters above the supposed shore of the lake. But the northwestern slopes rise to the top, having an elevation angle of no more than 20-22 meters. Here you can see traces of earthen fortifications. D. I. Khvostov was the first to pay attention to this settlement in 1820. Noting that the surroundings of the Berendeev swamp were donated by Peter I to his cabinet secretary Makarov, Khvostov writes that one of his descendants, N.P. wooden pavements inside the settlement of Berendeev". Pereslavets A. A. Selivanov, who visited the settlement on October 7, 1826, wrote:

The late autumn time did not allow me to completely solve all my searches for former city Berendeevo, it seems, has already been completely wiped off the face of the earth, but with all that said, on the day I was told, I was on the Berendeevo gorodets and, when I looked at it, I found this place quite elevated, occupying no small space, overgrown with forest. On this hillfort, from the sides touching the Berendeev swamp, the existence of a high rampart is clearly noticeable, which I ordered to dig up a little, and at the bottom of it there were many stones of different kinds ... in the middle of this hillfort there is a platform on which several small hills and pits are visible. Traces of the pavement, witnessed by Mr. Makarov, I have not yet found.

Legends and traditions

One of the legends about the victory of Russian soldiers over the Poles is confirmed by chronicle reports. On November 8, 1612, a battle took place on a field located between the village of Miloslavka and the village of Davydovo, Russian militias and a detachment of Pan Sapieha. And where the Ivanovka river flows into the Berendeyevo swamp, the Pereslavl detachments under the leadership of the governor Andrey Vilyaminov defeated the Poles.

Tsar Berendey

There are several legends about Tsar Berendey, his palace, golden carriage. Basically, these are interpretations of poetic legend.

stone woman

In different interpretations: “A mother named Rogneda goes to the lake and looks for her son. Finds him drowned. He curses the lake, for which he turns into a stone woman, and the lake turns into a swamp.

The location of the stone woman, according to eyewitnesses, is contradictory. Someone saw her at the foot of the Wolf Mountain, someone in the Clay Wasteland, and others in the vicinity of the village of Chernetskoye. Old-timers claim that it was exactly 60 years ago. At the foot of Wolf Mountain, in a sand pit, there are many impressive boulders. Some are shaped like sitting animals or fantasy characters. There are blue boulders in a clay quarry north of Volchya Gora, and near the village of Chernetskoye there is a whole “cemetery” of such boulders. More recently, I was informed about a bizarre stone with the outlines of a human face, which is located near the village of Bagrimovo.

Leshev stone

A large boulder of dark red color with an imprint resembling a human palm. Disappeared during the development of the Berendey swamp. According to the stories of local residents, in the 30s and 40s, when going hunting, men left tobacco on the stone, and women, gathering berries, brought homemade pastries to the stone - otherwise “the goblin will lead into the thicket”.

In art

In 1926, on the instructions of the regional newspaper Severny Rabochy, the writer M.M. Prishvin write essays on peat mining. And he heard different legends here. Prishvin wrote about the "Berendeys" of the Soviet era in the stories "Forest drops", "Ship Grove" and "Pantry of the Sun". In the book “Springs of Berendey”, he presented an image of a swamp, which differs from our ideas about it: “I live in a swamp, where the earth sways and a person hangs over a dark abyss, resting his foot on clusters of plants, where fogs are born and heavens are created.” For the writer, the swamp is a natural and at the same time spiritual reality that connects heaven and earth, it is the sphere of the ideal that exists in reality itself, although not accessible to everyone. Swamps - the kingdom of Berendey - Prishvin even connects with the image of the Invisible City: “Berendey is a wise king because he forced himself to serve everything that people call evil: mosquitoes, horseflies, midges, and swamps, and bumps - all this protects the Berendey kingdom from the invasion of the unworthy of people. Therefore, getting into the Berendey kingdom is the same as entering the Invisible City: you need to work hard, you need to be strong and pure in heart.

Berendey swamp, Berendey and Tsar Berendey are mentioned in the poetic works of various authors.

To you, dear Zalesie,
Where everything breathes so old,
Where there are so many fairy tales, so many songs,
I'm flying to you with my dream.
Kupan, Usolye, Kukhmar, Veksa,
The ancient Kremlin in the ring of ramparts,
Where Trubezh faithfully lay down
To keep silently the past of centuries.
Noisy Pleshcheyevo playing,
Forests whisper about something
Ringing in the soul, not ceasing,
Native edge of the voice.
“You know,” Bluestone whispers.
Do you know, remember, that I am a god?
No conversation between us
Lay, slave, a sacrifice at my feet.
- Hurry, hurry, the waves are raging,
Enemies at the walls, escape in the boat!
Swim, paddle! Who but lightning
Will you get on the water?
- On the Berendeyevo swamp -
The autumn rain beats in the forest
Don't go, someone is driving there
As a "woman" you perish, you disappear.
Oh end! Oh, blue Zalesie!
Chain of emerald shores
What heart does not dream
The magical reality of your dreams!

For the blue vaults
For spring waters
Children's fairy tales of nature call me,
To the white mountain, to the snowstorm forest,
Give a bow to the old man Zymorogu.
Pine vaults, deaf passages ...
I listen to nature's secret flute
I go through slumbers, not daring to wake up,
To the glades of childhood, to the country of Berendey ...
- Tryapkin N.I. Izluki: Poems. - M .: Young Guard, 1987. - S. 159.

Opening of the stone woman February 27th, 2014

this is an old post from 08/16/2011

Day of the Archaeologist, August 15, is dedicated. The article is published with the kind permission of A.M. Bakaev.

One of interesting discoveries 2010 was made by me and an amateur photographer E. Novikov from Karabanovo. The presence of a stone idol - the famous "stone woman" - on the southern outskirts of Volchya Gora in the Pereslavl district of the Yaroslavl region. This Berendey stone woman was searched for by many researchers for about a century, starting from the end of the 19th and the entire 20th century.
View of the Berendeevo swamp from the southern slope of the Wolf mountain. September 2010

The prehistory of the discovery and search for this idol is as follows. Since the end of the 18th century, among the inhabitants of villages and villages located on the banks of the Berendeev swamp, there were legends and legends, both about the swamp itself and about the town, lost among dense forests and swamps, on top of a mountain.
A great lover of antiquity, Count D.I. Khvostov, whose estate was located on the Kubr River, became interested in these stories. Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov had a friend, his neighbor-landowner N.N. Makarov. Makarov, and he was the great-great-grandson of the famous cabinet secretary of Peter the Great Alexei Vasilyevich Makarov, had an estate in the village of Balakirevo (near the Berendeev swamp).

In 1820, D.I. Khvostov asked N.N. Makarov to look for this legendary town on Wolf Mountain. Nikolai Nikolaevich, after asking local peasants about this, having visited late autumn, saw the residential area of the town and the garbage pavements, in a letter to the count he gave a description of it and local legends about this area. In 1826, another Pereslavl lover of antiquity, A.A. Selivanov, again at the request of D.I. Khvostov, was on the Berendey swamp on a high mountain overgrown with forest and hazel. He explored the settlement, saw its ramparts, several pits and small hills. At the foot of Wolf Mountain, local peasants showed him a large boulder, shaped like a woman, and told the legend associated with this idol.

In the 60s of the nineteenth century along West Bank Berendeev swamp is laid railroad tracks of the Northern Railway. With its opening in 1868, the Berendeevo station appeared. To lay the road here, in the lowland terrain, gravel and ballast sand were needed for the embankment - they then began to extract it in a quarry on the southern outskirts of Volchya Gora, and this is just one verst from the construction of the road. On carts, on horseback, ballast was brought up, for these purposes the supply road to the highway under construction was leveled along the bottom of the slope to the quarry. By the way, later, in 1943, this road was used for transporting sod peat mined by captured Germans - a narrow-gauge line was laid. Most likely, it was at the beginning of the development of the ballast sand quarry on Volchya Gora that the legendary “stone woman” was littered with soil ejection. The quarry continued to function until the early 70s of the twentieth century, and very intensively. That is why on the southern slope of Volchaya Gora (and here there was already a village of peat miners of the Berendeevsky peat enterprise since the mid-20s of the 20th century), such a deep and protruding recess was formed.

Later, in 1919 Pereslavl local historians M.I. a widow who turned to stone because her son, Berendey, drowned in the lake.

In subsequent years, the search for this idol was repeatedly undertaken. The old-timers of the nearest villages claimed that such a boulder existed near the foot of the mountain, they just pointed out different places him in the Berendey swamp. Yes, and described the idol in different ways. Someone said that the captured Germans broke the stone woman under the foundation of the bathhouse built here, and someone pointed out that it was smashed and taken under the foundation of the railway bridge across the Chernukha (Trubezh) river to the village of Vasilisino. Residents of the village of Chernetskoye said that a stone woman stood on the banks of the Berendey swamp on the outskirts of their village. Other coordinates were given on the shore of the swamp.

By the way, in the places indicated by the old-timers, I have recorded accumulations of boulders, sometimes of bizarre shapes, and near these places I have discovered archeological monuments. Without denying the possibility of finding stone idols and temples in these places on the banks of the Berendeev swamp, for 40 years I continued to search along the southern outskirts of Wolf Mountain. As a result, I discovered and explored two Stone Age sites there: Volchya Gora-I and 500 meters to the west of it, the Volchya Gora-II site. So, at the Volchya Gora-I site, zoomorphic stone sculptures and a stone god, stone cult churingi stones were found.

A stone head of a bear from the Volchya Gora-I site of the Late Mesolithic, approximately 8,000 years ago. This is a totemic (sacred) animal of the ancient tribes of all Eurasia (and America). The population of the same region, all the more, revered him for several millennia. After all, it was the bear that gave the name to a large ethnic group of ancient hunters and fishermen - Berendey.

Stone sculpture-head of a man, found by me at the Volchya Gora I site in 2003. This is a kind of sculptural portrait of a man of the final Bronze Age - the beginning of the Early Iron Age, i.e. a resident of the town on Wolf Mountain. The face of a man of the legendary Berendey people who lived here on the mountain more than three thousand years ago. This tribal grouping gave the name to the vast Berendeyevo swamp.

Basically, all these works of primitive communal man were made on sandstone and slate pebbles. Nature, as it were, suggested to the ancient hunters the figurines of animals, birds, etc., he only gave a little flint chisel features of forms and their details. By the way, the same figures were found at the Mesolithic site Chernetskoe-VIII, and next to the site, as I have already noted, there is also a cluster of large boulders (temple?).

And in mid-September 2010, we made sensational discovery: among the numerous boulders lying at the foot of the southern slope of the Wolf Mountain, a granite boulder was photographed, on which a prone man can be seen, clasping his head with his left hand (the pose of a woman crying from sadness). The shape of the stone with the woman lying on it is natural, only in some places of the idol are traces of stone processing visible: the left hand with fingers, the shape of the head and the right hand.

Here it is, the legendary stone woman of Wolf Mountain, finally found by us in September 2010. This boulder, like many others located here, was brought here by a glacier. Nature itself depicted a woman lying prostrate in sadness (and the legend tells of Berendey's mother petrified from grief), and ancient man only partially corrected the details of the head and hands with an instrument, creating an idol that was worshiped as a deity. Perhaps there was a megalithic complex of the ancient Berendeys, and this idol was the central figure of the temple (here, a lot of boulders are concentrated around it, now they are randomly located due to the destruction of the quarry). And once in antiquity, the boulders were arranged in a strict order.

It was such a stone woman at the foot of the Volchya Mountain that my grandmother Agrafena Bulygina described to me as a child (and this is the middle of the 60s of the 20th century), who saw her as a girl at the beginning of the 20th century, even before peat extraction on the Berendey swamp, where they went for cranberries. Gifts were presented to this idol at the beginning of the 20th century: handfuls of berries, bread. By drops of dew on this boulder, local peasants predicted the weather. For many years, the stone woman was littered with the ejection of soil from the quarry, but numerous swamp fires of recent years, rainwater washed away the sandy and peat soil applied to the boulder, and the stone woman of Wolf Mountain again appeared on the surface.
Undoubtedly, this is one of the most important and interesting finds 2010.

Undoubtedly, this unique monument the Volga-Oka basin of the Blue Stone type on Lake Pleshcheyevo or the Krivandinsky complex near Shatura, recently discovered by archaeologist V.V. Sidorov. It must be assumed that such megalithic complexes stone age in this region it was not enough. But they have not survived to our time (accidentally or deliberately destroyed). The Volchegorsk complex is also important because not only artifacts of the everyday nature of the ancient inhabitants were found here, but also objects of art. cult purpose.

A.M. Bakaev, local historian-archaeologist, Karabanovo, 2010

Bakaev A.M. local historian-archaeologist

The Berendeevo swamp is located in the south of the Yaroslavl region or, as Brockhaus and Efron wrote at one time, “in the Aleksandrovsky district of the Vladimir province, on the borders of Pereyaslavsky and Yuryevsky, 10 versts long, 4-5 versts wide. There are traces of habitation; according to local legend, the city of Berendeev was here, where Tsar Berendey lived.

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For a long time there have been legends and tales about the Berendey swamp, about its innumerable riches buried in swamps. Two centuries ago, one of the descendants of the Cabinet Secretary of Peter the Great N.P. Makarov, these legends prompted him to search for treasures on the banks of the Berendeev swamp and a hill near the swamp, popularly called Wolf Mountain. On this hill, in the midst of a dense forest, he came across well-packed platforms, garbage and wooden pavements.

In 1820, D.I. took up the search for treasures. Khvostov, who found earthen fortifications of the ancient town here.

The Krivichi Slavs began to live here, on the elevated banks of rivers and streams. The main occupation of the Slavs was fire farming, cattle breeding, beekeeping, hunting and fishing. Next to their settlements, the Slavs had cemeteries - burial mounds. The closest of them to the Berendeev swamp are located near the village of Kiucher. The toponymy of the area has Slavic roots: the rivers Trubezh, Sobolka, Ivanovka, Chernukha, the villages of Vasilisino, Rodiontsevo, Lavrovo, Davydovo, Miloslavka. The origin of the name of the Berendeev swamp itself is still a mystery. Some researchers associate this name with the Berendey tribal group, well known to historians studying Kievan Rus 12th century. Allegedly, black hoods (as the Russian chronicles called them for the high fur hats that Berendei wore on their heads) came here on contractual terms to protect the princely borders. But, it is unlikely that the name of the swamp came from these nomadic steppes. A.L. Nikitin connects this toponym with the Slavic words: beredit, i.e. worries.

In our opinion, this toponym is more ancient and at its root lies the word "bear" - ber, a sacred taboo name, act, Russian. to do - “take deeds” (“people-bears”, “people-wolves”) - isn’t the name “Wolf Mountain” from here?

The legends about these people were passed down from generation to generation, overgrown with fiction and fables. They have come down to us in the form of fairy tales and legends. One such, at the beginning of the 20th century, was recorded by the Pereslavl local historian and ethnologist M.I. Smirnov in the village of Lavrovo, and in 1919 - a collector of local folklore - legends, stories, fairy tales and songs - S.E. Elkhovsky processed it, giving it a poetic meaning.

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There are several legends about Tsar Berendey, his palace, golden carriage.

Basically, these are interpretations of a poetic legend. There are also a number of legends about the stone woman:

“A mother named Rogneda goes to the lake and looks for her son. Finds him drowned. He curses the lake, for which he turns into a stone woman, and the lake turns into a swamp.

It is interesting that older legends are intertwined with later ones. There is no doubt that in the eyes of people, the lake has turned into a marshy swamp in 3-4 thousand years.

It was these legends that prompted some researchers at the end of the eighteenth century to search for a town on a high mountain. Volchya Gora served as a suitable reference point, which was free from forest, and indeed there were earthen ramparts here, which was confirmed by D.I. Khvostov and A.A. Seliverstov.

In April 1848, A.N. Ostrovsky, who also heard many legends and fairy tales from local residents. Their characters formed the basis of the play-tale "The Snow Maiden". He spoke about the locals in the language of Tsar Berendey in the third act of the tale:

"The generous people
Great in everything - to interfere with idleness
He will become everything: work, work like that,
Dance and sing - so plenty until you drop.
Looking at you with a reasonable eye, you will say,
That you are an honest and kind people.

A.N. visited again. Ostrovsky in 1868, when a railway and Berendeyevo station were built in these places.

In 1926, on the instructions of the regional newspaper Severny Rabochiy, the writer M.M. Prishvin write essays on peat mining. And he heard different legends here. Prishvin wrote about the "Berendeys" of the Soviet era in the stories "Forest drops", "Ship Grove" and "Pantry of the Sun". He liked the wild beauty of this region so much that, being almost seventy years old, in 1941 he settled in a manor-museum.

"Botik" on Lake Pleshcheyevo. During the dashing years of the war, he often visited the vicinity of the Berendeev swamp, talked a lot with local residents, and hunted.

Pereslavl historian and local historian M.I. often visited here. Smirnov, who was also looking for archaeological objects. He discovered Slavic mounds in the villages of Kiucher and Vasilisino. He hoped to discover the legendary Gridin's town on Wolf Mountain, but to no avail. He recorded all his searches in his diary notes. They found records of a search and a stone woman.

The first mention of a stone woman dates back to 1830 in the journal Pedestrians from Moscow to Rostov.

In 1869, the Yaroslavl local historian V.I. Lestvitsin in his travel notes confirms the presence of one in the vicinity of the Berendeev swamp.

In 1928, local historian L. Hamelman also undertook a search for a "woman". He did not find it, but he wrote down the story of a blind hundred-year-old resident of the village of Chernetsky F.P. Shchetinin, who claimed that she used to be near the village of Chernetsky, was the size of an oven, had the figure and face of a woman. During the construction of the Northern Railway, it was broken into pieces and they were laid in the foundations of the railway bridge across the Trubezh River. And he allegedly transported these stones through the swamp.

In 1940, the Yaroslavl anti-religious museum made an attempt to find the stone woman again, but again without success.

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In 1960, the historian V. Sagetdinov carried out a search for the same "woman". And he did not find it, but claimed that he opened a temple with stone figures.

In 1965, employees of the Pereslavl-Zalessky Museum of History and Art visited Volchya Gora: K.I. Ivanov, V.I. Panfilov, A.A. Zelentsov and S.D. Vasiliev. The latter wrote that their reconnaissance discovered earthen fortifications of the settlement.

In 1966-67, archaeologist A.L. Nikitin.

The location of the stone woman, according to eyewitnesses, is contradictory. Someone saw her at the foot of the Wolf Mountain, someone in the Clay Wasteland, and others - in the vicinity of the village of Chernetskoye. Old-timers claim that it was exactly 60 years ago.

We also carried out reconnaissance on the mountain and its environs. At the foot of Wolf Mountain, in a sand pit, there are many impressive boulders. Some are shaped like sitting animals or fantasy characters. There are blue boulders in a clay quarry north of Volchya Gora, and near the village of Chernetskoye there is a whole “cemetery” of such boulders. More recently, I was informed about a bizarre stone with the outlines of a human face, which is located near the village of Bagrimovo. In ancient times, people worshiped such stones, sacrificed various gifts to them. And it is not surprising that the echoes of Slavic (pagan) rituals have survived to this day. Until now, sometimes you can see bouquets of flowers, berries, mushrooms or pieces of bread near such boulders. Perhaps the stone woman is nothing more than a boulder, shaped like a female figure of natural origin.

From western slope Volchaya Gora through the swampy floodplain of the Trubezh (Chernukha) river, a garbage-lag path was traced; while cleaning the riverbed, fragments of a 17th-century black-glazed jar and an iron knife were found. Perhaps these finds are a confirmation of the legends about the robbers who once settled here during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov. These robbers were also called "walking people." Dissatisfied with the regime of government of the sovereign and his nobles, they formed around themselves gangs of simple smerds and raided estates. These legends formed the basis of some chapters of A.P. Chapygin "Walking People" and are mentioned in the story by A.K. Tolstoy "Prince Silver". It is appropriate to recall here that in 1930, a resident of the village of Rodiontsevo - Petrov, in his garden during the planting of apple trees, in one of the dug holes, he found chain mail.

In the vicinity of the Berendeev swamp there are many old villages and villages.

There are legends about some of them. So it is said about the village of Davydovo that it was named after the warrior Davyd, one of the few surviving Russian warriors who entered into an unequal battle with the advanced detachments of the Mongols Batu Khan in the spring of 1238. The village of Dubrovka was the estate of Prince Alexander Yaroslavovich Nevsky. Here he hunted, and here, together with his brother Andrei, the great Prince of Vladimir, Andrei's wife came, who attracted Alexander. He gave her this estate, after which it became known by her name - Dubravka.

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There is a legend about the victory of Russian soldiers over the Poles, which is confirmed by chronicle reports.

On November 8, 1612, a battle took place on a field located between the village of Miloslavka and the village of Davydovo, Russian militias and a detachment of Pan Sapieha. And where the Ivanovka river flows into the Berendeyevo swamp, the Pereslavl detachments under the leadership of the governor Andrey Vilyaminov defeated the enemy army. The toponym of the village Miloslavka is interesting, the decoding of which was given by A.L. Nikitin.

The history of the settlement Berendeevo begins at the end of the 19th century. Berendeyevo station was built in 1866. According to the plans of the engineers - builders, the railway was supposed to pass not here, but in a trap and connect Sergiev Posad and Pereslavl-Zalessky. But the big manufacturers in Alexandrov persuaded the builders to build a railroad through their city. And, in order to connect the road with Pereslavl-Zalessky, the Berendeevo station was built with a small station settlement (now peat miners site No. 1). At that time, on the site of the future village, there were several houses of coachmen who delivered raw materials to Pereslavl factories and took finished products from there to railway. There was also a church (now restored) and a tavern "Blue Danube".

In 1918, during the period of the economic and energy crisis, on Volcha Gora, they began to cut down the forest, build workers' barracks and develop peat. The conditions for peat extraction were difficult - peat was mined by hand: knee-deep in ice water, pieces were cut with shovels and transported on wooden wheelbarrows, then the pieces were stacked. When they reached high humidity in peat and stumpiness, they stopped mining here and moved to other places. The peat reserves of the Berendeev swamp, according to Lengiprotorf, were colossal - 173.5 million cubic meters. Already in 1938, 70 thousand tons were mined using the lump method for the amount of 246,160 rubles of the 1938 ruble exchange rate. At the beginning of the 1950s, the peat enterprise began to use a more progressive method of peat extraction using electric and then diesel peat harvesters. The development of a peat bog by a milling method, when peat chips were obtained, made it possible to open large areas of the Berendeev swamp and develop the peat deposit completely, down to layers of sapropel or lake sand.

With the development of this method, a new village with multi-storey buildings built of cinder-block bricks, shops, a school, a community center, repair shops and a hospital campus appears. In the early 60s, in order to ensure the fire safety of the peat bog, an artificial reservoir-lake was created, a favorite place for recreation and fishing for the residents of the Central village. And on its shore, near the village of Davydovo, a briquette plant is being built, producing peat briquettes for heating the settlements of the Soviet Union.

Archaeological exploration and research of subsequent years by the author, together with teachers of additional education in the city of Alexandrov - M.G. Kornev and V.V. Savin, allowed to open the archaeological site Volchya Gora on the southern outskirts of Volchya Gora.

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Here, while plowing gardens, we collected considerable material: flint tools, ceramics, and so on. About a thousand artifacts date back to the Late Mesolithic, Middle Neolithic, and Early Bronze Ages. Fragments of stucco reticulated and smooth-walled ceramics from the Early Iron Age ( 6th - 5th centuries BC.).

Among the mass of archaeological material of different periods, 15 items of votive (dedicated to the gods) cult purpose were found here. These are small flat stones made of shale with fine engraving in the form of lattices (Slavic symbol "Sown field"), corner badges (see figure No. 1 - 3); ornithomorphic figurines made of pebbles (see Figure Nos. 5, 6); zoomorphic figurine on a flint plate (see figure No. 7).

Rice. 1. Wolf mountain. Stone engraved in the form of symbols - "Makosh", "Sown field" and "Unsown field". Shale.

Rice. 2. Wolf mountain. A stone with an engraving in the form of a symbol - "Trojan". Shale.

Rice. 3. Wolf mountain. Stone engraved with letters. Shale.

Rice. 5. Wolf mountain. Engraved stone. Pebble.

Rice. 6. Wolf mountain. Stone engraved in the form of symbols - "Makosh" or "Unsown field". Pebble.

Rice. 7. Wolf mountain. Engraved stone. silicon wafer.

Another zoomorphic figure - the muzzle of an animal, most likely a bear, is carved from limestone nodule (see Figure No. 8).

Rice. 8. Wolf mountain. Zoomorphic figurine - muzzle of an animal (bear), limestone.

The bulk of these objects of worship and art of the Stone Age belong to the Mesolithic era (they are more than 8 thousand years old).

A slate stamp for ornamenting pottery belongs to the Neolithic era (a little over 5 thousand years ago). On it, an engraving depicts a dwelling (see figure No. 9).

Rice. 9. Wolf mountain. Stamp with the image of a dwelling (symbol "Dyy") for ornamenting pottery. 5000 BC Slate.

A unique find is a flat stone with a drawing of a man. The drawing is made in profile with black mineral paint diluted in fat (see figure No. 4).

So far, it is difficult to chronologize this find, because in the Volga-Oka basin such a petroglyph is found for the first time.

No less unique is another sculpture. This is a realistically executed human head with clearly defined facial features and a carved headdress ornament. The sculptural portrait is made of a limestone cylinder (see Figure No. 10).

Rice. 10. Wolf mountain. Sculptural portrait of a man with a combination of symbols "New Life" and "Water of Mary". Limestone.

Rice. 11. Wolf mountain. An idol with a combination of "New Life" and "Water of Mary" symbols. Early Iron Age.

This find is strikingly different from other cult objects. It is possible that this sculpture is a portrait of Berendey.

All these pebbles and figurines were found on the outskirts of Wolf Mountain, where the locals most of all indicated the location of the stone “woman”.

Now we can more accurately say that the stone "woman" was the central figure of the Slavic (pagan) temple, which was worshiped both in the era of stone and bronze, and one of the tribal groups of the early Iron Age, which gave the huge swamp - Berendeyevo.

In 1943, captured Germans, whose camp was located not far from Wolf Mountain, smashed a stone "woman", using its pieces in the foundation of a bathhouse under construction ...

Soviet paleogeographers M.I. Neishtadt and N.A. Khotinsky, for the first time in the USSR, used the radiocarbon dating method for marsh-lake deposits in the Berendeevo swamp. It was possible to establish that the intense swamping of the lake began 6 thousand years ago. During the archaeological exploration, we found items of peat pioneers in peat quarries: iron fittings for wooden shovels, details of wheelbarrows, rails of a narrow-gauge railway.

No less significant than peat for National economy and industry turned out to be colossal reserves of lake silt-sapropel.

Ecological catastrophe of the region in last years swamp fires began. They did not bypass the Berendeyevo swamp either. The fires destroyed large areas. Together with peat, priceless tools of the past were destroyed.

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Intensive peat mining, and then fires, destroyed the nesting sites of upland birds, the habitats of elks, wild boars and other smaller animals. The snakes spread to different places, including people's homes.

The swamp has always been a natural accumulator of the water balance of a large territory of the Zalessky region. It, like a lake in ancient times, gives life to two rivers - the Small Kirzhach and the Trubezh. But due to an engineering miscalculation of the 50s, when the main flow was directed by drainage channels to the Maly Kirzhach River, the Trubezh River became irrevocably shallow, and the pearl of Zalesye, Lake Pleshcheyevo, began to shallow and overgrow.

Berendeevo swamp is undoubtedly a historical and natural monument center of Russia. Berendeevo swamp is an integral part of the Pereslavl region - a region rich in its history and culture. Edges sung in legends, traditions, songs.

Love for one’s land, people and its history can hardly be expressed better than in his poem, local historian Sergei Evgenievich Elkhovsky did it at the beginning of the 20th century:

"To you, dear Zalesie,
Where everything breathes so old,
Where there are so many fairy tales, so many songs,
I'm flying to you with my dream.
Kupan, Usolye, Kukhmar, Veksa,
The ancient Kremlin in the ring of ramparts,
Where Trubezh faithfully lay down
To keep silently the past of centuries.
Noisy Pleshcheyevo playing,
Forests whisper about something
Ringing in the soul, not ceasing,
Native edge of the voice.
“You know,” whispers the Bluestone.
Do you know, remember that I am a god?
No conversation between us
Lay, slave, a sacrifice at my feet.
- Hurry, hurry, the waves are raging,
Enemies at the walls, escape in the boat!
Swim, paddle! Who but lightning
Will you get on the water?
- On the Berendeyevo swamp -
Autumn rain beats in the forest -
Don't go, someone is driving there
As a "woman" you perish, you disappear.
Oh end! Oh, blue Zalesie!
Chain of emerald shores
What heart does not dream
The magical reality of your dreams!

Bakaev A.M.

Literature:

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, “F.A. Brockhaus - I.A. Efron", in 86 volumes, 1890 - 1907.

Tales from Russian legends. "Journal of pedestrians", - M .: 1834.

"Ladies' Journal", published by Prince Shalikov, 1827, part 19, No. 13.

Khvostov D.I., On the celebrities of Pereslavl-Zalessky in ancient and modern times and the sixth Sunday in Pereslavl-Zalessky, St. Petersburg. 1820.

The toponym "Davydovo" is taken from a local legend.

Nikitin A.L., Plowed land, - M .: 1973.

Vasiliev SD, Historical monuments in the vicinity of Pereslavl-Zalessky, Yaroslavl. 1968.

Karamzin N.M., History of the Russian state, T. 2.

Grekov B.N., History of Kievan Rus.

Archive of Elkhovsky S.E.

Reports PEZANPROB. Peat fund of the Yaroslavl region, - M.: 1947.

Transferred by the author to the Pereslavl-Zalessky Museum of History and Art.

Stored in the funds of the Pereslavl-Zalessky Museum.

There were reports from local residents about the finds of iron fragments of sabers, arrowheads and copper coins on Wolf Mountain.

Tyunyaev A.A., The history of the emergence of world civilization. - M.: 2006 - 2007.

Tyunyaev A.A., Encyclopedia of swastika symbols. - M.: 2006 - 2007.

Khotinsky N.A., Holocene of Northern Eurasia, - M.: 1977.