Once a chukhonka, who knew many legends, was brought to the palace. The Empress listened with interest to her stories, but she began to talk about the horrors that, in her opinion, were associated with the Tsaritsyn Meadow, which stretched directly opposite Catherine's chambers
“Here, mother, in this meadow, for a long time, all the evil spirits have been found. Like the full moon, so they climb ashore. The drowned ones are blue, the mermaids are slippery, otherwise it happens that the water one will crawl out to warm himself in the moonlight,”the old woman said
Even during the reign of Peter I, on the left bank of the Neva, near St. Petersburg, there was a vast wasteland, which was called the Amusement Field. It hosted military parades and entertainment festivities with gorgeous fireworks, which all of Europe envied.
After the death of the emperor in 1725, the field received the name Tsaritsyn Meadow, since the palace of the dowager ruler of the Russian state Catherine I was built on its southern part.
With the coming to power of Alexander I, at the beginning of the 19th century, Tsaritsyn Meadow became a traditional place for parades and shows. At the same time, the name was assigned to it - the Field of Mars. By the 20th century, it was an abandoned wasteland, only occasionally put in order.
Meanwhile, events in Russia developed at a dizzying speed: the "small victorious" war with Japan, which ended in complete failure, the barely pacified first Russian revolution, the bloody First World War - all this with a heavy burden of numerous problems fell on the shoulders of the people. People were in poverty and grumbled, a revolutionary situation was brewing.
And so the line that separated law-abiding citizens from the rioters was crossed, and in February 1917 a revolution took place in Petrograd. Many people died in numerous street fights. It was decided to bury the victims in the Palace Square.
“It will be like a symbol of the collapse of the place where the hydra of the Romanovs sat,” wrote Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies. However, the famous writer Maxim Gorky and a group of cultural figures opposed such a burial, proposing the Field of Mars as an alternative. The proposal was accepted.
On March 23, the funeral of the victims of the February Revolution took place. In total, 180 coffins were lowered into the graves on the Champ de Mars, accompanied by the fiery speeches and sounds of the Marseillaise. According to the project of the architect Lev Rudnev, the construction of a grandiose granite tombstone in the form of a stepped quadrangle with four wide passages to the graves began. It took over three years to build it.
The idea to bury people who died for the cause of the revolution took root on the Champ de Mars. The Bolsheviks who came to power actively set about new burials. So, in 1918, the graves of Moisey Volodarsky, Moisey Uritsky, Semyon Nakhimson, Rudolf Sivers and four Latvian riflemen from the Tukums socialist regiment, who were killed by counter-revolutionaries, appeared.
By a special decree in December 1918, a commission was created to select worthy candidates for burial at the famous cemetery. In 1919-1920, under the leadership of the commission, nineteen famous Bolsheviks who died on the fronts of the civil war were buried.
Burials on the Champ de Mars continued until 1933. The last one who succeeded was Ivan Gaza, secretary of the Leningrad City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, who was burnt out at work. After that, the cemetery was declared a historical monument.
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In 1957, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the Eternal Flame was lit on it. Already in the 70s, there was a tradition to hold a solemn ceremony on the graves - laying flowers by the newlyweds.
However, not everything is so smooth in the history of the famous field. Even in the time of Catherine I it was known that this place was not good. According to eyewitnesses, before going to bed, the empress loved to listen to the stories of old women about ancient times.
Once a chukhonka, who knew many legends, was brought to the palace. The Empress listened with interest to her stories, but she began to talk about the horrors that, in her opinion, were associated with the Tsaritsyn Meadow, which stretched directly opposite Catherine's chambers.
“Here, mother, in this meadow, for a long time, all the evil spirits have been found. Like the full moon, so they climb ashore. The drowned ones are blue, the mermaids are slippery, otherwise it happens that the water one will crawl out to warm himself in the moonlight,”the old woman said.
“Here's an old fool, she scared to death,” the Empress said irritably and immediately ordered the Storyteller to be expelled. That same evening, Catherine left the palace on Tsaritsyn Meadow and never appeared there again.
180 years later, in the fall of 1905, a mysterious incident happened in St. Petersburg, which confirmed the ill fame of the Field of Mars. One night, a horse-drawn gendarme outfit followed Millionnaya Street. Hooves pounded on the pavement and the quiet voice of law enforcement officers was heard.
“Enti left-wing leaders, well, there are Jews and all kinds of students, the most inveterate bastard. They set them up against the tsar and throw bombs at them,”the gendarme non-commissioned officer lectured to the two recruits. Slowly they drove up to the gloomy bulk of the Field of Mars. Several lanterns shone dimly on its outskirts, beyond was impenetrable darkness.
"Hush," the officer suddenly became wary. "Do you hear?" From the depths of the field came some strange sounds, as if something large and wet were being whipped along the ground.
The rustling wind carried from the darkness a grave cold, the smell of mud and an insinuating girlish laugh. The horses of the gendarmes began to snore in fright. "But spoil with me!" - shouted the sergeant and, ordering his subordinates to remain in place, boldly directed the horse into the darkness. In less than a minute, a desperate cry and a horse stomping away were heard in the night.
The next morning, on Nevsky Prospect, a horse with a stray saddle was caught, and on the Field of Mars, a crumpled gendarme cap with traces of an incomprehensible substance resembling fish slime was found. Its unfortunate owner disappeared without a trace. The search for the disappeared did not last long, as riots broke out in the city, and the incident was forgotten.
After the erection of a tombstone to the victims of the revolution, the already unkempt and gloomy Field of Mars became even more ominous. The townspeople carefully avoided him and tried not to appear there at a late hour.
By the beginning of the 30s, the city authorities brought the territory of the Champ de Mars into a more or less proper form: they laid out lawns and flower beds, planted bushes and trees, installed lanterns and benches.
But despite such measures, the "oddities" associated with this place did not stop. So, in May 1936, in the psychiatric department of the hospital. Worker Patrushev was delivered to Trout. An ambulance took him away from the Champ de Mars, where he went crazy overnight.
After a hard day, Patrushev bought a quarter of vodka in the store and on the way home decided to wrap up in a quiet place where no one would bother him to post a check. It was already getting dark when he settled down on a bench not far from the monument to the fallen fighters of the revolution. All around was deserted, only in the far alley pre-conscripts marched.
The worker took a sip from the bottle, tasted a simple snack, grunted with pleasure and suddenly found a little boy standing next to him. When the man asked who he was and where he came from, the boy did not answer. Looking closer, Patrushev noticed with fear that the child had sunken and dull eyes, a swollen, blue face, and felt a nauseating smell emanating from him.
"Get lost, evil spirits!" - Shouted the proletarian and tried to push the youngster away, but he deftly grabbed his hand with rotten teeth and fell to the ground in a pile of fetid dust.
On the harrowing cries of the worker, pre-conscripts came running and called the doctors. Psychiatrist Andrievich frankly admitted that he had not yet met such a case of insanity in such a short time. “A very interesting case. It looks like an alcoholic psychosis, but why without a long binge? And those strange bite marks. Well, we will observe,”the doctor said in surprise. However, the psychiatrist's observations were not destined to last long, since only three days later Patrushev died of general blood poisoning.
In the era of developed socialism, in the mid-1970s, the famous Leningrad sociologist S. I. Balmashev began to study the problems of modern marriage. In the course of his work, it turned out that the "leader's yellow jersey" by divorce belonged to the Dzerzhinsky district of the city. Here, for every thousand registered marriages, there were up to six hundred broken up families a year. Such an anomalous situation interested the researcher, and he dug so deeply and thoroughly that afterwards he bitterly regretted it.
An analysis of the civil registration acts of the Dzerzhinsky district and numerous opinion polls showed that most of the divorces occurred immediately after the marriage. Moreover, the main reason was not trivial - they did not agree in character or treason, but drunkenness, drug addiction or the commission of a crime and the conviction of one of the spouses. In the course of the study, it turned out that the percentage of premature deaths among these unhappy families is incomparably higher than in the city as a whole.
Racking his head over this phenomenon, Balmashev found only one explanation for him. The fact is that in 1970, employees of the Wedding Palace of the Dzerzhinsky District of Leningrad initiated the innovation of laying flowers by newlyweds in places of military and labor glory. The city authorities supported a useful undertaking and assigned each of the sixteen registry offices a place for a new Soviet rite.
For example, in the Moscow region, flowers should have been laid at the memorial to the defenders of Leningrad, in Narva - at the main entrance of the Kirov plant, and in Dzerzhinsky - at the monument to the fallen fighters of the revolution on the Field of Mars. According to the observations of the sociologist, the newlyweds from the Dzerzhinsky registry office, who laid flowers on the graves of the revolutionaries, soon got divorced. Conversely, the newlyweds, who ignored this event, continued to live in love and harmony.
Balmashev even managed to find two women who witnessed how on the Champ de Mars some shabby and unnaturally pale type was attached to the wedding processions.
He appeared from nowhere and just as suddenly disappeared, as if dissolving in the air. Later, women saw him in their dreams, after which misfortunes happened in their families: someone close to them died, maimed or fell ill … The sociologist perfectly understood the danger that came from the Field of Mars, but he could not explain it correctly. At an enlarged meeting of the city party activist, he made a report in which he pointed out the unfavorable influence of the monument both on the families being created and on Leningraders in general.
As a result, Balmashev was expelled from the party, expelled from the institute, where he worked for twenty years, and an article of the corresponding nature appeared in one newspaper.
And today the Field of Mars attracts the attention of researchers. Their comments regarding the events on it boil down mainly to the following.
In the old days, among the primitive tribes inhabiting the Neva basin, there was a belief that on the treeless, swampy wastelands found along the banks of rivers, at night there were Sabbaths of water evil. The Karelian-Finnish epic "Kalevala" describes one hero who, having come to the "flat coast, the terrible coast" at night, saved his life only by playing the strings. n musical instrument, charming drowned men and mermaids with it.
If we use the data of the Holsmund cartographic atlas, then in the pre-Peter times, a wasteland stretched on the site of the present Field of Mars. Therefore, it is possible that it was here that the hero of the epic delighted the ears of evil spirits with his game.
In addition to the witches' sabbaths, researchers cite another reason for the oddities on the Champ de Mars. The fact is that the burials of the Bolsheviks of 1917-1933 were made in a cemetery, founded without church consecration and, figuratively speaking, on the blood of people who died during fratricidal clashes. Already only this initially did not allow turning the graves into a place of eternal rest for the dead.
In addition, the very tombstone of the architect Rudnev contributes to the accumulation of harmful energy in the cemetery, which poses a certain danger to people. Plus, at the beginning of the century, the sculptor was one of the followers of the Miktlantecutli Society (a sect of fans of the witchcraft cults of the Indians of Central America). His adherence to the secret teachings of the Aztecs and Mayans was embodied in the project of a tombstone on the Champ de Mars - a stylized copy of the funeral temples of Yucatan, which had the ability to concentrate the terrible energy of the dead within their walls.
Therefore, at present, the ill-fated Field of Mars in St. Petersburg poses a danger to the townspeople who decide to visit it.
"Secrets of Mysterious Creatures" by N. Brekhov.