Surreal picture. It can not be so. How? However, it is. The small town of Kalyazin is located 180 km from Moscow along the Yaroslavskoye and Dmitrovskoye highways on the very bank of the Volga River. By car it will take 3 - 3.5 hours. Like many provincial cities of Russia, this city connects the history of its birth with the creation of a fortress-monastery, around which a settlement grew, and later on on opposite sides of the river two more settlements arose, united in 1775 with each other and received by order of Empress Catherine II; city status.
In 1800 there was built a bell tower at the Nikolsky Cathedral. The height of the bell tower was 74.5 m. In 1939-40, when the Uglich reservoir was created, the old part of Kalyazin was in the flooded zone; the cathedral was dismantled, and the bell tower was partially under water. Later, an artificial island with a pier for boats was created around the bell tower. Nowadays, the submerged bell tower has become a landmark of the city and attracts many tourists.
All structures in the flooded area were to be either destroyed or moved to a non-flooded place. It is impossible to move the stone cathedral and, like all stone buildings, they began to demolish it. However, one of the enthusiastic architects stood in the way of the breakers, even traveled to Moscow, but persuaded to leave the bell tower of the cathedral as a lighthouse, because the Volga in this place makes a sharp turn, almost at an acute angle. There is, however, a version that the bell tower was not blown up because they simply did not have time before the spring flood, but it does not stand up to criticism, because the demolition was controlled by the almighty NKVD, it was not blown up this year, it would be blown up next. The version about the lack of explosives is also untenable, for the same reason.
Another thing is the bell, which hung on the uppermost tier of the bell tower. It had to be removed. We have all seen newsreel footage, where the bell is pushed out through the arched opening of some bell tower, and it falls, crashing to the ground. The same should have happened in Kalyazin. The bell was removed from the suspension and lowered onto the logs laid in the archway. And then it turned out that the bell simply does not pass through this opening, either higher or wider than it. Since there was already an imperial instruction not to blow up the bell tower, they did not demolish the tier, but it took a long time to stretch the arched opening (and the spring flood was just around the corner), it was necessary to lower the bell in a tier lower, where the opening is wider. When lowering, the temporary suspension could not stand, and the bell collapsed on the logs prepared below.
The multi-ton (501 pounds) colossus easily broke them, like all the floors of the lower tiers. It so happened that the bell fell evenly and not rapidly, lingering on each ceiling, and, in the end, stood on the vault of the bell tower basement, which thought and thought, and broke too. From the open gates of the lower tier, clouds of brick dust, some pieces of paper, chips were blown out, a rumble was heard, the ground trembled. As a result, the bell ended up in a deep basement.
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It is clear that the comrades were not ready for such a turn of events. Everything was prepared to lower the bell, not raise it. It was clear that it was simply impossible to manage before the flood, and they simply waved their hand at the bell. By early summer, when the flood subsided, it turned out that the basement was flooded with water. And they again waved their hand at the bell, now for a long time (it would seem - forever, but no). War By the beginning of the war, the level of the reservoir reached the design level, and the bell tower was removed from the coast by a good 200 meters. The base of the bell tower went under a seven-meter layer of water, almost one and a half tiers.
A snow-white needle in the middle of blue waves, it's beautiful, but the locals were not happy, for them, those who stayed in Kalyazin, and did not move to another city, the bell tower became a symbol of the murder of the city. And they didn't like her. Except, of course, the ubiquitous boys who immediately swam to the bell tower with the opening of the swimming season. It was they who brought the first rumor that the bell, lying in the flooded basement of the bell tower, was buzzing. These are fairy tales, the adults said, this cannot be. However, it can. On a clear moonlit night, in early June 1941, the bell rang for the first time. The next night, the city did not sleep. The bell began to ring. Not often, every few minutes, but until the morning.
The old men said that it was an alarm, that - for war. And on the night of June 22, the bell was already ringing all night often and strongly. A low rumble spread by the waters for many kilometers, the alarm was heard in all coastal villages, even some Kashin residents (from Kalyazin to Kashin in a straight line for about 20 km) said they heard it. The news of the beginning of the war was already perceived by everyone as an expected event … After June, the bell seemed to quieten down, and at the beginning of winter, right out of the ice, the alarm sounded again … This was exactly before the start of the counteroffensive near Moscow. The residents of Kalyazin noticed that the bell began to ring before the start of the big battles, before the Battle of Stalingrad, before the Kursk. At the end of April 1945 he called for a long time, foreshadowing the battle for Berlin. The bell tower among the water is beautiful and sad. After all, once there were streets and squares, life was in full swing. Kalyazin fell apart. The mouth of the Zhabnya River, which expanded as a result of the construction of the Uglich Hydroelectric Power Station, tore off the river Svistukha from the main part of the city, barely visible in the distance. The third part of Kalyazin, the one that surrounded the ancient monastery, disappeared under water.
And earlier, when Kalyazin was not yet flooded, St. Nicholas Cathedral looked like this:
And now like this: