The place, according to a long-standing habit, is called Zhiguli, Zhiguli mountains. This is a part of the Volga Upland on the right bank of the Volga, bend around the bend of the river and called Samarskaya Luka. Everything is obvious with the geographical location, there are no questions here. But with the name of our native, albeit small, but still a mountain range, questions arise.
And the point is not only that the names of our places have changed from century to century and from geographer to geographer. For example, a certain Persian author of the 10th century in the "Book on the Limits of the World from East to West" calls them the Pechenezh Mountains (apparently from the name of the Pecheneg people who lived approximately in these places).
In the middle of the 16th century, the name Maiden Hills, which is more familiar to today's inhabitants, appears in the Kazan Chronicle. It is this name that gives an excellent basis for myth-making on the theme of the feminine principle of these places - the warlike Amazons, the Usolsk sisters-heroes or the modern Mistress of Samara Luka.
Another version connects the origin of the name with robber bands that have lived in the mountains for many years. The owners of the captured ships had to either pay a bribe or be flogged with burning rods. Such flogging was called "burn", and the people who made it were called "Zhiguli". Foreigners also had another name for the Zhiguli mountains - Cossack, which in their understanding also meant that there were dangerous, robbery places. Even Adam Olearius warned about robbery and the Cossacks who walked in the area of Devyaya Gora, where the Volga just comes right up to the mountains. Modern researchers derive the name Zhiguli from the Turkic word "dzhiguli" by the name of the barge haulers, whose work was once common on the Volga shores.
Repin's painting reflects the work that was once familiar to these places.
VF Barashkov's dictionary of historical toponyms asserts that the name "Zhigulevskie Gory" is derived from the name of the village Zhiguli, and at first it meant only that part of the mountains of Samarskaya Luka, which was located near this village. It is difficult to argue with this, because from the village of Usolye there are the Usolsky mountains, near Berezovka - Berezovsky, near the Zhiguli - Zhigulevsky, near Yablonevy Ravine - Yablonevy, near the Sok River - Sokovy (now Sokolya) mountains.
And now, not far from the aforementioned village of Zhiguli, a new and rather interesting version of the origin of the name of these places appeared. Here is how it was.
At the end of August 2016, a Moscow research group headed by V. L. Pravdivtsev arrived in the city of Togliatti. The research conducted by this group continues the ideas of two of our famous compatriots and contemporaries - an astrophysicist, an employee of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, and then the Pulkovo Observatory, Professor Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev and Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Vlail Petrovich Kaznacheev.
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As it may seem at first glance, there is little in common between astrophysics and medicine, and even more so, where they are, and where - Togliatti. However, fate decreed that these personalities and events came into contact with us, in Zhiguli.
These two people were united by an interest in studying the many physical and psychological effects that can be obtained using mirrors. Although academic science still insists that nothing can travel faster than light in the physical world known to us, Professor Kozyrev experimentally proved the opposite. Using a telescope developed by him, he determined not the apparent position of the stars in the sky, which differs from the real one due to the limited speed of light, but their real position. The most incredible thing is that his developments also showed the future position of the stars - the one in which they will find themselves in thousands of years, when the light emitted by them TODAY reaches the inhabitants of the future Earth. The nature of the radiation that carries such information is unknown, but Kozyrev foundthat they can be taken with specially shaped aluminum reflectors. In honor of the discoverer, these installations were named "Kozyrev's mirrors".
Experiments with Kozyrev's devices were carried out in the 70s of the XX century. And in the early 1990s, experiments with "mirrors" were continued by VP Kaznacheev, albeit with an emphasis on the psychophysiological features of the work of such structures.
Vlail Kaznacheev and Nikolay Kozyrev
Special cylindrical aluminum structures were made using the effect discovered by Kozyrev. Experiments on supersensible perception in these settings have led to sensational results. It turned out that a person placed in the space of these "mirrors" suddenly has strange visions. They can relate to the past and the future, or enable the operator to receive information about events that occur hundreds of kilometers away. The research group of the "Unknown" center under the leadership of V. L. Pravdivtsev took part in the experiments for most of this period of time.
During his previous visit to our city in 2011, Vitaly Leonidovich spoke in sufficient detail about the unusual results of his experiments. For example, once an ancient symbol, known today as the “Banner of Peace”, was introduced into one of the experimental "Kozyrev's mirrors". And then, Vitaly Leonidovich said, the inexplicable happened. Ball lightning flashed inside the installation (this despite the fact that these installations have no energy sources, and it would seem that there is nowhere to take lightning). There was a smell of ozone, magnetic anomalies arose, and a luminous disc-shaped object appeared above the building where the experiment was carried out.
Geophysical services on Dikson, where the experiment was carried out, at that moment registered a particularly strong disturbance of the magneto- and ionosphere, and a bright colored aurora borealis appeared over the village. One could write off what is happening as a coincidence with any natural anomalies, but in a series of seven experiments, this was repeated five times. In this case, a luminous object in the sky appeared and disappeared with an accuracy of a minute at the beginning and end of work in the "Kozyrev mirrors". So understand, as you wish, the sacred meaning of the mentioned symbol and its influence on the information and physical fields of our planet …
According to V. L. Pravdivtsev, during the experiments with "Kozyrev's mirrors", other mysterious facts were discovered. For example, during experiments on remote telepathic communication between two people, the observer often received the mental images transmitted to him many hours later - as if this information was stored somewhere all the time. But the most striking thing is that in more than a third of the cases, the observer perceived thought images long before they were emitted by the operator. This generally does not fit into any modern understanding of the world order. But, nevertheless, the fact is the fact.
Works with "Kozyrev-Kaznacheev mirrors" were devoted to medical problems and other issues of cognition. In particular, the operator, being inside the installation, could “tune in” to the geographical location of his stay and receive interesting information about the peculiarities of his nature, culture or history of this place.
The specialists of the Pravdivtsev group try to carry out research not only in a stationary laboratory mode, but also take out "Kozyrev-Kaznacheev mirrors" to various places in Russia and abroad. Of particular interest to them are territories that have established themselves among the people as "places of power" - those that are distinguished by a special influence on human health or the presence of abnormal geophysical phenomena. Naturally, Vitaly Leonidovich's group simply could not pass Samarskaya Luka and the city of Togliatti. Therefore, in August 2016, we again hosted them in our city. Those interested in Togliatti could spend several tens of minutes in the "mirrors", feel the influence of these attitudes and share their impressions with the researchers.
And one day, all our guests and four members of the Togliatti UFO Commission went to the area of the Molodetsky Kurgan to conduct field experiments on this, one of the most culturally, informationally and energetically saturated places of the Samara Luka.
Assembling the "Kozyrev - Kaznacheev mirror" near the Molodetsky barrow
After many days of heat, on the day of our trip, the sun was covered with clouds, the temperature dropped slightly. Therefore, staying inside a metal structure, the inner space of which is almost completely closed from the outside world, was expected to be somewhat more comfortable. Visitors to the National Park passing by could observe the whole process of assembling "mirrors", and from above the same process was watched with interest by paragliders and several winged birds of prey, the species of which was difficult for us to establish - they soared too high above Devya Gora.
Having assembled two installations - vertical and horizontal, we started experiments. Most of their results are unlikely to be of interest to the general public, but the experience of psychometry ("reading" information with the help of human extrasensory abilities) gave an interesting result.
One of the volunteers, being inside the mirror installation, tried to tune in to the Zhiguli and the entire surrounding area. And at some point in time, he clearly and clearly understood that our mountains in the original source are called not Zhiguli, but Zhivuli - from the root "alive". The words "live", "life" come from the same root. And this name is due to the fact that the whole Samara Luka is a natural place of power, and our ancient ancestors knew very well about this and knew how to use this natural life-giving force.
The name of Zhiva, the key female deity of the Slavic pantheon, who controls the world and monitors the implementation of generic laws is also one-root. Anyone else, but I really like this version.
Maybe it's not for nothing that the legend about the Mistress of the Zhiguli is so persistently breaking through in our places? Maybe it's not for nothing that the Middle Volga is considered one of the zones of passionarity that influence the development of civilization? Perhaps one of the most common anomalous phenomena in our area in the form of huge fireballs also has its roots in the energetic, geophysical features of our area?
Tatiana Makarova