For more than three decades, independent researchers from the Samara nongovernmental group "Avesta" have been collecting materials about anomalous phenomena, providing a material basis for ancient myths and epics, recording eyewitness accounts of incomprehensible and mysterious incidents.
Today's story is based on the materials of several recent expeditions of the Avesta to Racheysky Bor - one of the anomalous points of the Middle Volga region.
Green rectangle
This place is located in the Syzran district of the Samara region, and it is largely covered with forests - both pine and mixed. On the geographical map, the Ratcheysky Bor forms a kind of irregular quadrangle lying between the ancient villages of Staraya Racheyka, Smolkino, Troitskoe and Trubetchina.
Racheysky Bor is known primarily for the fact that there are many stones of an unusual shape.
The local rocks are composed of huge slabs of Neogene drainage sandstone, formed at least 15-20 million years ago. Under the influence of weathering, water currents and temperature changes, the plates gradually cracked and turned into huge separately lying blocks.
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It is now possible to walk on them as if on a floor, jumping from stone to stone, as well as through cracks of considerable width - such that one can go down in them and walk below, as in trenches. Here, botanists have discovered several types of ferns - relics of the Ice Age, which appeared in these places about 70 thousand years ago.
Among the Racheyskiye Mountains there is the source of the Usa River, which flows into the Volga not far from the Usinsky Kurgan. This small river complements the Samarskaya Luka to an almost complete water ring and thus makes it possible to travel on it by boat, constantly following downstream of the rivers. And on the right bank of the Usa River there is a vast placer of huge, well-rolled boulders, the diameter of which reaches 10-15 meters, and the weight is several tens of tons.
Geologists believe that such stone formations have remained in these places since distant times, when one of the tongues of a giant glacier that covered the entire north of the Russian Plain reached the Middle Volga region.
The misadventures of the "horse" stone
Until recently, not far from the Gremyachee village, on the slope of the mountains, one could see a huge stone, which the locals called the "stone horse". Indeed, he looked very much like a huge horse's head lying on the ground. A few years ago, the "Avestans" heard from the guide, a villager from Gremyachiy, a very intriguing story. He said that if this stone is generously poured with water, then soon it will rain over the Racheysk mountains, even in a drought.
"Stone Horse"
The following is the story of Igor Pavlovich, President of the Avesta Group:
- Having heard this legend from the mouth of the guide, we did as he said: we poured all our marching water supply from a twenty-liter bottle onto the “stone horse”. It was in July, when there was a thirty-degree heat, and there was not a single cloud in the sky. And you can imagine our amazement when, twenty minutes after the indicated procedure, a cloud suddenly appeared over the forest, which began to grow literally before our eyes. The sky above us quickly turned black, and quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the summer heat, elastic rain streams really gushed over us! After a few more seconds, they turned into a real summer shower.
Our cameraman was most frightened because of this phenomenon. He began to shout at the participants in the experiment that under such a stormy stream of heavenly moisture he would not be able to work. However, this rain ended rather quickly and as suddenly as it began. In a moment, the black cloud disappeared behind the mountain ridge, and the July sun shone brightly over the forest again.
We even laughed at this unexpected incident and at the fright of our operator, who hid the camera under plastic wrap during the rain, and therefore could not take a single frame. Only the villager, our guide, didn’t laugh, who said that this always happened in his memory when the "horse" block was watered.
"Avesta" were going to come to the same place the next year, armed with serious physical devices. However, they no longer had to study the amazing stone. In its place, the researchers saw only a large dent in the ground and traces of powerful technology.
Local residents said that in the spring some "tough" guys with a truck crane, obviously from the city, came here. They loaded the "stone horse" onto KamAZ and took it away in an unknown direction. Probably, this natural unique now adorns the dacha of some local "authority" who heard about the wonderful properties of the "horse" boulder from the Racheyskiy pine forest.
Fireballs over the Usoy River
However, in the vicinity of the village Gremyachee you can still see another huge stone, which outwardly resembles the head of some strange creature. Local Chuvash call this geological outlier “uibed-tyuale”, which can be translated as “man - a furry monkey”, and also as “man-owl”.
It is this mythological character, according to the storytellers, that the mysterious rock looks like. And the Chuvash legend says that even in our time these mysterious creatures from folk myths are regularly found in the local mountains.
Imagine a dwarf as tall as the waist of an ordinary person, but with huge eyes and a face covered with either wool or feathers. Some people from among those who met such a "horror" called him a monkey, others - an owl. This is how the Chuvash got this double name of the mysterious underground people.
Residents of the villages Smolkino and Gremyachee also say that sometimes strange fireballs of about two meters in diameter and with a tail fly over the Racheysk mountains. They assure that every villager who has lived here for many years has seen such a ball at least once in his life.
In Chuvash, this phenomenon is called "patavka-bus" (aka "pata-kabusya"), which just means "fireball". As one of the eyewitnesses of this phenomenon told "Avestovtsy", "patavka-bus" usually flies slowly and low, although sometimes they are seen as if hovering over the forest. Sometimes the ball stops for a long time over this or that place, and then flies further. After that, where the fiery alien hovered, after a while a hole appeared in the ground.
The members of the expedition examined several such depressions left after the visit of the "patavka-bus". They looked exactly like a hole, and not like a karst sinkhole - as if they had carefully dug it out with an excavator, and then smoothly leveled the edges. Exactly the same explanation of the origin of such pits, according to the "Avestovites", can only be specialists.
But the most incredible legend associated with the "patavka-bus" says that these fiery flying balls can … turn into a man! Allegedly, the villagers know specific cases when such newcomers from the unknown world, embodied in male people, settled in the local villages, and then even married local women. But the children born of this strange marriage soon either died or quickly turned into no less mysterious underground men "uybede-tyale". As soon as such a child began to walk, he soon ran away to the mountains - and his mother never saw him again. This is the local Chuvash legend.
Other stories and legends of the aborigines of the Ratcheyskiy pine forest in many respects echo the legends of the inhabitants of the villages of the Zhigulevsky mountains. Among them are myths about the mistress of the local underworld, a ghost town called "Temple of the Green Moon", as well as the "Waterfall of Tears" mirage, which popular rumor attaches to the famous spring of the Stone Bowl.
Racheyskiy Bor stones
However, scientists believe that there is a direct connection here: after all, geologists have long established that the Racheyskie and Zhigulevskie mountains are the product of the same ancient geological dislocation that formed in the southeast of the Russian Plain about 15 million years ago.
It follows from this that the underground structures of both massifs, as well as the local flora and fauna, subsequently developed along the same path. We find a reflection of these natural processes in ancient legends, the meaning of which scientists have yet to unravel.
Valery EROFEEV