The most famous and richest treasures are found where the routes of international trade once ran, robber bands operated or wars were constantly waged. Such places include the estuaries of the Dnieper, Don and the Black Sea coast in the places of old Greek, Byzantine and Genoese colonies. The Meshchera forests, among which the Ryazan principality appeared, cannot boast of historical prerequisites for valuable deposits in the ground: they were located far from trade routes, partly on the border with the steppe inhabited by warlike nomads, so the inhabitants of the principality did not accumulate in the "money box", spending everything funds for defense.
However, according to archaeologists and treasure hunters, the Ryazan land also contains riches that can be the pride of the world's leading museums.
Treasury of Ivan Ivanovich
By the beginning of the 16th century, Moscow princes Ivan III and his son Vasily II began to call themselves the sovereigns of all Russia, ending the period of feudal fragmentation by the annexation of a huge number of large principalities and small appanage allotments. Ryazan principality alone remained formally independent, although it pursued a policy pleasing to Moscow. His last Grand Duke Ivan Ivanovich began to rule independently in 1516. He did not want to be ruled by Moscow, but he did not have the strength to resist it. And then Ivan Ivanovich decided to enter into an alliance with the Crimean Khanate, for which he sent a letter to Khan Mehmed Girey with a proposal to marry his daughter. But unfortunately for Ivan, the news of the matchmaking quickly reached the Grand Duke Vasily III, and he summoned the unlucky groom to Moscow.
Ivan perfectly understood that this trip would not end with anything good for him, but, yielding to the onslaught of his closest boyars, he came to the court of the Grand Duke, where he was imprisoned. The "decapitated" Ryazan principality was liquidated. Prince Ivan was subsequently released from prison, but left in Moscow under supervision. In 1521, when the Crimean troops approached Moscow and the commotion began, Ivan Ivanovich, taking advantage of the opportunity, fled. But not to Crimea or Lithuania, where they usually fled for political reasons, but to their homeland.
For half a year, the fugitive prince lived in the village of Shumash, where he tried to either gather supporters for the separation of Ryazan, or get his treasury, according to rumors, buried before leaving for Moscow. Neither one nor the other was successful, and Ivan had to go to the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund I empty-handed.
Meanwhile, the failed father-in-law Mehmed Girey did not abandon attempts to get Ivan into his khanate - however, he tactfully kept silent about the root cause of such hospitality: either he wanted to marry him to his daughter, or to find out if there is a hidden treasury in Ryazan, or maybe even both. But the quiet life of a poor gentleman in the town of Stolklishki turned out to be dearer to Ivan than the struggle for his Ryazan wealth, so he ignored Girey's invitation.
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According to historians, Ivan Ivanovich's treasury may be buried somewhere on the territory of the Ryazan Kremlin not far from the Archangel Cathedral. In the village of Shumash, where the prince was hiding, they found only one treasure, dated to the 18th century. Nothing more ancient has yet been discovered.
Two skulls on top
In the Time of Troubles, many impostors appeared in Russia, claiming the throne. The most successful of them was False Dmitry I, who was even crowned king. Other impostors were less fortunate. One of them, Ilya Ivanovich Korovin, posed as Tsarevich Peter Fyodorovich, who never existed in reality as the son of Tsar Fyodor I Ivanovich. The future false prince was born in Murom, from where he moved to the Volga, where, according to him, he was engaged in the protection of merchant ships and then even fought with the Persians as part of a streltsy regiment. And then, when the struggle for power began, he became the head of the Cossack gang, receiving the nickname Ileyka Muromsky.
His gang operated along the banks of the Volga from Astrakhan to Samara, posing as supporters of either Boris Godunov, or False Dmitry, or Vasily Shuisky. But as soon as he began to smell fried, Ileyka fled in the direction of Moscow, abandoning his associates. True, he did not act for long: the Putivl governor Grigory Shakhovskaya decided to use Korovin in the fight against Vasily Shuisky and in 1606 announced the appearance of a new heir to the throne. Then they joined up with the troops of Ivan Bolotnikov and captured Tula, but were stopped by the government troops of the governor Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky and forced to surrender.
Realizing that their lives would not be saved, a small detachment of Cossacks broke through from Tula, taking the treasury with them, and moved towards Ryazan, simultaneously robbing the surrounding houses and estates. From there they went to Moscow, but were defeated at Kolomna and taken prisoner. However, they did not find the gold and silver plundered in the manors of the landowners. The legend has survived that this treasure was buried two versts from the Oka, two meters from the bank of the stream, between two birches, and two skulls were placed on top of it.
According to the data of modern local historians, now this place is included in the city of Ryazan and, quite possibly, during the construction of some object it will be found.
The legacy of Prince Gagarin
The Gagarin family traced their ancestry from Prince Rurik. Ivan Nikolaevich, a nobleman of the Ryazan province, born in 1774, was a descendant of the 25th tribe. He was not famous for anything special in his life: he served in the Preobrazhensky regiment, worked as a secretary in the Criminal Chamber, from where he went to the Forestry Board (read - he served as a forester), then sat in the local noble assembly, and with the beginning of the Patriotic War of 1812 he entered the Ryazan militia, although he did not have time to make war with Napoleon's army.
So Ivan Nikolaevich would have disappeared unknown, if not for his special cruelty to the serfs. Of course, I did not reach the famous Saltychikha, but the story came out loud. Ivan Nikolaevich was very fond of rich revelry, which he could not afford, so he pulled everything he could from the peasants by increasing the corvee and rent. And if the peasants could not pay, then he beat them with a fierce battle, sometimes to death. Peasant patience is long, but it also has a limit: after the expulsion of Napoleon, the people grew bolder, and, according to rumors, the case of the atrocities of Prince Gagarin reached the very Emperor Alexander I. The commission headed by the Ryazan governor confirmed all the words of the peasants, but, to avoid a scandal, she declared Ivan Gagarin insane and sent him to the monastery to atone for his sins.
The prince did not have direct heirs: he did not acquire a wife, and he did not make children with a mistress from the peasants, so a guardianship of the nobility was appointed. In the estate, which consisted of the village of Fenyaeva, the villages of Korovino and Volosovka, the commission discovered complete poverty. Comparing the prince's spending on revelry and extortion from the peasants, the members of the commission established that he should have retained the unspent funds, but they were not! They found only an underground alcohol storage facility, and even then it turned out to be empty.
In 1818, Ivan Nikolaevich died, taking the secret of his wealth to the grave. The heirs and local peasants searched for treasure for a long time and to no avail. They have not been found so far.
There is a hypothesis associated with the descendants of the prince, shedding light on the location of these treasures. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the estate was owned by Leonid Nikolayevich Gagarin, and although the peasants were no longer serfs, he treated them no better than his ancestor a hundred years ago. He forbade them to walk through their domain. And when one of the peasants mowed the grass, which the guards of the estate believed to have grown on the princely land, and it came to murder, this gave rise to a riot.
Leonid Nikolayevich died in 1909, and eight years later, when the February Revolution broke out, his widow fled to Dresden, taking jewelry. It is believed that Leonid Gagarin nevertheless found the treasure of his distant ancestor, and it was he who allowed his widow to live comfortably in exile until 1922.
Church utensils of Ivan the Terrible
Despite the fact that the current village of Listveno is part of the Vladimir region, the treasure was buried near it at the time when it was part of the Ryazan principality. The Resurrection Monastery in this place was founded by Ivan the Terrible during his campaign against Kazan in 1549. Later, he and all the other kings made rich donations to the monastery in the form of church gold utensils. In the Time of Troubles, a Polish detachment entered the Meshchersky forests, seized the monastery and, according to the legends, tortured the monks for a long time to find out where the gold donated by the Russian tsars went. The monks did not reveal the secret. The angry invaders burned some of the monks, others drowned. Local peasants reburied the bodies and laid heavy stones at the burial site.
In the middle of the 19th century, the builders of the new church broke the old stones and put them in the foundation of the new church, and they dug everything around in search of the treasure, but they could not find anything. According to legend, this treasure is guarded by the souls of brutally tortured monks, and they will reveal the secret only to a pure person who can give rest to their souls. Apparently, such a person has not yet appeared, and the treasure continues to keep its secret.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №9. Author: Yuri Solomonov