The purpose of the largest mound on the Kerch Peninsula has not yet been established.
In 1937, the famous occultist Alexander Barchenko visited the Kerch Peninsula. He was interested in a mound near the village of Oktyabrskoye, the mystery of which Soviet archaeologists could not solve. Immediately after returning to Moscow, Barchenko was arrested, his diary and all the drawings were confiscated.
40 years later, Comrade Bazhenov, a senior engineer of the geophysical work department of the USSR Ministry of Geology, sets up a scientific experiment on the Black Kurgan. With special instruments, he scans the mound and discovers a huge oval cavity 11 by 20 meters in solid rock at a depth of seven meters from the surface! However, even with the help of modern technology, it was not possible to reach the chamber of the mound …
Largest of all
On the Kerch Peninsula, there are more than 2.5 thousand mounds, only known to historians. According to the official version, all of them are burial places of the Bosporan kings, despite the fact that in many of them archaeologists have not found human remains.
And those of them, where bones and funeral feasts were found, date from these finds. However, no one takes into account the factor of the secondary use of these amazing structures, the original appearance of which we can only guess.
Kara-oba is not only the most mysterious, but also the largest burial mound on the territory of the former Bosporus kingdom … Before the excavations, its height was 35 meters, the diameter of the embankment was about 90. Thus, in size it is comparable to the pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan. And, quite possibly, it once had a stone cladding, from which megalithic walls remain today.
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The first mention of the Kara-Oba burial mound, which means "earthen hill", was left by the actual state councilor, director of the Kerch Museum of Antiquities, Alexander Lyutsenko, in his letter addressed to the chairman of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, Count Sergei Grigorievich Stroganov.
"The owner of a farm located five versts from Kerch, a Kerch resident of Abazali, invites me to excavate one huge mound lying on his land and known as Kara-Oba." - On May 12, 1859, the current state councilor Alexander Lyutsenko wrote in his diary.
Lyutsenko discovered a tomb made of irregular stones of a wild breed, which was filled with human bones. One rusted piece of an iron knife or sword and one copper arrowhead were found between the bones.
Another burial was discovered about a century later by the head of the 1968 archaeological expedition, Peter Schultz. It was a female skeleton with a Scythian molded pot.
Photo: A mysterious structure near the Oktyabrskoye village.
Anomaly in the center
Trying to get to the middle of the mound, Alexander Lyutsenko discovered an arch about two meters high in the rock, from which there was a passage to the center of the structure. But after going into the depth of about five meters, the workers stumbled upon a very strong limestone, which they could not break through.
Nikolay Fedoseev, candidate of historical sciences:
“When in 1964 excavations at the Black Kurgan were resumed, Gaidukevich, Shultz and Melentyev faced the same problem - an impregnable rock. Then a version appeared that the mound is actually not a burial, but a cenotaph to the king, that is, a gravestone that does not contain the remains of the deceased."
However, this version was immediately rejected when, in 1968, Bazhenov, a senior engineer of the geophysical work department of the USSR Ministry of Geology, scanned the soil using the so-called biophysical method. And I discovered that at a depth of 5-7 meters from the surface of the mound lies a huge oval-shaped cave 11 meters wide and 20 meters long. Archaeologists immediately realized that the cave is the crypt.
But before getting into the anomalous zone discovered by Bazhenov, archaeologists paid attention to the results of the next scan. This time, the magnetometer recorded another anomaly in the same place - a small metal object. And they could well have been a German mine from the times of the war. The excavations were stopped immediately. No one wanted to fall prey to ordinary ignorance. And they hardly knew then about the arrival of an employee of the special department of the NKVD, Alexander Barchenko, to Kara-obu. But it is known that one of the main goals of his expeditions was the search for a stone that fell from the stars of Orion. Is there really a sacred artifact in the body of a grandiose structure, and for what purpose was the Black Barrow actually built?
The answer to this question will be given in the near future, when the Crimean archaeologists will finally take care of it. In the meantime, black diggers only periodically visit him in search of artifacts.
Yaroslav PYTLIVY, Photo I. Shilov, KT archive
The material was published in the newspaper "Crimean Telegraph" No. 447