View of the "Kuchkovo Pole" from the bank of the Neglinnaya River from the Kuznetsky Bridge in the 16th century.
Art postcard of the A. I. Abrikosov partnership.
Her story is an endless series of love dramas, betrayals and betrayals. The ghosts of insulted, abandoned, humiliated lovers have been scaring casual passers-by at night for centuries … People felt that sooner or later the river, which had accumulated black energy, would begin to return it. Two hundred years ago, trying to protect themselves from the evil fate of Neglinka, they hid the river under the ground. But imprisoned in stone, Neglinka continues to remind of her existence even today …
Mysterious find
In the middle of the seventies of the last century, a powerful flood in the center of Moscow carried a corpse out of the Neglinnaya river sewer. The criminologists who arrived at the scene were puzzled: in the pocket of the shabby jacket of the unknown, they found an antique ring with a diamond. It was doubly strange that the jewel for which any collector would give a fortune, as it turned out, did not pass according to the police reports. And this means that the ring was not stolen - at least in recent years …
There were no versions of what happened until investigator Yegor Sobolev, studying the circumstances of the death and the mysterious find in the Moscow underground, found in the archive one criminal case from the time of tsarist Russia - and, surprisingly, it is also directly related to Neglinka.
Neglinka originates near Maryina Roshcha and descends to the very heart of Moscow - the Kremlin. Its channel runs along Streletskaya, Novosuschevskaya streets, Tsvetnoy boulevard, Trubnaya square, Neglinnaya street, Teatralnaya square, under the Aleksandrovsky garden and along the Kremlin wall.
The names themselves - Neglinnaya, Samotechnaya, Trubnaya - remind of the long and unhappy history of the river.
At the time of Ivan Kalita, millstones of mills were spinning on the banks of the Neglinka, forges and pottery workshops worked. The inhabitants of the ancient capital of the Moscow principality caught crayfish and white fish in the purest water. But in the 18th century, everything changed: a new fashion appeared - it became prestigious to live on Neglinka. Mansions of the Moscow nobility are being erected on its banks.
Sewage poured into the clear river water, garbage fell. The Neglinka began to grow shallow, gradually overgrowing with mud and reeds …
Ashes of ugliness
In Catherine's times, not far from the Kuznetsky bridge thrown across the Neglinka, there was a Secret Expedition - an institution that investigated state crimes. It was led by Stepan Sheshkovsky. He was a man of short stature and frail build. But the most terrible legends circulated about his atrocities.
Sheshkovsky created a biased interrogation system. The torture room was equipped with devices, the mere sight of which inspired the person under investigation with mortal horror.
Sheshkovsky's cruelty knew no bounds - here, in a house on the banks of the Neglinka, he personally pinned at least two thousand people half to death.
Next to the Secret Expedition were the possessions of one of the most sinister women in the history of Russia - the landowner Daria Saltykova. With the help of witchcraft, the bloodthirsty Saltychikha tried to get rid of the flaws in her appearance. She is responsible for the lives of 139 people, mostly serfs and women. The reason for Saltykova's bloody atrocities was the secret passion of the landowner, which is rarely remembered. Daria had a fierce hatred for women who were more beautiful than her. One glance at the portrait of the landowner is enough to make it clear: any woman could become a victim of Saltychikha.
Daria believed in the legend that the Neglinka waters have life-giving power.
Every Sunday at midnight, Saltychikha put on a long white shirt and went down to the river, stopped at the very edge of the bank and whispered a prayer. After that, the landowner scooped up the night water and washed her face. By order of the lady, the servant made a fire, threw a damp towel into it, with which she dried herself, and then scattered the ashes over Neglinka.
Saltychikha believed: together with the towel, her ugliness burned in the fire …
Saltykova was subjected to civil execution, and her sentence read "the freak of the human race."
Talisman
In 1817, Muscovites decided to get rid of Neglinka.
A special commission decided: "An open canal with pools, due to insufficient water flow in it from the accumulated sewage, causing trouble in the air, blocking it with arches, fill it up."
With his own hands, man turned the once pure, living river into a fetid, polluted waste, poisoned by witchcraft and the blood of the tortured. The Neglinka became a source of evil. And the townspeople felt its influence on themselves.
The first were the founders of the Sandunov Baths, Liza Uranova and her husband Sila Sandunov - the meeting with the Neglinnaya River became disastrous for both their family and themselves.
Neglinka's ill-fame did not bother Sandunov's strength. He firmly decided to buy land in the Kuznetsky Most area.
But his wife was alerted by the rumors about the local devilry. Elizabeth decided to go to the famous fortuneteller - the old gypsy Zoya, who lived here, in the Trubnaya Square area.
The thin hands of the gypsy laid out the Tarot cards. On the witch's cloth already lay "Lovers", "Wheel of Fate", "Judgment" …
Zoya shook her head - this situation does not bode well. Finally, the gypsy turned over the last card and looked at Liza point-blank: “Blood runs under this earth. You will not be happy in the house built here … But the cards also say that powerful forces gave you protection. You have a talisman - a talisman that can protect you from the curse of this place."
Returning home, Lisa told her husband about the ominous prophecy. In response, Sila only smiled and continued to bother about buying land.
A mansion on the banks of the Neglinnaya, already partially hidden in a pipe, was built. But the rich interiors did not calm Elizabeth down: she still felt uncomfortable here, and Sila Sandunov decided to build baths on Neglinka.
The land on the Kuznetsky Most was very expensive, and the newlyweds had to lay almost all the jewelry they had. The last one was the ring presented to Lisa by Empress Catherine II as a sign of her special favor. Elizabeth tried to persuade her husband not to sell him, reminded of the gypsy's prophecy. But Sila Nikolaevich only laughed in response. The ring lay on the moneylender's table.
Lisa's body was then found lifeless on the riverbank. Kuznetsky Most, where the Sandunovs lived, went underground along with the river.
The ghosts of the Neglinka
When the legendary Sanduny appeared on Neglinnaya, they decided to take the water for the baths from the Moscow River, and pour the dirty water into Neglinka. At the same time, on Trubnaya Square, which got its name from the pipe into which Neglinka was removed, a market appeared where they traded in stolen goods. The environment was appropriate - slums, thieves' dens and prostitutes. On the corner of Trubnaya there were the famous taverns "Hell" and "Crimea". The inn "Crimea" occupied two floors. One was used by cheaters and swindlers. The second was brightly decorated, with a pretense of chic; merchants and visitors feasted here.
And below, deep in the basement, was another inn. This place was called briefly and ominously - "Hell". It was here that the entire underworld of Moscow flocked. According to the testimony of contemporaries, there were so many corpses dumped then into Neglinka that the stone river bed was clogged and the water stopped flowing.
The lover of Savva Morozov, a Frenchwoman Juju, worked as a model in one of the capital's fashion houses. Her carriage was driving along the Kuznetsky Most when a newspaper boy shouted: “Savva Morozov committed suicide in Nice! Savva Morozov committed suicide in Nice! Juju ordered the cabby to stop to buy a newspaper. She barely had time to jump off the step …
The carriage rushing towards, Zhuzhu did not notice. The coachman did not have time to restrain the horses … The girl was taken to the hospital. Doctors fought for her life for a long time, but they could not save her … And after sunset, in a gateway near Kuznetsky Most, a passerby stumbled upon the body of a boy who was selling newspapers in the morning. The passer-by looked into his face … The
boy was dead. A silk stocking squeezed his neck with inhuman strength. On the same night, a police examination established that the stocking belonged to a French woman, whose body had already been in the morgue for several hours by the time the newspaper boy died …
The glory of Neglinka did not bother the patron of the arts Savva Mamontov. A successful manufacturer begins construction of the Metropol, Moscow's finest hotel right above Neglinka. His new project is striking in its courage and scope. In the midst of construction, Mamontov was arrested and put on trial. He was accused of abuse and embezzlement.
After a painful trial, the jury acquitted Mamontov, but by this time, through the efforts of officials, he was completely ruined and deprived of the opportunity to carry out his grandiose project. A year later, the hotel was nevertheless built, but literally a few months after the opening, a terrible tragedy occurred.
The hotel was built, and part of the room stock was already used - guests settled here, but suddenly a fire breaks out and for unknown reasons the building burns out completely in a matter of hours. After that, the authorities began repair work in the Neglinka underground pipe. Some sections of the pipe were restored. But this did not stop the river - 40 years ago, in the mid-60s, it burst out of the stone banks and flooded the center of Moscow. Eight years later, on August 9, 1973, history repeated itself.
At the end of the eighties of the last century, a collector was built, but this did not save the city from the blows of the underground element. In the center of the capital, vast areas of soil collapse. Hydrologists say that the waters of Neglinka are especially aggressive - they can corrode concrete, cast iron and even steel.
No, no, yes, and a casual midnight passer-by in the Kuznetsky Most area will meet the ghost of a Frenchwoman Juju, a girl in a dress of the old days or a man in an old dress drinking water from the river, and the Power of Sanduns has recently appeared so often in their baths that it has ceased to frighten their employees. The tour guides of Sanduny talk about it as something familiar.
Sometimes people staying up late here can hear mysterious sounds or even see a dark silhouette walking along the pool.
Author: Natalia VAKHRAMEEVA