This is a very lonely house. It stands in the city of Irkutsk at the corner of Gryaznova Street at the intersection with Podgornaya Street on a concrete patch next to a new building in a pompous office style. He has painted platbands and shutters, curtains on the windows of the first floor, but from the side of Podgornaya Street on the second floor, the glass has long been broken. This is the house of the Jewish community at 25 Gryaznova or 1a Podgornaya.
This time our trip to the house gave nothing. It turned out that it belongs to an entrepreneur who built a modern building nearby, now a watchman lives in it. All tenants moved out long ago. The businessman refused to talk to us, sending him to the service for the protection of cultural heritage sites.
As follows from the documents on the website of the service, the house belongs to the newly identified objects of cultural heritage and has a double address. Nothing more. Plus a story from Alexei Petrov about ghosts that his acquaintances heard when they rented an apartment here.
The first clue about the history of the house and its residents is on the Jewish Roots portal. Before the spiritual testament of Yakov Osipovich Markevich in 1894, the building was transferred to an almshouse.
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“In 1898, a“Almshouse for the elderly and sick at the Jewish prayer house”for 8-10 people was opened there. “The elderly, crippled, blind, deaf and sick chronicles from the inhabitants of the Irkutsk province of the Jewish faith in the almshouse are provided with full free maintenance. The almshouse is located in a house belonging to a meetinghouse. Contact the manager with requests. For the maintenance of the almshouse, 1,400 rubles were spent, allotted by private institutions and individuals,”the portal quoted a message from 1900.
In the newspaper "Siberia" for 1910 it was reported that the income of the institution went to the poorest Jews of Irkutsk, in addition, 200 rubles were allocated annually for the construction of a new house. By 1910, the fund was 2.5 thousand rubles, and at a meeting of parishioners of the Jewish prayer house, it was decided to use this money to start building a new building, instead of the one bequeathed by Markevich and already "decayed."
The second thread is in Irkipedia, which reports on the arrival and expenditure of funds from the Irkutsk prayer house in 1891-1892. By September 1, 1892, he had 906 rubles 54 kopecks.
The third is the surname Markevich. Joseph Markevich, the father of Yakov Markevich, who transferred the house to an almshouse, was the founder of the Irkutsk Drama Theater. It was he who built the building on Bolshoi Street with the help of the City Duma and local merchants and invited actors from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Irkutsk.
The forum of the site "Jewish roots" says that Yakov Markevich was engaged in commercial affairs and his marriage to the exiled daughter Agrafena Markovna contributed a lot to his success.
“The Markevich family was one of the first three richest Jewish families in Irkutsk - the Dombrovsky, Leibovich, Markevich. Together, they controlled 40% of the city's drinking establishments. Agrafena Markevich, the owner of many Irkutsk drinking establishments, distilleries and vodka factories, various urban real estate, was assigned to the guild merchants in the 70s of the XIX century,”the message says.
Agrafena Markevich owned 10 houses in Irkutsk, and from 1883 to 1904 the Markevichs owned numbered baths on Poplavskaya Street, 32. In 1892, 2 years after Agrafena's death, a document was published in the Irkutsk Provincial Gazette about the transfer of her to her sons Pavel and Joseph “10 real estates”. The material took up a whole strip.
In total, the Markevichs had five sons, and all of them were engaged in commercial affairs. One of Yakov Markevich's grandsons, Yakov Iosifovich, born in 1896, was the director of theaters in Vladivostok and Kostroma. He died in 1969, and his daughter, the great-granddaughter of Yakov Markevich, in 2000-2010.
Markevich's house at the intersection of Gryaznov and Podgornaya is now part of the Irkutsk Quarters project, which involves the regeneration of the central part of Irkutsk in the same way as the 130th block. What will be in it is unknown.
ZOYA KUZNETSOVA