High above the steep banks of the Moskva River, in a picturesque natural setting, is the ancient village of Kolomenskoye.
There is a snow-white Church of the Ascension built here in the 16th century by the Grand Duke, father of Ivan Vasilievich IV the Terrible, Vasily III. The magnificent Royal Gates were erected during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov. On a nearby hill stands the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, built in honor of the accession to the throne of Ivan the Terrible himself. Probably, the Temple of the Ascension also served as a watchtower in case of Tatar raids: in case of alarm, a signal was given (during the day - with smoke, at night - with fire); if the watchmen from the summit of Ascension saw such a signal, they gave it in turn, and it was visible from the bell tower of Ivan the Great in Moscow.
History of origin
The village of Kolomenskoye, located on the road from Moscow to Kolomna, was founded, according to legend, by the inhabitants of the city of Kolomna, who fled from Batu. The first written mention is in the spiritual letter (testament) of Ivan Kalita in 1339. Initially, it was the fiefdom of the Moscow Grand Dukes, then the Tsars.
In 1606 Kolomenskoye served as the headquarters of Ivan Bolotnikov, in 1610 - False Dmitry II.
The heyday of Kolomenskoye is associated with the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich - Kolomenskoye was his favorite residence. In 1667, a magnificent wooden palace was built, which had 270 rooms; the palace is surrounded by a fence and a garden, with buildings of orders, gates with a clock tower, etc. The events of the Copper Revolt of 1662 are associated with Kolomenskoye. Later, young Peter I often lived here; near Kolomenskoye, on the Kozhukhovskoye field, he arranged the famous "amusing battles".
After the death of Alexei Mikhailovich and the transfer of the capital to St. Petersburg, Kolomenskoye fell into decay. Under Catherine II, the dilapidated palace was dismantled, and a new one (also wooden) was built in its place, where the empress lived in the summer during her stay in Moscow. The Catherine Palace, in turn, was dismantled under Nicholas I; only one wing has survived from the construction of the latter.
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Library of Ivan Vasilievich IV the Terrible
For more than a hundred years, active and unsuccessful searches have been going on for the so-called library of Ivan the Terrible. Among the architectural complexes of the late Middle Ages, the Kremlin, the Assumption Monastery of Alexandrova Sloboda, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Kolomenskoye claimed the role of an overhead treasure indicator. It was in the latter that the archaeologist I. Steletsky was looking for and, as it were, almost found a mysterious liberey. And here half a century later - almost again - the builder V. Porshnev found it. However, these are the very cases when "almost" does not count.
Zoya (in the Orthodox sound of the name - Sophia), niece of the Byzantine Basileus Constantine XI from the Paleologus dynasty, having married the great Moscow prince Ivan III in 1472, did not just change her residence permit in Constantinople to Moscow. Arriving from the then far abroad in the white stone, she brought a truly priceless dowry - a significant part of the library, saved from the Turks, who seized and plundered the capital of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
What did the libreya contain? Judging by the references of Prince Kurbsky, who fled to Lithuania, Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich could read the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. According to the Livonian prisoner John Witterman, who fled from Moscow to the Baltic states, the treasury of Grozny contained the comedies of Aristophanes, Virgil's Aeneid, and now lost works of such more unknown ancient authors as Zamole and Heliotrope.
Ivan IV allegedly significantly enlarged the collection of his grandfather and grandmother - in particular, after the capture of Kazan he added the most valuable manuscripts of medieval Arab researchers from the collection of the Kazan Khan. Rumor has it that the libreya also contained witchcraft instructions and books on magic. Ivan Vasilyevich, who did not shy away from transcendental knowledge, seemed to have cast a terrible spell himself: whoever approaches his treasury will lose his sight.
It is unlikely that it always worked - the princess Sophia and her brother Peter I, who, as you know, did not suffer from blindness, saw the liberey.
But there are other evidences, however, mythological. The search for the library of Ivan the Terrible at the beginning of the 30s of the XX century was carried out by Apolos Ivanov, who served at that time in the protection of the Kremlin. Passing underground passages from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to the Kremlin, he found many decayed skeletons chained to the wall. Ivanov never found the Grozny treasure, but lost his sight, although years later.
Why the most valuable collection is sought in the dungeons, you can understand. Wooden Moscow often burned, sometimes completely burned out. Sophia herself ordered to hide the chests in a stone crypt, where fire would not reach them. But there were a great many underground premises in medieval Moscow: almost all monasteries and many estates were supplied with an extensive network of structures hidden from the eyes. And by no means all of them survived.
So the geography of possible searches is vast. Not excluding that some of the folios may be hidden under the Kremlin, something in Aleksandrov, and something in Vologda - another oprichnina patrimony of Grozny (in favor of each version there are arguments), let us dwell on the Tsar's estate near Moscow - the village of Kolomenskoye.
Books are still dead
The most serious scientific interest in the library of Ivan the Terrible was shown by the famous Moscow archaeologist Ignat Yakovlevich Steletsky. Having worked in search of secret treasures both in the Kremlin and in the tent-roofed church of the Ascension in Kolomenskoye, he then paid close attention to the five-domed Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist in the village of Dyakov, which is near Kolomenskoye.
In his extensive work "Dead Books in a Moscow Cache", the archaeologist told how exactly his attention was drawn to the temple standing on the outskirts. Just before World War II, he got into a conversation with an elderly peasant, a resident of the village of Dyakova, whose father served as the church head in the Dyakovsky church. When he was young, Steletsky's interlocutor, at that time a church watchman, noticed a small door in the church wall. Having knocked out their friend, the blacksmith, to forge the key to the lock, together they opened the door and went down the stone secret staircase. Leaning at the end of the turn against the locked iron doors and the decayed skeleton in front of them, the frightened treasure hunters returned upstairs. After that, during the repair, the door inside the church was laid with a brick.
Steletsky continued his searches - visual and archival. He found written sources in which there was a dull hint of serious excavation work in the vicinity of Kolomenskoye.
Having examined the hill that crowns the Church of the Beheading of the Head, the archaeologist drew attention to a hilly area between the steep cliff and the floodplain of the Moskva River. It somehow stood out among the surrounding relief with an unnatural shape. Steletsky consulted with a geologist, who confirmed his guess: this is an artificial formation, consisting of a dump of sandy rock, while the upper layers of the soil contain loam. So, in fact, large-scale earthworks were carried out on Dyakovsky Hill.
In 1938, the archaeologist began excavations in the vicinity of the Dyakovskaya Church. And at a depth of seven meters I even came across a massive limestone masonry. But since the excavations were carried out on the territory of the church cemetery, soon, at the request of the inhabitants of the village of Dyakova, they had to be curtailed.
Ignat Yakovlevich presented a report on the search for the liberey and his guesses about the possible place of her burial in the third volume of his work. The manuscript of which, along with part of the scientist's archive, was stolen. Local historian investigating the secrets of Kolomensky, Yevgeny Ivanov, believes that this is the work of the NKVD, which has always been obsessed with curiosity about the search for Steletsky.
“Of course, the discovered masonry does not yet indicate that it is precisely“the library of Ivan the Terrible”that is hidden under it, - wrote the archaeologist. "But it indisputably testifies to the presence in the depths of the Dyakovskaya Upland of some colossal underground structure, probably a storage facility."
Steletsky was not destined to check his guesses: first the war, then the mysterious disappearance of the archive, and soon the death of the scientist pushed the discovery into the next era. Which may not have arrived yet.
The last witness
The editorial office received a call from Vladimir Fedorovich Porshnev, a builder from Reutov near Moscow. He has his own version of the location of the library.
On the eve of the Moscow Olympics, he, at that time the chief engineer of the Mosoblstroyrestavratsiya administration, supervised the repair work in the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, which was then abandoned and abandoned. One day, Volodya Bobkov, the head of the section, called him at home and reported: they came across an underground passage. The piston rushed to the object.
In the center of the temple, closer to the altar part, he saw a removed white stone floor slab, and under it compacted sand. The workers began to rake it. Steps of white stone opened, going down at an acute angle towards the western wall of the temple. Above the steps and the manhole, a vault and large-sized bricks were found. They dug about a meter and a half - the stairs led further.
Then, after consulting, the chief engineer and leading architect-restorer Nikolai Nikolaevich Sveshnikov ordered to weld a metal door and hang locks. While they were negotiating with the management of the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve to continue the work, someone knocked down the locks at night and dug a hole four meters deep.
Seeing traces of the activities of unknown treasure hunters and having no funds to continue the work, Sveshnikov and Porshnev decided to reliably close the dungeon. They covered it with sand, tamped it down, poured concrete about half a meter and put the white stone slab back in place. So, until better times, the builders secured an interesting object.
Years later, the temple was returned to the diocese, and it is unlikely that its abbot knows about the underground hole. But Vladimir Fedorovich, twenty years after the perfect discovery, visited the dungeon again. But - in a dream. He was led up an inclined staircase and entered a vaulted crypt located at a depth of 12.5 meters near the western wall of the church. Under its vault lie not only chests with antique and medieval tomes, but also leather sacks with the royal treasury and the coffin of Tsarevich Ivan, who was killed by the enraged father Ivan Vasilyevich.
You never know, however, what can be seen in a dream? Vladimir Fedorovich is a quite sensible person, and he understands this himself. Therefore, I decided to check the picture revealed in a dream. But how? It is not possible to return to the excavations or at least to enlighten the ground near the church.
I started looking for clairvoyants. Received the phone number of Tamara Mikhailovna Makhnyreva from the city of Labinsk. She sent Porshnev a drawing in which a crypt with treasures is shown to the right of the entrance to the church. The location corresponds to an old discovery of an underground manhole. The scheme does not contradict the dream. Quite good starting data for new searches. But who will believe what he saw in the dream and the diviner's guess?
No time for discovery
And what in the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve - do they know about the treasures lying, perhaps, almost underfoot?
I asked this question to Vladimir Yegorovich Suzdalev, a historian, former chief curator of the museum. About the search for Steletsky, Vladimir Yegorovich knows only that the archaeologist was looking for a library in the tent church of the Ascension. By laying the pits in the foundation of the building, Ignat Yakovlevich greatly annoyed the restorer Kolomensky, the architect Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky, who appealed to the authorities with a demand to prohibit Steletsky, obsessed with treasure hunting mania, from spoiling the monument.
As for the underground voids in the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, it was equipped with a stove-air heating system. Perhaps, Suzdalev believes, construction workers stumbled upon one of the channels of this system in 1980. Moreover, the old-timers of the museum said that in 1929 Baranovsky himself dug under the altar the tomb of the priest of the Dyakovsky Church.
I also turned to Igor Yuryevich Prokofiev, a well-known Moscow biolocation operator, who had worked in Kolomenskoye several times in the past. He happened to find through the earth's thickness a system of underground passages stretching under the Golosov ravine (which separates the Kolomensky and Dyakovsky hills) towards the Moskva River, and underground monastic cells 1x2 meters in size connected with it.
Basically, the dowsing method allows you to reveal a crypt with a treasury hidden in the ground. But Igor Yuryevich considers it untimely to look for him: well, let's say we find it - and what next? The local eagles will immediately plunder the treasure. Maybe all the failures associated with the search for the library of Ivan the Terrible are natural, and in this case they should not be considered failures? It's just that the time has not yet come when the treasures of world importance can go to the state concerned about their conservation. And not adventurers thirsty for easy money.
If so, the Palaeologus librery remains hidden from our eyes unworthy to contemplate it.
But in addition to man-made creatures, Kolomenskoye is rich in original creations of nature itself:
The abode of the underground god
A ravine, stretching from west to east, conventionally divides Kolomenskoye into two almost equal parts. One of them is civilized. Here are concentrated museums, kiosks with souvenirs, numerous cafes and the famous observation deck. Another part of the reserve is “wild”. These are grassy hills, small groves and an old orchard with large boulders, reminiscent of symbols of ancient pagan religions.
A small stream flows along the bottom of the ravine, formed by springs, of which there are a great many. Tradition tells that these springs are the traces of the horse of George the Victorious himself, who once rode here with the news of his victory over the serpent. The water in the stream is very cold. They say that its temperature is the same all year round - plus 4 degrees, which gives it the properties of the greatest density and life-giving power. In winter, the stream does not freeze even in severe frosts, for which no one has yet explained.
Experts explain the origin of the name "Golosov ravine" in different ways. Romantics associate him with the “voices of nature”. Indeed, in the summer there are always birds singing, grasshoppers chirping and water in the stream rustles.
However, another version seems more convincing - a mythological one. Historians believe that initially the ravine was called "Volosov" - after the name of Volos or Veles, the pagan god - the ruler of the underworld and the patron saint of domestic animals. This is how the ancient Finno-Ugric tribes who lived on the banks of the Moskva River long before the arrival of the Slavs here could have called this ravine. It is no coincidence that archaeologists have found in the vicinity of Kolomenskoye numerous traces of ancient settlements that existed here in the days of Ancient Rome.
This version is indirectly confirmed by modern studies of geologists. Moscow, as you know, stands on the so-called Russian platform, a very solid geological formation. However, each platform has its own faults. One of the largest runs under the Voice Ravine. Traces of ancient volcanic activity have even been found here. So these places can rightfully be considered "the gateway to the underworld."
Magic stones
In the Voice ravine there are two huge stones in the depth of the ravine, weighing several tons each. Moreover, the bulk of these boulders are in the ground. Small peaks come to the surface. One of the stones lies at the bottom of the ravine, the other on its high slope.
The history of these stone giants goes back centuries. They were also worshiped by pagan tribes who lived here about one and a half millennia ago. It was then that the stones got their names. The bottom of the stones is called "Goose". It is believed that he patronized men, giving warriors strength and good luck in battle. Upper - "Maiden's stone" (according to other sources "Divy"). He, accordingly, brings happiness to the beautiful half of humanity. which are boulders weighing about 4-5 tons, striking the imagination with their huge size and bizarre outlines.
Where did these giants come from? What gave them such an incredible shape? In 1995-1996. scientists from the Institute of General Physics measured electromagnetic fields in the Voice Ravine and directly near the stones. The results were stunning. The excess of the norm of electromagnetic radiation in a ravine is more than 12 times, near boulders - more than 27 times. Lepton fields have also been found. One of the experiments almost ended tragically. Taking measurements in a ravine, one scientist was suddenly lifted into the air by an unknown force to a height of 2.5 m, then the action of the force suddenly stopped and the scientist collapsed onto the steep slope of the ravine. In this case, the magnetometer went out of order, and the lepton field meter recorded a short-term presence of a "critical mass" of leptons. Obviously, because of this, a short-lived levitation effect arose. Nature oriented the ravine strictly from west to east, it seems to cut through the natural magnetic field of the Earth, forming something like an electromagnetic and space-time anomaly.
The surface of the stones is very unusual. It resembles giant bubbles and is covered with numerous letters. It is believed that the stones have not lost their magical properties to this day. It is enough to come here, touch their wavy surface with your hand and make a wish. To be sure, you can tie a ribbon or colored patch on the branches of a nearby tree. And then the stones, in which, according to legend, the spirits of the ancient gods still live, will certainly help to fulfill the dream. Nobody has any statistics of fulfilled hopes here, but the number of multi-colored pieces of matter fluttering in the wind is in the hundreds.
Mysterious disappearances
Since ancient times, this ravine has been shrouded in mystery. There was always something inexplicable going on here. Thus, an amazing story is described in the chronicles of the 17th century. In 1621, a small detachment of Tatar horsemen unexpectedly appeared at the gates of the royal palace in Kolomenskoye. They were surrounded by archers, guarding the gate, and immediately taken prisoner. The horsemen said that they were the warriors of Khan Devlet-Giray, whose troops tried to capture Moscow in 1571, but were defeated. Hoping to escape the pursuit, the cavalry detachment descended into the Golosov ravine, shrouded in thick fog. The Tatars spent there, as it seemed to them, a few minutes, and emerged only after 50 years. One of the prisoners said that the fog was unusual, shimmering greenish, but in fear of the chase, no one paid attention to this. Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich ordered an inquiry, which showed:the Tatars most likely spoke the truth. Even their weapons and equipment no longer corresponded to the weapons of that time, but looked more like outdated samples of the mid-16th century.
The mystical stories continued on and on. In the 19th century, in the documents of the Police Department of the Moscow province, numerous cases of the mysterious disappearance of residents of neighboring villages were noted. One of these incidents was described in July 1832 in the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti. Two peasants, Arkhip Kuzmin and Ivan Bochkarev, returning home from a neighboring village at night, decided to cut the road and pass through the Golosov ravine. At the bottom of the valley a thick fog was swirling, in which a kind of "corridor flooded with pale light" suddenly appeared. The men entered it and met people overgrown with wool, who with signs tried to show them the way back. A few minutes later the peasants came out of the fog and continued on their way. When they came to their native village, it turned out that two decades had passed. Wives and children, 20 years older, hardly recognized them. The police intervened. At the insistence of the investigators, an experiment was carried out in the ravine, during which one of the time travelers disappeared into the fog again and never returned.
Bigfoot in Kolomenskoye
Over the centuries, in the vicinity of Golosov Ravine, we periodically saw shaggy people of enormous height. Such cases are described not only in ancient chronicles, but also in the Soviet press. So, in 1926, a local policeman stumbled across a thick fog on a "savage overgrown with wool" more than two meters tall. The policeman pulled out a pistol, but the mysterious creature instantly disappeared into the fog. Local schoolchildren joined the search for an unusual guest. However, traces of his stay were never found. But on the pages of one of the capital's newspapers there was an article by the journalist A. Ryazantsev "Pioneers are catching Leshego."
