On the southeastern coast of Crimea, praised by Maximilian Voloshin, there is the Karadag mountain range, the name of which is translated as Black Mountain. The age is really amazing - 150-160 million years. Scientists assure: from time to time, living remnants of bygone eras appear here.
In June 2013, E. Rud, a lawyer of the branch of the scientific biological station on the territory of the Karadag reserve, received shocking video materials from his Yalta friends, the authenticity of which was difficult to doubt, although what he saw was like a horror film (unfortunately, the author of the article does not show a video or even a screen from him)
On board the pleasure boat, huddled together, people were screaming in fear. The ship rocked strongly, although there was no storm or wind, the bright sun was shining. The wave came from a monster that appeared next to the ship: its dimensions exceeded 50 meters in length! (The length of the ship is about 40 meters.)
The sea serpent of ancient myths, wriggling in the water, swiftly pounced on the dolphins, immediately devouring them in front of the amazed audience. These shots were supplemented by others, shot from above by tourists who ascended on that clear day to the top of Karadag in order to survey the endless blue expanses.
Well, it was not a massive hallucination ?! In addition, there were many different eyewitnesses. There was a stir around the Karadag snake, the problem demanded a scientific word, since a rare visitor to the reserve does not ask a question about the monster.
Red army and janissaries against the Karadag reptile
A gigantic serpentine bloodthirsty creature that lives in the waters of the Eastern Crimea, is mentioned in ancient myths and legends. It was included in the annals under the name "Karadag reptile". Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Yevgeny Shnyukov says: “Having rummaged through the legends of the Crimea, I found such a description of how somewhere in the area of the Otuzka River there existed some kind of snake, which the locals were afraid of and to eliminate which even Janissaries had to be summoned from Central Europe. Judging by the events, it was even before the Crimea became part of Russia."
Promotional video:
In 1921, Maximilian Voloshin sent Mikhail Bulgakov to Moscow a clipping from the local Feodosia district newspaper. The note said: the peasants of the village of Koktebel complain that a certain serpent has appeared on the Karadag mountain, which comes out of the sea and devours their sheep, and therefore a company of Red Army soldiers was sent to Karadag to capture him. Attempts to find and "ratribunalize the giant reptile" were not crowned with success: they managed to find only his trail sliding into the sea. But it is known that on the basis of this newspaper clipping Bulgakov wrote the story "Fatal Eggs".
After the war, the writer Vsevolod Ivanov said that on May 14, 1952, during his vacation in Crimea, he went for a walk to Serdolikovaya Bay, where he saw something resembling a ball of seaweed. Suddenly, this something began to unfold and lengthen. Finally, a huge snake with a meter head crawled out of the water onto the stones. The writer was lucky: while smoking a pipe, he watched the kite with interest for 40 minutes (!), Made sketches and notes about how it played in the water and hunted dolphins, and then rested, basking on the rocks. Moreover, the "communication" lasted more than one day.
O. S. Severtseva recalls that after Ivanov's story, many young people, including her, went with him to the bay. In the hope of seeing the monster, they dived along neighboring bays. The water in the underwater cave - the supposed place of the monster's exit - turned out to be icy. It became completely dark, it was impossible to determine the depth, and it seemed that there could be nothing alive …
Later, Yuri Senkevich collected information about the mysterious snake, personally participating in its search, for the program "Club of Film Travelers". He was convinced that it was a relic of an ancient fauna.
A dog's head is deadly
In May 1961, a fisherman from the village of Kurortnoye M. Kondratyev with two companions went to sea in the morning to fish. Having sailed from the pier of the biological station, the boat turned towards the Golden Gate.
Suddenly, three hundred meters from the shore and 50 meters from the boat, the fishermen discerned something brown under the water. Come closer. A meter-high head rose three meters above the water, covered with coats like algae. The neck and the visible part of the body were covered with horny plates. From the mane at the top of the head, small eyes looked at them, the look of which horrified everyone. Recovering himself, Kondratyev managed to turn the boat around and give the boat at maximum speed.
The monster chased after, however, a hundred meters from the coast, it stopped and went into the open sea. The boat, at full speed, jumped ashore, and the would-be fishermen, screaming, rushed towards the biological station.
Seven years later, Kondratyev "was lucky to meet an old friend again." Approaching the boat, he saw a large brown spot 30 meters from the shore. The water seethed, the head of the monster barely appeared - and then disappeared under the water, leaving behind a whirlpool with a funnel 10 meters in diameter and about two deep. Taught by bitter experience, the fisherman immediately left.
Not everyone was so lucky. In the 1930s, a fisherman from Kuchuk-Lambat (now Maly Mayak) met a huge snake among the coastal rocks. When people came running to his inhuman cry, he only managed to whisper: "A dog's head …" - then he was paralyzed, and a month later he died.
So the artist from Moscow A. Kudryavtsev, one might say, got off with a slight fright. On August 18, 1990, he took it into his head to go fishing at night on the pier in the village of Planerskoye. Not a soul around. Suddenly he was seized with horror - in the darkness at a height of two meters above the water, two eyes shone. The artist, unable to miss them, turned to stone. Barely regaining consciousness, he jumped up and rushed to the shore. For a long time he was tormented by terrible dreams.
In 1992, V. M. Velsky, a former combat swimmer who served in the special forces: “I went into the sea wearing a mask and fins. About five meters from the shore, I immediately went under the water and swam 40 meters at a rather great depth. Looking around, to my right, I saw that "handsome". I was not afraid. I saw him well. It was a smooth snake, with a body volume of more than half a meter, without any ridges, more than 15 m in length. He saw me, arched his neck up, looked and rushed to me. I realized that I had to run away and broke all existing swimming records.
Having jumped ashore, I was amazed to see that the head of my pursuer looked out at the point from which I began to flee. He scanned the distance exactly! His head rose more than half a meter above the water (it looked like a horse), and he, like me, began to look around. I realized that there was no time for jokes here, and began to hastily retire."
Occasionally, scientists were accidentally lucky. In the late 1980s, the BENTOS deep-sea underwater laboratory operated off the Crimean coast. During one of the dives, the researchers saw something huge, about two meters in diameter, swam 8-10 meters across the course of the "BENTOS". However, there was no clear visibility, and there were no special cameras for underwater filming. On December 7, 1990, a team of employees of the Karadag branch of the Ukrainian Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas of the Academy of Sciences went out to sea to check the nets set up for catching Black Sea rays at a depth of 40 meters in the area of Serdolikovaya Bay, a few miles off the coast of Karadag.
When the nets were pulled up, they pulled out a dolphin with a devoured belly - so that the spine was visible. The teeth marks left on the insides resembled the edge of dough, from which circles for dumplings are cut with a faceted glass. How big was the mouth if the teeth were the size of a glass ?! And what kind of marine predators could they belong to? Is that a representative of the Mesozoic era … Scientists were at a loss. Later, another prey dolphin was removed from the nets - it was as if its head had been sucked out.
Despite all attempts to find out the truth, one can only guess who the senior researcher of the biological station V. Machkevsky met at sea quite recently. at night he went with friends in a kayak to put his net behind the ready-made insert net. Having completed the business and sailed a little, they saw from the coast, against the background of Karadag, that very snake.
“… A full moon rose in the sky, and it illuminated what was happening very well. The surface of the water was absolutely smooth as glass. Suddenly I heard a splash to my left. He turned his head and … saw in the halo of foam the rolling body of a rather large animal. On his back there was no fin characteristic of a dolphin, there was no reflex inhalation-exhalation characteristic of dolphins. The back of the unknown creature was smooth and much larger than a dolphin. It may have had a scaly surface, but in the night light it was difficult to see. The roll of my back in this halo of foam was so long that I managed to show this phenomenon to a friend. It was so close that I could touch the animal's back with the paddle. It all looked like a huge snake and a car camera, this creature is impossible to describe."
Vulnerable Keddy
So who swam in the Crimean waters? They spoke of a cloak-like shark with flat sides, resembling a huge eel; according to another version, it was the herring king - a belt fish up to nine meters in length, found in the North and Mediterranean Seas … Maybe some kind of lizard has survived in the Black Sea since ancient times? After all, what do we know about Karadag, which has been a nature reserve for decades? And why not be this majestic mountain a haven for exotic species?
Karadag is the remnant of an ancient volcano, the underwater part of which has not been studied. Once upon a time, displacements of earth layers and volcanic clay led to complex layering, the formation of underwater caves, unknown passages and tunnels.
Voloshin, who settled in Koktebel, possessed a spiritual vision, more than once talked to his friends about a certain secret hidden in the depths of Karadag. About wonderful, inaccessible underwater grottoes, about portals with access to the past, to other dimensions, and, finally, about the spirits and mythical creatures that inhabit the "living" Cimmeria, which does not reveal its secrets to everyone.
Official science is sure: if a living creature lives on Karadag, there should be several of them - mom, dad, grandfather, grandmother, etc. But neither the remains nor the clutch of eggs of these creatures has yet been found. In addition, the Crimean hydronautics is now completely collapsed, deep-water equipment was handed over for scrap.
It is known that such studies are being successfully continued in their territories by North American zoologists. In 1995, two Canadian oceanographers - Dr. Edward Busfield (Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto) and Professor Paul Le Blond (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) - in the April issue of the scientific journal "Amphipa Tsifika" described the discovery in the fjords of British Columbia, on the Pacific coast Canada, a large animal species new to science - cadborosaurus.
They attributed it to the plesiosaurs, a group of highly specialized marine reptiles that became extinct in the Mesozoic era. This "saur" got its name from the name of the sea bay of Cadborough, where it was most often observed.
The message caused a furor in the media. The newspapers immediately gave the creature the nickname Keddi, and local environmentalists demanded that the government immediately ensure the protection of such a rare and, obviously, vulnerable species.
According to eyewitness accounts, the cadborosaurus, by the way, has been mentioned since ancient times in Indian folklore, like two drops of water similar to the Black Sea snake, but feeds on fish, sometimes trying to hunt seabirds.
For scientists, there is no doubt that the depths of the oceans keep many unexplored secrets. But they need facts. However, until now, not a single high-quality picture has been taken - neither in our country, nor in theirs.
This is stubbornly explained by the fact that mysterious creatures appear and disappear suddenly, as if only in order to remind: the living Earth was not born yesterday, but it is necessary to study and protect it in all its manifestations, especially in unique ones.
Nina Yakhontova