The collection of the non-governmental research organization "Avesta", which is located in Samara, contains unique records. They were received from former employees of the special geological party of Volgostroi, formed in early June 1931. The goal of the group was a comprehensive study of the Zhigulevsky Gate area, where, as you know, in accordance with the GOELRO plan at that time it was supposed to build the world's most powerful hydroelectric power station.
Underground labyrinth
During 1931-1933, a special geological party led by mining engineer A. S. Barkova surveyed the Zhiguli valleys near the villages of Gavrilova and Lipovaya Polyany, as well as a number of other areas. Mining engineers were able to penetrate through the caves into the system of the undergrounds of the Samarskaya Luka, where the prospector had never set foot before. But only quite recently it turned out that during their travels through the Zhiguli subsoil, they more than once met mysterious and inexplicable phenomena, about the non-disclosure of information about which the prospectors at one time signed a subscription to the relevant authorities.
Shortly before his death in 1989, Nikolai Sokolov, one of the former employees of the no longer existing Moscow Institute for Water and Geotechnical Research for Volgostroi, spoke about this. Fragments of this recording in the author's processing are offered to the attention of readers.
“In 1931, the summer was extremely hot and dry. The Volga has become very shallow. Here and there, sandy islands rose from the water. To get to the cave, which we were going to explore, we had to maneuver between the shallows for a long time before we managed to bring the boat up to the rock near the crevice.
We were lucky - due to the extremely low water level in the river, we managed to get into the cave, almost without soaking the bags and without even extinguishing the lanterns. Immediately behind the ledge, the floor of the cave dropped abruptly downward, and the ceiling went up somewhere, forming a large hall filled with water dust. Our guiding stream, breaking through a narrow place, rapidly expanded, and, breaking off a stone ledge of a rock, fell into an underground lake, swirling its waters in a small whirlpool.
The weak light of our lanterns did not allow us to see the entire hall as a whole, but it was still noticeable that the ceiling of the cave here is very uneven and unstable. Huge boulders hung over our heads, threatening to fall every minute. Moving over the stones, we easily climbed to one of the widest holes. 3a it began a dry gallery, which was four meters high and six meters wide. It ended in a narrow, irregularly shaped hole that led us into a large hall. On this part of the way, we stopped to rest and had lunch.
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During lunch, a very noticeable draft was discovered in the avalanche hall. Consequently, the air in this hall not only entered, but also exited through some other hole unknown to us. The search for a new passage also took a lot of time, but in the end we still managed to find a rather narrow gap going somewhere down and into the depths of the mountain.
When moving along a narrow winding manhole, each of us somewhere in front all the time heard some kind of even incomprehensible noise. And when we all got out of the manhole, we clearly distinguished a quiet ringing, similar to a bell. At the same time, the source of the sound was not visible - it seemed that this ringing was born somewhere in the depths of the mountain and fills the entire cave.
Strange, but as we moved through the cave, the bell ringing gradually disappeared. It was humid in the hall - drops of water fell from the high ceiling, which invariably fell into the long-ago hollowed-out cracks, displacing the air from them. Perhaps it was precisely such a fall of drops that gave rise to the magic bell ringing that we heard in front of this hall.
Pantheon
It turned out to be noticeably colder here than in the previously passed dungeons. In some places, ice even lay along the walls of the cave. The headwind increased noticeably. And then the gallery turned to the side almost at a right angle. We stopped, fascinated by the picture that opened to us. Ahead lay a huge hall filled with a strange bluish gleam. It was so bright that the entire surrounding space could be easily seen. It turned out that we were standing in front of a vast ice field of weak violet color.
Closer to the walls of the cave, the ice rose up, forming a system of regular cubes. Soon we approached one of the huge blocks of ice, illuminated by the same bluish glow. And here everyone was dumbfounded: from the depths of the ice shell … a huge bear looked at us. Standing on his hind legs, he seemed to be reaching forward, as if he was trying to reach the uninvited aliens.
When the first shock from the meeting with the frozen bear passed, we all, as if enchanted by an incredible sight, went further through the hall - from block to block. Surprisingly, none of us had any fear, from excessive fatigue. The further we went, the more frozen exhibits of this strange underground museum we came across. Here in front of us in a block of ice appeared another bear, here is some kind of huge bird, here is an elk, a deer, another bear and some other completely incomprehensible animals … A real underground pantheon!
How did all these animals get here? How did they get frozen into these almost regular ice cubes? How long did they stand in this mysterious dungeon? We did not find answers to all these questions.
How long we walked through the cave after that is hard to say. Maybe an hour, maybe several hours: the sense of time for some reason disappeared. But suddenly water appeared on the floor of the cave. Then we saw a small stream, from which we drank greedily.
After resting for a few minutes, we walked along the stream to one of the side galleries. The passage gradually narrowed, and on the floor there appeared small pebbles, accumulations of clay, and, finally, dry leaves of trees. Therefore, the surface of the earth is somewhere very close! Indeed, after passing just a few turns, we saw an exit. It turned out that the cave went out to the bottom of some unobtrusive forest ravine at the foot of a large mountain. So our underground journey is over."
What was it?
Here is how the president of the non-governmental research organization "Avesta", engineer Igor Pavlovich, comments on these lines:
- When analyzing the above texts, the question immediately arises: how reliable are they? Despite all the improbability of the described phenomena and events, let's nevertheless try to reason strictly scientifically.
The very existence of significant underground voids in the karst rocks of the Samarskaya Luka is an indisputable fact. But whether the caves described by the participants in the expeditions to the Zhiguli underground existed, and whether they exist to this day - that's the question! After all, it is known that the construction of a cascade of Volga hydroelectric power plants in the second half of the twentieth century radically changed the entire hydrological regime of the river on the territory of the Samara region. In particular, at the end of the 50s, the water level near the dam of the Volzhskaya HPP named after V. I. Lenin rose by 29 meters, in the 60s in the Saratov reservoir near Samara - by 5 meters, and at Syzran - by 11 meters. Without a doubt, the water that rose then filled all the underground voids.
And the purple glow in the underground indicates the presence of significant inclusions of radium. It is the decay of this radioactive chemical element that should cause stable ionization of the air and, consequently, the glow of it and the surrounding rocks. The presence of radium, uranium and other radioactive chemical elements in the vicinity of Samarskaya Luka has already been confirmed by the latest geological research.
As for the ice "Kunstkamera", something similar was discovered in the caves of the Kugitang mountain system in Turkmenistan in 1984. Mentions of the ice caves of the Zhiguli are found in the monastery's geographical guidebook published in 1689. And at the beginning of the twentieth century, the compilers of a detailed hypsometric map of the Zhirylevsky mountains also found many caves in these places, inside which, even at the height of summer, there were whole ice deposits. In particular, the topographer M. Noinsky in 1902 noted the emergence of "an underground passage into a very deep ice cave near the village of Podgory."
How to relate to the stories of geologists of the 30s is a personal matter for each researcher. However, it is worth noting that it will hardly be possible to repeat all the trips described above through the Zhiguli dungeons. Most likely, most of them have long been destroyed as a result of a rise in the water level in the Kuibyshev and Saratov reservoirs. Nevertheless, researchers of everything unusual and mysterious would be very interested in obtaining new data about the secrets of the caves of Samarskaya Luka.
Valery Erofeev. Secrets of the XX century magazine