The city and village spread out on the Azov coast, which has chosen the Donetsk ridge, amaze even avid travelers with unexpected beauties.
SHOLOKHOVSKY KHUTOR
From the mines you can wave to the village of Veshenskaya - the homeland of Mikhail Sholokhov and his heroes from "Quiet Don". A couple of hours by car - and you are like on the pages of a novel. Solid houses, a church, a monument to the Don Cossacks rising on a hill and the majestic river itself. "Opposite the village, the Don kabarzhina of the Tatar sagaydak bends, as if it turns to the right, and near the farm Bazki again majestically straight, carries greenish, translucent blue waters past the chalk spurs of the right-bank mountains, past the continuous on the right side of the farms, past the rare villages on the left to the sea …", - wrote Sholokhov. After admiring enough of the water surface, go to the writer's memorable places. This is the estate where he lived, and the house where the first pages of the novel were created, and the monument to Gregory and Aksinya - he was brought here from Rostov-on-Don in the 1990s.
BOFFO STAIRS
If, walking along Taganrog, you suddenly feel as if you are transported to Odessa, do not be surprised - this means that you are looking at the Stone Staircase. It, like the famous Potemkinskaya, was designed by the same person - Franz Boffo. Due to the fact that the steps of the stairs are of different widths, there is an illusion that it narrows if you look at it from the bottom up. A special challenge is to count the steps. There are under two hundred of them.
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THE GHOST PALACE IN THE NEOBAROKCO STYLE
The artist Alexei Bogolyubov, once staying in Taganrog, wrote that he lived in the luxurious house of Mrs. Alferaki. There was something to admire: the owner of the house, Nikolai Alferaki, was a great connoisseur of beauty, he was friends with Karl Bryullov and the architect Karl Stakenschneider. It was he who invited him to build a palace in Taganrog in the southern neo-baroque style. He filled it with magnificent examples of French painting, tropical plants and other beauty. Since the 1930s, there has been a local history museum. They say that there are also ghosts there: according to legend, the queen of Sarmatian comes every night to check whether her treasures are in place …
OBELISKS-TERRICONS
During the Great Patriotic War, the mines were occupied by the Germans and held from July 1942 to February 1943. The city was badly damaged: houses and offices were destroyed, a prisoner of war camp was set up in the school building. The miners were arrested along with their families - they did not want to help the invaders and establish coal mining. The Krasin mine was adapted for the execution of death sentences … During the months of the occupation, 3,500 people were thrown into the mine. In 1975, a memorial was erected here: two obelisks-waste heaps are striving upward, and a miner standing between them holds a bowl with the Eternal Flame in his raised hands.
SHECHTOR'S MANSION WITH TOWERS AND LIONES
Any connoisseur of Russian Art Nouveau will recognize the exceptional beauty of the mansion on Frunze Street in Taganrog. Turrets, decorated with sharp spiers, as if wearing a wizard's hat, windows of various shapes. Does it look like the Yaroslavsky railway station in Moscow? It is not surprising, because they have the same architect - Fyodor Shekhtel. The fashionable architect was invited by the local bread merchant Yevgeny Sharonov - he wanted to build a house for his daughter. The mansion came out to glory: noticeable, fashionable and, moreover, decorated with panels based on sketches by Viktor Vasnetsov and in the manner of Nicholas Roerich. And from the gate with gate towers, the masks of lionesses look at the townspeople - it is also quite easy to determine their authorship - the characteristic large features immediately inform that Mikhail Vrubel had a hand in them. And inside it will be interesting - the Museum of Urban Planning and Life is located here.
CAPITAL OF THE DON COSSACKS
Only 25 kilometers separate Shakhty from the city of Novocherkassk. The town is over two hundred years old. It was founded by ataman Matvey Platov - because of the Don overflowing in the spring and frequent fires in Cherkassk, he was looking for a place where he could found a new capital of the Don Cossacks. As a result, I chose the tract Biryuchiy Kut ("wolf's den"), which rose between the rivers Tuzlov and Aksai. It was here that “little Paris”, as the architect Franz Devolan called it, called Novocherkassk. The place is cozy. Plan for the day: walk the streets, look into the Atamansky Palace, where the Museum of the History of the Don Cossacks is now located, go to put candles in the Voyskova Ascension Cathedral, where the heroes of the war of 1812 rest.
Photo: Yuri Pogotov.
