The media have written more than once that bad things are happening in the village of Zapovednoye in the Slavsky District. Here, in a few years, an entire architectural complex was wiped off the face of the earth, which included a club and even a pre-war cinema.
But the workers did not manage to complete their dirty work: the 19th century church, which they began to dismantle in the last place, is still standing still. Local residents are sure that it was not without mysticism - everyone who participated in the destruction of the church began to die one after another.
Hanged himself in the warehouse
The old-timer of the Zapovedny Anatoly Moiseev, in whose metric the birthplace is also recorded as Zekenburg (the German name of the village), recalls the first case. It happened at a time when the church was used as a granary.
- The director of the school, Mikhail Vasilyevich Sychev, who gave the order to level the cemetery next to the church, somehow quickly washed down after his order and died. At that time, rumors began to circulate among us that all this did not just happen,”says Moiseev.
However, the loudest and most mysterious deaths, about which the entire Slavsky district spoke, began to occur only a few years ago. One of the customers of the church dismantling was the first to die.
The terrifying inscriptions on the gates of the old-timer of the village Anatoly Moiseev made with his own hands
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“We became interested in dismantling the church when we saw the announcements,” says the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Slavskie Novosti” Lidiya Nizhnikova. - Some LLC wrote that it was selling the building for brick. We made a report that angered the representative of the owner of the church, and he came to us with a scandal and threats.
I was not from the Kaliningrad region, but brought with me brochures, which said that his company would restore the area in Zapovednoye, restore all the buildings and make a hotel complex there.
A few weeks after the angry businessman returned from the editorial office to Zapovednoye, workers found him hanged in one of the warehouses next to the church.
And soon there was another death of a man from the team of the new owners of the church. The man was found dead in a brick booth, which served as a kind of checkpoint during work on the destruction of the trading area of the village. From what he died - it is not clear.
The fourth death was particularly shocking. According to Anatoly Moiseyev and local paramedic Edita Gunkina, the foreman who was in charge of the work crashed on the way to Slavsk. The guy burned to death in the car.
- He was more concerned with sorting out the office, that stood next to the church. True, he also hired a brigade that worked inside the church,”Moiseev clarifies.
So far, no one can say what exactly the team was doing in the church itself. Residents are sure that the workers were lifting the treasure from a six-meter well inside the building.
Tractor driver and woman in black
The fifth deceased in this terrible story was a tractor driver named Bruzhas.
The beginning of the 50s. The musicians of the local ensemble are going on tour. In the background is the church and the club building, which is now destroyed.
- He began to break the wall together with his accomplice. I was picking this masonry around the gate - Anatoly Semyonovich rests his hand against the doors upholstered in tin. - And I myself have little faith in what happened later. Allegedly, when this Bruzhas was digging a pit with an excavator from the wall of the church opposite from the entrance, a woman in black approached him.
And she seemed to ask why he was digging a hole at the site of the cemetery, and then hinted that this hole could become his own grave. I have already heard this legend from several people, but it has taken root in the Zapovedny so much that it is passed on from mouth to mouth.
After the shift, the excavator - and this is already known for sure - went to his home in Bolshiye Berezhki. But he didn’t make it - his heart stopped on the way. The man was found dead in a tractor, driving which he was driving to the village.
- My father, Semyon Romanovich Moiseev, was the commandant of Zeckenburg from 1946 to 1948. Then he stayed here and told me how in 1954 a detachment of the military arrived at our church, on a party assignment looking for valuables.
It turned out that there was a hiding place inside the building, in which church utensils and some valuables were kept. My father told me that this cache was a large oak box, dug into the ground.
They took him out and loaded him onto a boat, moored right there, on the canal. To the five mysterious deaths, you can add a story with a treasure hunt.
On the right in the photo is the scaffolding that the workers used to lift the treasure from the well.
The next stages of treasure hunting coincided with the dismantling of buildings in the market square. Inside the church, work began, the noise of which spread throughout the Zapovednoye.
“After the buildings and all the workers had disappeared, I and other residents managed to get inside - no one had let us in before,” Moiseev continues. - Forests appeared over the well, which I have already mentioned. Apparently, with the help of a winch and these very forests, something heavy was taken out of the well.
Moiseev says that a team of workers from Central Asia, hired by the brigadier who died in the accident, worked inside the church. The workers disappeared immediately after examining the six-meter well.
“Then a second brigade of Uzbeks appeared,” says Moiseev. - They also worked underground, but in a different place - they dug out basements under the church. Probably, something was found there, but no one in the village was able to find out what exactly.
Headache
After all these terrible stories associated with only one village in the Slavsky district, a logical question arises, but from a more practical plane. How did it happen that during the entire time when the destruction of a whole complex of historical buildings was carried out, none of the officials became interested in the problem?
The head of the service for the protection of cultural heritage sites, Evgeny Maslov, says that Zapovednoye is a real headache for its employees.
Historical buildings in Zapovednoye continue to be dismantled into bricks. Photo: State Archives of the Kaliningrad Region
“I personally visited this facility about two years ago,” Maslov recalls. - I met with the owner, who, according to him, had good intentions. In general, since this is a monument of local importance, officials from the Slavsky district were supposed to monitor its condition.
The fact that they don't catch mice there is understandable. I think that after your publication we will arrange a serious check, and we will definitely identify many violations.
BTW
The cross was not allowed to fall
We can say that the dismantling of the church ended after numerous tragedies, but two attempts to finish off the building were still made. The first was the theft of a lightning rod. The attackers planned that the lightning would provoke a fire on the roof of the building, after which dismantling work could be carried out absolutely unhindered. Nevertheless, the fire has not happened yet, but the vandals were interested in the cross from the spire.
“We drove an industrial climber who climbed the spire to the whole village. Then, many were already dismantled by evil due to the fact that the Zapovednoye was turned from a once flourishing land into a heap of ruins, - Anatoly Moiseev recalls. - This climber was brought by some guy in a jeep, he dropped him off, and he stood on the sidelines, waiting for the cross to fall to load it. But these vandals did not succeed in anything, only the tiles on the roof were spoiled.