In the Sverdlovsk region, on the banks of the Kyrya river, there is an abandoned village Rastess. For more than sixty years, there is not a single living soul in it, the houses are dilapidated, the yards have long been overgrown with weeds. However, hunters and travelers are still trying to bypass it …
Gateway to Siberia
After the Siberian Khanate fell at the end of the 16th century, the road beyond the Urals was open to enterprising Russian people who went east in search of gold, silver and furs. Boris Godunov, a very calculating man and not devoid of intelligence, understood what benefit the Moscow state could get from the development of new lands.
Therefore, being the de facto ruler under the painful and self-aloof from power Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, he achieved the signing of the Tsar's decree, according to which the construction of a convenient road for travel from Europe to Asia was started. This path, by the name of the person who proposed and then carried out its construction, was named the Babinovsky tract.
Artemy Babinov, who brought his own project to life, not only laid a 260-verst highway from Solikamsk, but also founded settlements throughout its length, which were supposed to serve the road and protect people traveling along it.
One of these settlements was the Rastessky guard, later - the village of Rastess, the name of which goes back to the outdated form of the word "clearing", since the first inhabitants of the settlement were lumberjacks who fell trees for laying the Babinovsky tract. Then they were replaced by service people, who kept the path in good condition, carried armed guards of carts, who welcomed the wanderers to their camps.
For about a century and a half, the tract was the main route to Siberia, and the village of Rastess was one of the most important transshipment points on it. Messengers with royal decrees, peasants seeking a better life, scientific expeditions passed through it. Only after the construction of the Siberian-Moscow Highway, the importance of the old road began to decline until, in 1763, it was officially closed.
Promotional video:
Nevertheless, the village of Rastess was not deserted, and in the nineteenth century it even experienced a new heyday - after deposits of gold and platinum were discovered in its vicinity. The villagers, by the standards of that time, became quite wealthy, and some even got rich.
The village retained its industrial significance even in Soviet times - until, in the middle of the twentieth century, it was mysteriously deserted.
Bloom anomaly
What exactly happened in the 1950s is still unknown. There were no witnesses left who could tell about what happened, no traces that could shed light on the mysterious disappearance. Just a few facts - and even more speculation.
If we talk about the facts, then they are as follows: once the residents of the nearest settlement, Kytlym, located a couple of tens of kilometers from Rastess, realized that for a long time they had not seen a single inhabitant of the neighboring village, and had not even received news from any of them … Having gathered, the local men drove in cars to find out what had happened.
What they saw from their neighbors left the villagers at a loss. From the outside, it seemed that everything was as usual in Rastess. The houses were untouched, livestock and poultry in place, except that some of the animals looked visibly starving.
However, as soon as we got closer, it became clear that something strange had happened. There was not a single person in the entire village. Moreover, it seemed that all the inhabitants of the village had simply disappeared in the blink of an eye. The windows in the houses are open, the doors are not locked. On the tables is a half-eaten lunch (or dinner?).
On the bench lay an open book with a bookmark, as if the reader had decided to distract himself for a minute - but never returned. Continuing the search of the village and its environs, people came across another riddle: it turned out that graves had been dug at the local cemetery. However, not a single clue where the inhabitants of Rastess could have disappeared was never found.
Only after returning to Kytlym, the men, who did not understand anything, began to remember that at one time they had laughed at the eccentric neighbors, who sometimes fancy mermaids, now the light in the sky, now some kind of evil wandering through the neighboring forest.
These memories not only increased the aura of the mystery of what had happened, but also cemented Rastess to notoriety. From now on, those who wanted to voluntarily find themselves in the deserted village became less and less every year, despite the temptation to appropriate the property left unattended.
Moreover, the opinion about the curse hanging over the ancient settlement was subsequently reinforced more than once by many anomalies. According to the testimony of those rare daredevils who nevertheless reached Rastess along the remains of the old Babinovsky tract, they saw strange lights among the trees, pillars of light going to the sky, and sometimes, especially in the dark, from nowhere came a whisper from which the blood froze …
The fate of the Trans-Ural village strangely unites it with the disappeared English colony of Roanoke, the first to be founded in North America. Founded in 1585, it was discovered completely deserted only 15 years later.
At the same time, the same "symptoms" were observed as in the case of Rustess: the houses looked as if people had decided to leave them for a minute, but could not return. The abandoned settlements in North America and the Sverdlovsk region are united by the fact that the mystery of the disappearance of people to this day cannot be solved.
Of course, you can name a great many versions that at the very least explain what happened. From fairly realistic (a consequence of an attack by Indians or, in the case of Rustss, escaped prisoners) to mystical: alien abduction, opening doors to a parallel dimension, mass insanity, attack by monsters.
According to one of the versions, the reason why the village was deserted is the free settlement of prisoners (located nearby), who dug graves in the hope of finding gold and robbed the houses of local residents who were forced to go to work in neighboring settlements, from where they returned only for the weekend.
However, there are still too few facts to give preference to one of the hypotheses. Therefore, it is completely unclear whether Rustess will ever become a less mysterious place than it is now.
Attempts to research
In 2005, the first expedition to Rastess was made by an amateur traveler. Due to the short duration of the expedition and the inaccessibility of the village, the collected material was not enough to study the history of this area.
In 2011-2014, Rastess was repeatedly visited by Perm jeepers as part of the Eurasia-Trophy event held in that area. At the moment, Rastess is very heavily overgrown with wild grass, from the buildings there are rare ruins of wooden log cabins. In August 2014, another cast-iron tombstone from the late 19th and early 20th centuries was discovered and excavated in the cemetery.
In July 2015, the site was visited by a team of ATVs from Yekaterinburg on the way along the historical route of the Babinovskaya road from the village of Pavda to the village of Verkhnyaya Kosva. It turned out that the place where Rustess was located is now an overgrown field with the almost disappeared remains of three houses and a single old burial.