Italian Venice is rightfully considered one of the most romantic, beautiful and unusual cities on earth. The capital of the world's oldest film festival and fun carnival … Masks, gondolas, Murano glass … It's hard to imagine that there is a very scary place on earth!
Closed for 50 years
Venice is the only city on water in the world, but to be precise, it is elegantly scattered across the islands of the Venetian lagoon of the Adriatic Sea.
Among them is the Poveglia ghost island, located just three kilometers from the famous Piazza San Marco and 700 meters from the island of Lido di Venezia, where this year's 75th anniversary film festival will open.
Poveglia in 2018 also celebrates a serious anniversary - for exactly 50 years this piece of insanely expensive land is uninhabited and abandoned, closed to the public, guarded by a water patrol. Italian authorities have banned official water taxis from taking customers to Povella. True, you can persuade a private owner with a boat, who will ask for a route of 700 meters at least … 100 euros (7000 rubles).
I learned about this mysterious island from Dmitry Cherkeszade, a traumatologist and orthopedist, an expert in joint replacement and limb lengthening at the Venetian hospital Del Angelo, who has been living in Italy for many years, ten of them in Venice. He undertook to study the history of the development of medicine in the Most Serene Republic of Venice (Venice was a separate state and existed for 1100 years until its fall in 1797) and was faced with a mass of discoveries and mysteries, including terrible ones. But today I would like to talk in more detail about the "haven of lost souls", "the gates of hell", "garbage dump out of pure fear" - Povelje. This is what the Venetians call the island.
Promotional video:
Fiery ghosts and moans
Poveglia's notoriety began with the plague that raged in Venice for four centuries. Since the XIV century, plague corpses were brought there, as well as the sick and dying, who were thrown into common pits and mercilessly burned. Venice has survived 22 outbreaks of plague, and it is difficult to imagine how many people were actually burned on this island, when even their official number is terrifying - 160 thousand people. The island's soil is said to be 50 percent human ash. And local fishermen are still trying to fish far away - they are afraid to catch the bones of their ancestors with nets.
Poveglia has become a favorite destination for paranormal researchers, as they have been able to observe a wide variety of ghosts here. Witnesses say that a burning figure suddenly appeared out of nowhere in front of them, which turned to ash in seconds. Entities from dense fog, wandering shadows, lights are observed here. Many people hear voices: screams and groans, as well as the ringing of a bell, which was removed from the bell tower 50 years ago, when in 1968 the last institution of the island - a psychiatric hospital - was closed. By the way, during the time of Mussolini (from about 1939 to 1944), Italian anti-fascists were held by force and tortured in this mental hospital.
This medical facility added creepiness to Poveglia's dark history. It is said that his head physician was a sadist, performed terrible experiments on patients without anesthesia, and eventually went insane himself, repented and threw himself down from the bell tower. They refer to the notes of one clinic nurse who wrote that the rebellious patients forced the doctor to throw off. Falling to the ground, the doctor survived, but the patients did not allow the medical staff, watching his torment. Suddenly a dense fog rose from the ground where the murderer was writhing, it enveloped his body in a cocoon and strangled him to death. The rioters walled up the doctor's body in the wall of the bell tower. It is believed that it is his spirit that rings a non-existent bell …
Almost a hundred years have passed, but ghosts continue to dominate Poveglia, and no one is able to remove the stigma of the most terrible place on the planet from the island. Moreover, archaeologists studying burials on the island have found here … the remains of a vampire, or rather the one who was declared as such in the 16th century. This skeleton had a brick protruding from its mouth, right between its jaws. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that such a method would stop the "shroud-eater", as the ghouls were then called.
In 2014, Povellu was leased for 99 years to Italian businessman Luigi Brugnaro. Far from superstition, he announced that he would open a hotel on the territory of the "horror clinic". Meanwhile, the island is still abandoned and continues to acquire new creepy stories.
Migulina Katerina
