In the 18th century, the famous Russian historian N. Karamzin wrote about a mysterious and full of mysteries world - Trans-Urals: “Russia opened a second new world for Europe, deserted and cold, but free for human life, marked by diversity, greatness, wealth of nature”.
However, boundless Siberia amazed and continues to amaze travelers and researchers not only by the grandeur of its nature, but also by man-made archaeological monuments, which from time to time open to the inquisitive gaze of contemporaries.
Underground curiosity
On September 1, 1581, a Cossack detachment of 840 warriors equipped by the Stroganov merchants under the command of Ermak Timofeevich Alenin (1532 - 1585) sailed along the Chusovaya River to the Ural Mountains. Almost without meeting the resistance of the Siberian Tatars, by mid-October of the same year, Yermak's squad reached the Irtysh. Along the way, the warriors saw many unusual things, which from time to time they reported to their distant homeland.
For example, in the archival records of the beginning of the 17th century, information about the amazing "underground curiosity" found by the Ermak Cossacks has been preserved. During the capture of the city of Isker, which stood on the high bank of the Irtysh, the guards did not find any bodies of the dead or living people in it. All utensils and food supplies disappeared from the city. Upon closer inspection of the deserted settlement, Yermak's scouts discovered a narrow but deep hole leading to the river.
When a group of warriors descended to the very bottom of the manhole, they were amazed at what they saw. It was as if they found themselves in an underground city with an extensive system of passages, caves-dwellings and large halls in which the coals of fires were still smoldering! The walls, floor and vaults of the underground city were decorated with shell rock and stones, and the storerooms contained a lot of gold, silver, precious stones, Asian brocade and furs. The Cossacks even found a cemetery in this city, which was a niche in the wall, into which the bodies of the dead were embedded, and a pagan temple, furnished with wooden and stone gods.
It was located in a spacious grotto located behind an underground cemetery. In the center of the temple there was a deep hole in which the Cossacks discovered traces of fires and many bones, including human ones. Apparently, the inhabitants of Isker, who fled during the assault in this underground city, left along an underground passage to the other side of the river.
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The chieftain ordered to take away the expensive booty, and to lay barrels of gunpowder in the tunnels of the underground city and blow them up. Nowadays, only wide and deep ravines overgrown with open woods, located three hundred kilometers north of Krasnoyarsk, now remind of this once large settlement of the Siberian Khanate.
City of giants
Another discovery, quite accidentally made in the early 1990s in the southwestern Altai, near the border with Kazakhstan, indicates that from time immemorial Siberia was inhabited by peoples with a very high level of development and, most likely, differing from modern humans in their anthropometric characteristics.
In the mountains, speleologists stumbled upon a complex of caves, which, presumably, could serve as a dwelling for an ancient man. The total area of the discovered caves was more than one and a half square kilometers. They were large grottoes, connected by passages and had only three exits to the surface. Inside, huge horizontal slabs like tables were found embedded in the rock.
All these slabs were so large that a modern person would not be able to use them. But the most interesting thing for the participants of the expedition was revealed in a distant grotto, the entrance to which was covered by a massive vertical slab with petroglyph marks carved on it. It took six men to move the slab and go inside, Imagine the surprise of those who entered when, once in the cave, they saw on its sloping vault the image of a star map of the sky, illuminated by the sun's rays falling from three small holes in the ceiling! The unnamed creators of this miracle achieved that simultaneously with the movement of the sun on the earthly horizon, the sky map drawn on the ceiling of the cave also changed …
Due to the onset of twilight, the members of the expedition were forced to leave the caves and descend into the gorge to the camp. The next morning, they made another attempt to explore the mysterious complex. However, once again the cavers failed to find the entrances to the caves. According to reports, since then, no one else could get into the kingdom of the mountain giants.
The accidentally discovered settlement of giants was reflected in the Turkic legend of a tribe of heroes, with whom one of the Asian rulers had an agreement. According to the treaty, in exchange for the most beautiful girls, the giants were to defend the ruler's kingdom. However, when the waters of the warm sea splashed on the site of the Karakum Desert, the giants left their habitable places and left forever.
Soon the great kingdom fell, and the fragrant oases were buried under a layer of sand. It is quite possible that the disappearance of the mysterious people is explained by another legend, which tells about a terrible war that broke out in those regions several millennia ago, in which the opposing sides even used nuclear weapons!
Kolyma "cosmodrome"
In the early thirties of the XX century, the harsh Kolyma region became a place of a kind of "shock construction", where dozens of camps were erected in a short time, which became a place of severe trials for hundreds of thousands of Soviet people. The construction of one of these institutions began in the summer of 1932 on the Yukagir plateau, 120 kilometers north-east of the village of Zyryanka.
The detachments formed from the "special contingent", under the supervision of the guards, cut down the forest, the explosives cleared the rocky territory for construction. According to the plan of the unnamed architects, the camp was to grow on a strategically advantageous hill - a many kilometers rocky plateau, a significant part of which was occupied by a lake.
After a series of powerful explosions made by mining engineers, turbid water poured out of the lake through gaps in the rock. When the bottom of the lake appeared, the civil engineers were amazed: they saw a cone-shaped bottom bowl, the surface of which was as if cast from high-strength concrete! The bottom was covered with long lashes, embedded in concrete and made of an unknown metal, similar to aluminum. It also seemed interesting that in many places at the bottom traces of burning were visible, as if someone had worked here with powerful burners.
Later, when one of the engineers of that project happened to take part in the construction, and then in the maintenance of the Baikonur cosmodrome, he found a number of similar structural elements in the first-born of Soviet cosmonautics and at the bottom of the lake. And the footprints on the concrete table of the cosmodrome looked very much like the sooty sections of the cone-shaped bowl of a reservoir …
The mysterious find was immediately reported to the leadership of the camp construction, which decided to blow up the strange object, and then fill the bottom of the lake with rock, sand and clay. From the witnesses of that unusual discovery, a non-disclosure agreement was taken about the mysterious Kolyma Baikonur …
Source: “Secrets of the XX century. Mysteries of History"
