In the Kaluga region, people talk about strange hairy creatures that they met in local forests
In the village of Soroki, in the south of the Kaluga region, we came to collect "anomalous" folklore. They were interested in devil, brownie, devils - famous mythological characters. And they heard about … monkeys.
- There were! - confidently and without a shadow of a smile, said 83-year-old local resident Maria Ivanovna Minakova, specifying: - I have not seen it myself, old people told. Who lived in the forest.
- And how did they look?
- Well, monkeys and monkeys. They climb the trees … They swear like men. They are like people, like that. - Grandmother pointed to my companion Rosa Tenyakova …
- So they were women? she asked.
- Yes, only naked, shaggy. Their whole body is shaggy. Their chest is like a human. Long arms …
It would seem that the villager decided to play a trick on the eccentric "city". But I immediately remembered: I had already heard about monkeys in the Kaluga region. Also in the south of the region, but in the Zhizdrinsky district, the village of Korenevo. In 1998, in response to a request to tell about unusual animals, V. I. Arinina (at that time she was almost 85 years old) boldly answered:
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- Here two women saw monkeys when they went for nuts! For a long time, really. Even before the war. On the nuts, they said, they swayed by the river.
Both villages are located at the same latitude and in the same zone - the famous slash forests. Between them in a straight line - 80 kilometers, and on the roads - twice as much. Perhaps the almost identical stories about monkeys who have come from nowhere are just a coincidence. But there are other suggestions, more romantic.
If you believe the legends, then the Kaluga monkeys were small in stature. They loved to swing in the trees. Especially females.
Fled to freedom?
There were no zoos in Kaluga either. Not to mention the southern districts of the province, which have always been considered the most archaic and backward. Although it cannot be ruled out that some landowner, a lover of exotic things, brought monkeys and accidentally or intentionally released them. Theoretically, at least in the summer they would not have disappeared: there is a lot of food, there are no special enemies … In Soviet times, baboon monkeys were experimentally released on an isolated island in the middle of a lake in the Pskov region - in the summer they felt just wonderful. In winter, of course, scientists took care of them. And Japanese macaques, even without human help, feel pretty good almost in our climate. In India, mountain langur monkeys often climb into the snow zone …
In the south of the region, large and educated landowners are rare. But nevertheless, for example, the estate of the princes Lvov with exemplary economy and factories was. Near Bryn - the area corresponds. However, the monkeys who escaped from the exotic lover would hardly have begun to travel 80 kilometers, and even not to the south. And how would they have crossed two powerful rivers - Zhizdra and Resseta? And there should have been references to the manor menagerie in literature and historical documents - there is one in the south of the region. Getting an exotic animal a hundred years ago was still more difficult than it is now …
Little snowmen?
This version, of course, comes to mind first of all. I think everyone now knows that Bigfoot is a newspaper nickname. And received by mistake.
You will see such a monkey in a pond and think - like a mermaid!
“He lives not in the snow, but in the hard-to-reach forests. That is why researchers-cryptozoologists prefer to call it now a relict hominoid. Nowadays, many messages about a meeting with this relative of ours, who apparently lost to our ancestors in the competition for the best places and were forced out into the wilderness, come from Yakutia, Karelia, Chukotka, and in the recent past, shaggy humanoid, most often called "swamp devils", less often "goblin", were often found in the forests of central Russia. Moreover, the "name" of the Chuvash "goblin" of this kind - upate - has long been translated into Russian as a monkey! " - writes cryptozoologist D. Bayanov in his book.
Last year, traveling to the neighboring Chuvash Republic of Mari El, where hairy humanoid people are called ovda, I myself wrote down the story of a young guy: “My grandmother told me: once a horse came from the night, and a huge monkey was sitting on its back”. “It was an ovda,” another old-timer commented on the bylich …
However, the entire anatomy of the relict hominoid shows that it is nevertheless adapted for movement on the ground. Yes, he can climb trees, sometimes he sleeps on them, this line of behavior of "divas" is said in the poem of the 12th century Azerbaijani poet Iskander-name … But in all places where relict hominoids were noticed on trees, they were seen, and much more often, and walking on the ground.
Simple mermaids?
At first glance, this version is tautological: it explains the incomprehensible creatures - "Russian monkeys" - by even more incomprehensible mermaids. However, from the point of view of ethnography, the mermaid is a well-known character, albeit a mythological one. So it is perfectly acceptable to rethink it into monkeys.
A mermaid in Slavic mythology is by no means a woman with a fish tail, but a beautiful young girl with loose hair …
Most often we met them (according to beliefs) in the summer in rye. But mermaids also loved to swing in trees. Remember, in Pushkin: "A mermaid sits on the branches"? In contrast to the observations of the "monkeys", the legends of encounters with mermaids are told today. Including in the same Soroca. This is what one of the young peasant women told us:
My mother told me about mermaids. What do they look like? Like ordinary women, young. They sit on birches, swing. It always amazed me - why not on the river? "No," my mother said, "they are in the forest."
And Maria Ivanovna herself, having said about the monkeys in the trees, immediately recalled that mermaids are also found on them:
- On the birches. Crawl out of the swamp and swing. After Trinity …
Some researchers, who prefer to explain all the mysteries by one reason, also consider mermaids to be relict hominoids.
Indeed, in Siberia, sometimes in Karelia, mermaids are described as ugly huge women covered with hair. But in our area, mermaids are young and beautiful. And they are not at all like monkeys.
Familiar inhabitants?
There is a tiny chance that we had some kind of monkey-like animals of an unknown species, perhaps indeed related to primates, there is.
Yes, nowadays there are no such people - but let's not forget that broad, truly scientific zoological research was launched in Russia (and in other countries as well) some one hundred or two hundred years ago. Professional biologists can still be counted on one hand (for example, the fauna of the Kaluga region is studied mainly by the staff of the biology department of the pedagogical university, whose main task is to train biology teachers).
And in the nineteenth century, field zoology was just getting on its feet. Particularly noteworthy is the location of the event: the clearing forests. Since the time of the raids of the Polovtsy and other Tatars and Pechenegs, here, in modern military terminology, the "security zone" of the southern borders of the Russian lands passed. Tsarist and princely decrees were forbidden to reduce forests: they served as a natural barrier against the cavalry of the steppe inhabitants. It is here and now that many rare plant species have survived and
Otnyh: a classic example is the desman, a valuable fur-bearing animal, considered a relic of the Tertiary period. During our hike, the Red Book butterflies literally flew around us in flocks: the poplar tapeworm and mnemosyne, so rare in other parts of the region … For knowledgeable people, there is nothing strange in the fact that "Russian monkeys" (if they really lived) are unknown from fossil remains - the mineralization of bones requires a combination of many rare factors, starting with the fact that the corpses of dead animals in nature are usually quickly taken away by scavengers.
For twenty years I have been seriously interested in collecting fossils, every summer I visit Kaluga quarries that reveal the deposits of the Carboniferous time, and for all the time I have found only three teeth of ancient fish. Not a single bone of them, not a single print! But that's not all. At least one tooth of a primate of an unknown species on the territory of our country was found at the bottom of a Caucasian cave by one of the enthusiasts of the search for "Bigfoot" - R. Danov. According to the experts of the Darwin Museum, the tooth in Moscow really belonged to a primate of an unknown species.
However, if there were “monkeys” in our country, could information about them not get into folklore? After all, peasants are not urban zoologists who visit the forests on short visits, they should know at least large animals living in the area!
In the slash forests, there was practically no agriculture and logging, and the population was always small. It is quite possible that it is here that a population of some rare animals that died out in other parts of the world hundreds of years ago has survived almost to our days. On the other hand, the “monkeys” probably had a different name among the people, just as the aborigines called the newspaper “snowmen” in a completely different way: yeti, saskvatchi, almas, avdoshki …
So far I have only managed to find one mention:
“In the forests, besides the goblin, according to beliefs, there are bogs, mosshogs, their appearance is similar to monkeys, some of the water, only the tail is shorter, smaller in stature and does not bring people too much evil "(E. M. Pomerantseva." Mythological
characters in Russian folklore ).
People tend to associate phenomena with evil spirits. But I am convinced: behind many legends there is, albeit encrypted and distorted, reality.
BTW
And here are the cacti on the Volga It is not known whether it will be possible when to meet alive the primordially "Russian monkey". But we still have wild cacti - plants of the Mexican prairies. Andrey Perepelitsyn found them during an expedition in the lower reaches of the Volga. They feel very good here. And even bloom.
The origin of cacti, unlike monkeys, is by no means mysterious. They were planted before the revolution. Then the plantations were abandoned. Cacti without human care went wild. But they survived. Suddenly, the surviving monkeys will eventually be found.