For the second century, researchers have been trying to unravel the mystery of the "Veles Book", which tells about the rituals of ancient Slavic pagan magic. Meanwhile, professional historians consider this work to be nothing more than a forgery. One of the versions ascribes its authorship to a certain Alexander Ivanovich Sulakadzev.
Sulakadzev lived in the first half of the 19th century. He came from a family of Georgian nobility: his paternal ancestors arrived at the court of Peter I together with the embassy of Tsar Vakhtang VI. But his mother was Russian, a native of Ryazan, so Alexander Ivanovich was sometimes called not by the hard-to-remember generic Georgian surname, but by his maiden maternal name - Blagolepov.
Photo of the tablet number 16 of the Veles book
The historian claimed that in the course of his research he managed to find many of the rarest ancient manuscripts. Some of them were soon published. These are, in particular, "Boyan's Song to Slovens", as well as "Perun and Veles broadcasting in Kiev temples to the priests Moveslav, Drevoslaz and others." Lovers of antiquity were waiting for new sensations.
According to Sulakadzev, there were almost 2,000 old books in his library, of which 290 were handwritten scrolls. However, experts of that time had doubts about the authenticity of these sources, since their owner could not clearly answer the question of where he got these manuscripts.
Once he was found in the back room of the house for a forgery of an old document. In addition, several servants let slip that they had helped the owner to falsify ancient parchments and "birch bark letters."
There were other indications of forgery, such as errors in dates. However, the case was not given a wide course, since, firstly, Sulakadzev did not at all profit from the sale of supposedly ancient scrolls, and secondly, they really contained a lot of valuable information on Slavic history.
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Sulakadzev died in 1831. After his death, the widow sold her husband's collection of forged manuscripts at bargain prices. And in 1919, among Russian emigrants in the West, they suddenly started talking about the ancient Slavic book of mystical content - the Veles Book, which told about the descendants of Dazhdbog - the Rus, about their way of life, customs, and most importantly, about their magical traditions.
But how did the book get to the West? The legend was as follows: during the retreat from Russia, Colonel of the White Army F. A. Isenbek found in a noble estate abandoned by the owners of several wooden planks, covered with incomprehensible symbols.
Arriving in Paris, the officer showed the find to a historian, a well-known specialist in Slavic paganism, Yu. P. Mirolyubov, who managed to decipher and publish the texts. So fragments of the "Veles Book" went to the people.
However, modern historians and linguists (for example, L. P. Zhukovskaya) are inclined to believe that the mysterious tablets with the inscriptions "in Old Slavonic" are nothing more than separate pieces of the manuscript "Perun and Veles broadcasting in Kiev temples to the priests Moveslav, Drevoslav and others”, which actually came from the pen of the hoaxer Sulakadzev. It is not excluded that other "lost scrolls" from his collection will later surface somewhere …
Is it worth the harsh judgment of the hoaxer? His contemporary, the poet Mikhail Chulkov, wrote: “The hoaxes of Sulakadzev are brilliant. Strange as it sounds, he can be called the real creator of history, so much he was able to imbue its spirit."
And the historian Alexander Pypin argued:
“It is hardly doubtful that … there was not so much a counterfeiter chasing profit, or a hoaxer, but a dreamer who deceived himself. Apparently, in his products he was chasing, first of all, his own dream of restoring monuments, the absence of which historians and archaeologists regretted."
