In 1601, by order of Tsar Boris Godunov, the city of Mangazeya was founded in the lower reaches of the Taz River, near the Yenisei trails. In the local, Zyryan dialect, the word meant "land near the sea." The city was built not far from the shores of the Ob Bay - the gulf of the Kara Sea.
These shores are uncomfortable: grassy bumps, bushes, undersized trees. Not a soul around. Only bursts of waves hitting the high right bank of the river. Nothing disturbed the sleep of the local land until the time when the Tsar's people came and began to cut down trees and erect the fortress walls of the future trading settlement.
The "Scheduled List" for 1626 says: "over the Taz River … there was a beautiful chopped five-tower Kremlin - Detinets …"
Mangazeya became the final destination for merchant trade caravans from Europe to Siberia. It completed the Man-Gazei sea passage, an ancient Arctic route that connected the Russian Pomorie (White Sea) with the great Yenisei. Peasants from all over Russia rushed to the city, looking for freemen and wishing to get rich on the sable trade.
Life boiled in Mangazeya very quickly. The merchant people were not transferred either in winter or in summer. There was so much money and goods that it was enough to rebuild the church, the seating yard, and very well equipped their own courtyards.
There were all sorts of rumors about the wealth of Mangazeya and it was no coincidence that it was nicknamed "golden boiling". City tycoons fought, as usual, over money. In 1630, as a result of an artillery duel between the adherents of two large quarreled Mangazey governors - Grigory Kokorev and Andrey Palitsyn, the famous Gostiny Dvor was destroyed.
In 1619, by another tsarist decree, the Mangazeya sea passage was prohibited under pain of severe punishment - in order, on the one hand, to prevent foreign trading companies from accessing the rich fur market - annually up to one hundred thousand skins of silver sable were harvested in the Yenisei taiga and transported for sale to Mangazeya! On the other hand, the boyars wished to stop the uncontrolled trips of the peasants of Pomorie there.
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In 1642, the city was badly burned, and in 1672, by another order of the new Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, it was completely abandoned. The uyezd center, which it was, moved to the banks of the Yenisei River, to the Turukhanskoye winter quarters - to Novaya Mangazeya.
Centuries passed - more than 300 years - and a scientific expedition of the Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic headed by Mikhail Ivanovich Belov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, went to the places where the once "golden-boiling" Mangazeya became famous. Researchers quickly found traces of an urban settlement beyond the Arctic Circle.
Excavations have shown that Mangazeya was a typical medieval Russian city with a Kremlin and a posad, with craft workshops and trading rows. Three Kremlin towers are well preserved - Spasskaya, Uspenskaya and Ratilovskaya; the other two were washed away earlier by a landslide.
The fortress walls were erected in 1 604 by the governors of Moscow, the prince Mosalsky and the boyar Pushkin. On an area of 800 square meters, a former voivodship yard was excavated. In the central part of the settlement were found the remains of buildings - foundries, and in them, among the slag - parts of crucibles and smelting furnaces.
In the jeweler's dwelling, they found raw precious stones - agates, carnelians, emerald grains, silver and copper rings, rings and pectoral crosses. A shoemaker's workshop was excavated with a bunch of leather scraps and a special boot knife.
On the banks of the Taz River, the remains of the Gostiny Dvor were also found, and there were also magnificent bone and wooden chess sets, chests, sledges, skis, knives and axes, drills, earthenware and glassware, leather shoes, clothes and much more. Among the finds are a remarkable comb carved from a mammoth bone, several hundred coins from the times of Ivan III, Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, copper coins of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich - the very ones whose issue caused the famous “copper riot” in Moscow.
Researchers have identified not only the borders of the Kremlin and the contours of the posad, but also traces of three religious buildings, first of all, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, the Assumption Church, which stood behind the fortress wall and the chapel of St. Basil of Mangazey - a young man who was villainously killed by local pagans. The story goes that after a fire in 1642, the coffin with Basil "came out" of the earth, after which miracles of healing took place among those who touched the relics of the young man. Later, Vasily's coffin was taken to New Mangazeya.
The famous trading settlement existed in the north of Tyumen for only several decades. Many merchants came to him "from Russia - Permyach and Vyatka, and umyachi and empty-dwellers, and usoltsy, and Vazhans, and Kargopol residents and Dvivians, and Vologda residents - and merchants of all Moscow cities …"
We walked along the streets, paved with keels of ancient ships - kochi, laid on the edge. They had a chance to see Mangazeya in all its splendor, listen to the chimes of the bells of wooden churches, live in houses with double walls to protect them from the northern winds …
Nowadays, only imagination can restore the appearance of the once noisy polar city of Kitezh. Mangazeya flashed on the pages of history and sank into oblivion. A third of the ancient settlement has already been taken away by the river, but what the expedition of M. I. Belova is an invaluable asset of Russia.
Irina STREKALOVA