Rocks are one of the hardest natural materials on earth. Fragments of living organisms that lived on our planet hundreds of millions of years ago can be found in the structures of some stones. If you hit a stone with a hammer, the mark from the impact will remain on the body of the stone and will never disappear. Written in stone, it stays forever.
That is why, if people wanted to tell their descendants something important, they wrote it down and sketched it on the stones. Such inscriptions, traces of which go back to ancient times, are found in any part of the world. Many of them have not yet been decrypted, which means that the keys to the secrets and secrets that they keep are still lost in time.
The inscriptions on the stones are called "petroglyphs". This word is derived from the Greek πέτρος - stone and γλυφή - carving. The most ancient petroglyphs are rock paintings of cavemen depicting hunting scenes and ritual dances. So people of the Paleolithic era were able to convey to us today the story of their life.
Most often, the stones depict animals, abstract symbols associated with astronomical objects or forces of nature. The most famous petroglyphs are found in the Sahara. There, on the Tassilin-Adjer plateau in southern Algeria, there are drawings depicting animals, hunting scenes, and animal husbandry. The drawings are 7,000 years old.
There are many petroglyphs on the territory of Russia both in the Caucasus and in Karelia. Yes, almost near every Russian village there is a stone known to the entire district, on which you can make out icons and drawings of unknown origin.
One of the most famous stones in the whole country with petroglyphs is located on the border of the Novgorod and Malovishersky districts, near the village of Mytno. He is called the Dandy. The exact coordinates of the stone: N 58 ° 41.910 ', E 31 ° 46.590'. This is a granite boulder measuring 1.5x2 meters. It belongs to the II - I millennium BC. And this is the late Bronose Age. It depicts bear paws and human palms, abstract symbols resembling a schematic representation of the Sun among different peoples. It is not yet clear what these symbols, depicted in one place, mean, for which the ancient people put so much work. And the very interpretation of signs is very conditional.
Are bearish feet depicted, or a footprint from ancient shoes? Are there solar symbols on the stone, or did the ancient stone cutter want to depict something of his own? Why are the signs positioned this way? And what if so pray for the centuries to secure a certain agreement between the leaders of the two tribes? Or maybe people thought that by putting these signs on the altar stone, they would give it the strength of living nature, through the paws of a bear, the strength of the sky, through the signs of the Moon and the Sun and human wisdom, through the palms. So far, one can only speculate. An exact decoding of the signs does not exist today.
There is another mysterious stone with mysterious drawings in the Malovishersky district. They call it "Kolmykovsky stone". There is a legend about him. On the Verebushka river near the village of Kolmykovo there was a place that people have revered as a saint for many centuries. And there was a huge boulder. Yes, not simple, but with signs. People call these stones investigators. There were human footprints on it - both adults and children, and cow and horse. And not just knocked out, but as if dented, as if plasticine was molded. The journal "Region of Culture" has already written about the stones-investigators. So in one of the traces of the Kolmykovsky stone there was always clear water. You could drink it straight from the trail. And the water quenched my thirst and gave me strength. And most importantly, he knew how to heal the stone for many diseases. And if he could not, so people would not come to him for so many centuries. And here - the path is trodden.
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And once people come to the stone, lo and behold - and beside it, on a tree, is an icon. They took it off, took it to the church, which was the closest. And only in the morning that icon was in its former place. Since then, this place has become more revered. It means that it has the power of grace.
But those days have passed, and in the fifties of the twentieth century, the local authorities decided that the Kolmykovsky stone was ideologically harmful and should be liquidated. They covered it with dynamite, and blew it up with petroglyphs together. No photographs or drawings remained. Only human memory, but a bunch of debris. Yes, the local population, the fragments that were scattered by the explosion, collected and saved until better times. And now, in the same place, the remains of that stone are piled up. From the former - a tenth. But again people come to him and ask for help. I haven't been there yet, but they say that it helps. Otherwise they wouldn’t.
This story is just a small part of those legends and mysteries that keep the Malovishersky region. And kind and sympathetic people live there, who for centuries cherish what they have and try to increase the beauty and wealth of their land. Hence, among the swamps and dense forests, there is a real pearl of the Novgorod land - Malaya Vishera.