In the pictures: Bor-Kaya in the summer. Isn't this cave the Golden Cradle? Photo by the author.
Members of the Crimean travel club "Akinak" were carried away by the search for the legendary "Golden Cradle". Some local historians believe that this term hides the Holy Grail itself …
"So far, we have limited ourselves to searching in the most little-known places for the possible location of the Crimean relic," - the head of the expedition, Alexander, answered when asked about the expediency of an expedition to Bor-Kaya, the mountain of the Inner Ridge. After all, even from the famous legend it is clear that we are talking about Mount Basman with a height of 1176 meters.
And this is the very heart of the Crimean nature reserve, on the north-western side of the Main Ridge. In the eastern cliffs of Basman, dark openings of caves gape. The same caves, found in other places of the Crimea, gave rise to many legends among the local population about treasures, supposedly hidden in them and protected by spells from abduction.
"Akinak" is not looking for easy ways, and first its members will check all the information about the Golden Cradle in other places. “Many people were looking for the relic on Basman, and so far without success,” the guys say. But in the legends of the Crimean peoples, at least eight more places of concealment of the sacred object are mentioned.
But it is interesting that the Crimean relic is often associated with the most sacred subject of world Christianity. And her name is not just the Golden Cradle, but the legendary Grail. This is the point of view that "Akinak" adheres to, whose participants provided the most fascinating information about the relic.
Holy grail- the main Shrine of Christianity - the cup from which Christ communed the apostles during the Last Supper, and into which His blood was then collected. Writings about this mysterious Cup appear unexpectedly in Western culture at the end of the twelfth century. And subsequently, this mysterious and frightening image, going beyond the limits of the usual spirituality, embodied the unattainable ideal of Christianity. Its history can be traced in the Byzantine Empire, but after its capture by the crusaders in 1204, references to the Grail disappear in Christian Europe, and the Sacred Chalice there begin to be considered lost to sinful humanity. But just at the same time in the medieval Crimea, in the state of Theodoro, we find evidence of the existence of the Grail tradition. It's amazingbut even now, on the frescoes of Crimean churches, the image of a golden cradle bowl is ubiquitous!
There are no written sources left from the state of Theodoro, all of them were destroyed after the Turkish conquest. However, Crimean scholars of the last century left us a number of interesting legends and tales associated with the principality of Theodoro.
The central motif of these legends was the mysterious Golden Cradle, depicted on the coat of arms of the principality and belonging to the Theodorite princes. To date, more than ten versions of this legend are known. Its plot boils down to the following: in the 14th century, the Christian principality of Theodoro was forced to confront two powerful enemies - the Tatars of Mamai and the Genoese, who settled in the Cafe. Desperate battles were fought between them, and the principality was in grave danger. Genoese Catholics demanded that the Theodorites give them the Golden Cradle, promising to end the war.
Then the prince of Theodorites, together with his family and a sacred relic, took refuge in the caves of Mount Basman, where, in prayer to the spirits of the mountain, he called to hide the Golden Cradle. At that moment, a terrible earthquake occurred, and the Golden Cradle, guarded by spirits, remained in a mysterious grotto. Only a select few can see it. Those who are not worthy to see the cradle, the spirits guarding it make madmen.
Even more interesting is the Crimean Tatar version of the legend of the Golden Cradle. Here is the eternal struggle between good and evil, and the triumph of love, and the eternal conflict of generations, and the contradictions between the way of life. Not a bad plot for a movie, by the way.
Researchers have broken many spears around the mysterious cradle. They saw in it either the golden font, which, according to legend, was presented as a gift to the Mangup prince Isaac by the ambassadors of the Grand Duke of Moscow John III, then they elevated it to the stone cradles of Turkic epic legends and even pointed to the similarity of the Crimean Golden Cradle with the cradle of Genghis Khan.
Therefore, let us take a step into the theory of mythology. The essence of the worldview is explained through sign signals, security and forbidden symbols, color gamut, ornamentation. These features are reflected in clothing and household items.
Non-Turkic (Slavs, Iranians, Germans, Greeks, Romans) and Turkic tribes (ancient Turks, Bulgars, Kipchaks) imagined that the world around them consists of the world of people, the world of gods and the world of ancestral spirits. They are connected with each other using the "tree of life". Actually, this is the world order that underlies the worldview of many other nations. For example, as the well-known Crimean ethnologist Rustem Kurtiev points out, the Altai Turks believe that the lower zone (the roots of the tree) is the world of the souls of the ancestors, who are served by the god Erlik together with his friend Umai. He is responsible for the reproduction of descendants, and the goddess Umai guards the cradles with the souls of future children, which are in a mountain cave and are guarded by the Master of the mountain - the Old Man, white as a harrier.
Birds and animals are sitting at the entrance to the cave. The door to the cave is opened during the sacrifice of the white lamb. In the legends of the Crimean Tatars, the Golden Cradle is kept in a mountain cave, and the inhabitants of each region of the peninsula believed that the Golden Cradle was located exactly with them, in their sacred mountain. According to researchers, the legend of the Crimean Tatars about the Golden Cradle is a symbol of the Tree of Life with all its attributes.
But there is one more "but" connected, as is customary in the turbulent twentieth century, with special services and secret organizations. At the end of the twenties, a group of employees of the secret department of the NKVD, headed by the notorious Alexander Barchenko, a major specialist in the field of occult sciences and paranormal phenomena, worked on our peninsula. Barchenko came to work in the special department of the NKVD, which was headed by an old Bolshevik, one of the founders of the GULAG system, Gleb Bokiy. For the research of A. Barchenko, huge sums were allocated for those times, he received carte blanche from the new authorities for unlimited access to archives and any information. Gleb Bokiy personally authorized the search for the Holy Grail. Officially, the purpose of the work was to explore the Crimean cave cities of Mangupa and Chufut-kale.
However, according to the testimony of one of the members of the expedition, she had another secret goal - to find a wonderful stone hundreds of thousands of years ago that fell to Earth from the constellation Orion. "Stone from Orion" is another allegorical name for the Holy Grail, which goes back to Wolfram Eschenbach's poem "Parzival", where the Grail appears before us in the form of a stone that fell to the ground from the crown of Lucifer.
What the Bolsheviks found remains unknown, since Gleb Bokiy and Alexander Barchenko were shot in 1937-1938. But if Bokiy was shot fifteen minutes after the verdict was pronounced, then Barchenko was interrogated for another whole year. Apparently, former seminarian Joseph Stalin was not averse to owning the Holy Grail. The former artist Adolf Hitler was not averse to purchasing the shrine.
During the occupation of Crimea by the Germans, the search for the Holy Chalice continued. From December 1941, they were led by SS Gruppenfuehrer and Police Lieutenant General Otto Ohlendorf, leader of Einsatzgruppen D, known by the nickname "Grail Knight" given by Heinrich Himmler. Einsatzgruppe officers thoroughly searched the old kenassas and mosques, the mausoleum of Tokhtamysh's daughter Janike-khanum, the Chufut-kale and Mangupa caves, the ruins of temples and mountain fortresses. For his work in the search for the Holy Grail, Ohlendorf received the Iron Cross of the first degree from Hitler.
But has the Holy Grail been found? Otto Ohlendorf was arrested by the Americans in their victorious forty-fifth. In 1947, the SS man was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal as the culprit in the deaths of thousands of Jews in Ukraine. However, the allies were in no hurry to carry out the sentence. Were they also interested in a Christian shrine? Only in 1951 was the last "Grail Knight" hanged. Whether the Yankees obtained information from the SS man is unknown.
The guys from the Travelers' Club are sure that the shrine remained in the Crimea. But it will take a lot of time to find it, including by esoteric methods. “Until the summer, that's for sure, and there the Serpent of Karadag will come,” - either they joke or seriously say the researchers of the Crimean caves.
Why look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there? Or, more precisely, the Cradle, dark in all respects, in the darkness of the cave labyrinths, especially if … “I don’t want to think about sad things,” the akinaki smile and remain in the mountains. Why languish from the midday heat, freeze from the chill on a summer night on the yayla, get wet under the annoying autumn rain, smear yourself in the indelible clay of caves, stomp more than a dozen kilometers like “your hill, our hill”? I don’t know, and the guys from Akinak don’t know.
