An ancient Szezha legend says: “In the days of Ona, when Stenka Razin did not walk around our area and there were almost no Russian villages on the Samarka River, one night the heavens opened up. The trumpets of Jericho sounded over the forest, the earth trembled, the hills shook. Every animal and every bird hid. And a star with two tails fell from the sky. And there was a lake in that place, and a piece of rock in the middle of it."
Lake Kruglovushka, lost in the wilderness of the Bogatovsky district of the Samara province, is unique in its own way. According to the residents of the nearby village of Sezzhe, miracles are still happening here. On clear sunny days, it happens that a blue fog appears from nowhere over the lake, in which vague shadows tremble. Everyone understands shadows differently. Who sees in them other mountain cities. Some are the souls of distant ancestors. Emerging from nowhere, a strange fog just as suddenly goes nowhere. And on other nights, a radiance rises above the mysterious reservoir, eclipsing the light of distant stars. And even in terrible rainy thunderstorms, the island seems to attract brilliant lightning to itself. Rattling fiery arrows now and then strike a tiny piece of land, however, without causing much damage to it. Local residents strongly believe in the healing properties of the Kruglovushensky waters.
Many stories of miraculous healings are passed down from generation to generation. And, perhaps, the most mysterious: the local old people assert that in time immemorial people lived on the island who were not like people. Who they are and where they came from, the chronicles do not know. Only a squat cross, knocked down from rough tree stumps, which is firmly embedded in the ground, has survived only. But it is only a later reminder of the Epiphany rituals introduced by Russian settlers.
Kruglovushka is an island with a diameter of fifty meters, a geometrically surprisingly regular shape. Dense bushes and low trees make up its picturesque landscape. Although information about the unusual phenomena that regularly occur in this piece of the Samara hinterland has long been heard by venerable scientists, no serious research has been undertaken by official science here.
Only this year, the enthusiasts of the Samara public research organization "Avesta" (this is the name of the ancient book of wisdom) began to study the age-old mystery. Last summer, the famous Samara paraglider Viktor Pilyavsky joined the scientific group, equipping his motor flying structure with special equipment to survey the surroundings at high and extremely low altitudes. “Using a paraglider, we were surprised to find a circular spiral of anomalous origin around the island,” says the vice president. Avesta »Oleg Ratnik. - Three concentrically located water rings are clearly visible from a height. And the entire system is surrounded by a clay-earthen rampart up to 30 meters high and 400-500 meters in diameter. Such a specific cartographic structure gives Kruglovushka a certain resemblance to Arkaim - an ancient settlement,discovered in 1987 using aerial photography in the Southern Urals. Of course, it is too early to make serious comparisons. We need concrete results, facts, data. But there is also a sixth sense that turns healthy adventurism into something material. Remember the gold of Troy found by Schliemann in the 19th century? Who knows what the mysterious Volga Kruglovushka conceals in itself?
Zhiguli is an ancient land filled with unsolved secrets. There are dozens of zones with pronounced signs of abnormality. There are such zones in the Shiryaevskaya valley, Vavilovsky Dolu, Gremyachee tract and in other places of Samarskaya Luka. The South Ural Arkaim, according to preliminary estimates of archaeologists, is older than the legendary Greek Troy by at least half a thousand years. It is not known who built the strange city of a repeating ring-shaped shape with a complex internal infrastructure. Only one thing is known: the ancient settlement that arose in the endless dehydrated steppes was much more fortunate than the Kruglovushka drowned in the lake.
Whether this amazing body of water arose as a result of a comet impact or for other natural reasons - for a long time to judge by scientists. But locals sometimes find here incomprehensible objects: fragments of ancient porcelain, it is not clear where they came from in these places, melted stones with symmetrical grooves (molds for melting metal?), Iron plaques without any drawings. “There are many wonderful things here,” says one of the old-timers of Syezhye. - I remember that somewhere in the late 1950s in winter, and the cold was then fierce, Daria Perova walked, the kingdom of heaven to her, on the ice past Kruglovushka. Lo and behold - an ice hole out of nowhere.
And in the ice-hole - the icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker floats. Daria fished out the icon, wiped it off with a handkerchief, and went to the grandmothers. And we still had old women - pre-revolutionary, familiar with the monks. They tried and judged: what to do with the acquired image? And then they decided - we will give it to Father Nikodim from the Trinity Church. Father was wise, he put a gift to the iconostasis. And two months later the icon "began to cry". Miro began to exude. Then Father Nikodim passed away, and the icon disappeared. They searched, searched - they did not find. Looks like it was prophetic.
Since then, the villagers have called the lake Holy. On church and patronal holidays, a procession of the cross is certainly performed on Kruglovushka. Here the parishioners take a bath. But the healing waters are always ready to receive the suffering. A special bath is equipped for this. Honor, the whole county enjoys the local grace.
- The lake is overgrown with folklore, - the former history teacher Nikolai Fomin takes out a pack of student notebooks from the table. - Here it is - the history of Kruglovushka. In metrics, homemade topographic maps, memoirs of fellow countrymen. Unfortunately, the events taking place here are not visible beyond the end of the 19th century. Yes, and this information is fragmentary and hardly reliable …