How do you prefer to keep your money? Probably, like the majority, - in the bank, or, at worst, at home, in the storehouse. But our distant ancestors believed that the best place to preserve their savings was … land.
Reliable storage
Probably, it is no secret to anyone that up to the revolution, the majority of the population of our country was the peasant class. It was divided into "ordinary", poor peasants, and wealthy. And if the former did not have any special savings, and they hid all the coins that they had either in the red corner, or under the threshold, in extreme cases, in the joints of the log hut, then with the latter, the situation was somewhat different. They preferred to keep their savings outside the house, albeit next to it; and the most reliable place was considered the earth's interior. Money, as a rule, was placed in some container, and then buried in the ground - in the garden, for example, and even in the forest. Schron was certainly marked - so that later it could be easily found.
Europeans, by the way, also often acted in a similar way - but they have such burials were accepted in some emergency situations, for example, during the siege of a city. Ours buried their savings for no apparent reason, which greatly surprised foreigners visiting Russia. What was the reason for such frequent treasures?
The reasons
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And there were several reasons for such storage of their savings. The first is frequent fires. Until the seventeenth century, they were almost commonplace in rural areas, and often all the property of the victim was lost in the fire, even if he himself remained alive. Money, although only metal coins were used at that time (paper bills came into use later), could also suffer from a fire - melt, turn black. That is why they preferred to hide them underground - there they were much safer.
The second reason for keeping money in the "earthen bank" was a thriving theft. Robberies were also commonplace, and of course, the robbers were looking for money in the house. Finding them outside the house, without knowing the exact instructions as to where they were hidden, was very problematic.
Finally, the third reason was the desire to have stock for a rainy day. People were afraid of everything - after all, Russia survived the invasion of the Tatar-Mongols, and dispossession, and war … There was no guarantee that this would not happen again - and therefore the existence of a treasure, to which, if necessary, you can return after a few years, seemed pretty solid the foundation for a good life after all possible vicissitudes and blows of fate. Needless to say that many of these caches, which, by the way, often contained not only money, but also other valuables, were never dug by their owners?..
Natalia Vorobyova