In 1989, the Old Sarepta Museum-Reserve was founded in Volgograd. Once located here, a German settlement arose several centuries earlier, during the time of Catherine the Great, who invited immigrants from Germany to these lands to live. Each of the buildings of the German community had a basement connected with its other buildings by underground passages. These cellars have survived to this day, they were visited by a journalist from Volgogradskaya Pravda.ru.
Marriage by lot
As Denis Platonov, an employee of the Old Sarepta Museum-Reserve, who became our guide to the unique place, said, unmarried boys and girls lived in Sarepta in two separate buildings.
And the first of the Sarepta dungeons that we had a chance to visit was the basement of the former “house of single brothers”, built in 1797.
Traces of the past three centuries are felt here in everything. Salt on the walls. The niches carved into them are a kind of built-in wardrobes of the former German residents of Sarepta. On a shelf under the basement ceiling, they kept valuable food so that rodents would not eat it.
How it was? On a specially appointed day, the young men and women of Zarepta came to their church, or kirkh. They wrote their names there on small notes, which were then put in two separate urns. A five-year-old boy from one of them took out a note with the name of the groom, and from the other his peer - the name of the bride. The pastor consecrated the marriage of two young people, and only after that the notes were opened, the names of the newlyweds were read.
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Looks strange for our time? Yes. However, there was not a single divorce in Sarepta in the entire history of the community: marriage in it was considered sacred and was not subject to dissolution.
Guardian in armor
The main building in the history of Zarepta is the Kirche, a German church built in 1772. All the rituals important for the life of the Sareptians were held in it: here they were baptized and married, here they were buried. At the same time, the Sarepta church was a kind of border between the world of the living and the dead: in front of the church were the houses of the Sareptans, and behind it was the local cemetery.
In 1938, when the church in Sarepta was already closed, the residents of Krasnoarmeisk went down to its underground part and there they found a large forged door with a heavy padlock. When they opened it with great difficulty, they were stupefied: a mechanical knight, clad in armor, stood outside the door. We can say that it was a mechanical robot, made in full human growth. He was armed with a sharp spear and made sharp movements with it, as if trying to strike someone. He was a kind of guard of the church basement, with his spear he was supposed to hit uninvited guests. Employees of the NKVD seized this formidable find, where it went then is unknown.
Pastor's house, or firing squad
The pastor of Zarepta, the spiritual mentor of the local community, strictly monitored the observance of the norms of Christian morality in it. To this end, every day he made a detour along the local underground passages, suddenly appearing in any of its buildings.
“About a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, the local Cheka branch was located in the same building, and its basement was converted to accommodate those arrested,” continues Denis Platonov. - There is a preserved corridor in which the Chekists then shot those sentenced to death. And they then forced the indigenous Sareptians to dig mass graves for the executed. Not without reason, when the building of the former house of the pastor was transferred to the creation of a museum, bullets from revolvers and rifles left in them after the shootings that took place here were often found in the walls of his basement.
Nowadays, psychics love to be in the dungeons of Sarepta. Once in this basement they discovered a spirit named Vasily. He said that "he was killed here for nothing." When asked if it was possible to help him in any way, the spirit replied that nothing could help him, but he would not refuse a sweet treat. Since then, here, in a recess in one of the basement walls, visitors have often left sweets. And from time to time, the offerings supposedly disappear without a trace …
It’s scary to be alone in this basement - here soon you get the feeling that someone is looking in your back. The film crew of the Kultura TV channel tried to do their own shooting in it. Attempts were unsuccessful - over and over, over the course of a number of hours, the television camera within these walls refused to work. Moreover, as soon as the film crew left the basement, the camera worked normally again.
Ghost of the White Bride
Sareptians were treated for diseases, as a rule, with herbs, which the community pharmacist collected on the nearby Ergenin hills or grew in a vegetable garden, under the window of his house.
Here in this building is the deepest and coldest basement in Zarepta. It once contained food supplies that were served to the guests who lived upstairs. Emelyan Pugachev personally visited this basement at the time of its plundering during the Pugachev invasion.
Once upon a time there lived a wealthy brewer named Krautwurst in Sarepta. His daughter was preparing for marriage, but on the eve of the wedding she died suddenly. Her father, instead of burying his daughter in the Sarepta cemetery, decided on a rather strange step: he placed the coffin with his daughter's body along with all her dowry - about one and a half pounds of pure gold - in one of the local dungeons. He also placed a mechanical knight nearby, who was supposed to protect the treasure from plunder.
But some time after that, on the main, Church Square of Sarepta, people at night began to notice the ghost of that dead girl, dressed in white clothes, which both disappeared and appeared unexpectedly. And after the Great Patriotic War, people began to disappear over and over again in the dungeons of Sarepta. They were then found dead, with severe cut and stab wounds on their bodies. Therefore, the last underground passages here were blocked and walled up.
Beer for a ghost
The basement of the former Goldbach trading house is perhaps the most mystical in Old Sarepta.
“Many museum employees,” Denis Platonov told us, “came across various obscure things here. For example, in the photographs taken in this basement by them, more than once silhouettes of people who had taken on them appeared. For some reason, the exhibits were suddenly changing places in closed windows. And during one of the museum excursions here, in violation of all the laws of physics, the stand suddenly collapsed - as if someone had thrown it off the wall.
The museum staff turned to the TV show "The Battle of Psychics", from where the famous psychics Alena Orlova and Nonna Khidiryan arrived at the museum. Both of them immediately indicated that there was someone otherworldly in this dungeon. And right there in the basement, as eyewitnesses recall, howled, the alarm, which had been disconnected for some reason, suddenly went off.
The ghost turned out to be quite sociable. It told psychics that he was called Johan during his lifetime. As it turned out, Johan was very fond of beer, which he lacks in the afterlife. Since then, in the place of this building indicated by the psychics, there is always a mug with fresh beer, on top of it lies a piece of bread. Since then Johan himself has ceased to be naughty in his basement, but the beer in his mug allegedly disappears regularly …
In the same basement there is a magic portal indicated by the same psychics, leading to the other world. In its place is now an overturned barrel with small money on it. Visitors leave them for Johan, museum staff use them and buy beer for him.
Alexander Litvinov. Photo: Publishing House "Volgogradskaya Pravda" / Kirill Braga
