Near the hero-city of Kerch, there is an amazing monument of ancient building art - the mysterious Tsarsky Kurgan. Another name is Kara-Oba, which means Black Mountain in Tatar.
Officially, it is a monument of burial architecture of the 4th century BC, the tomb of one of the members of the Spartokid dynasty, which was built during the life of the ruler. Some historians attribute the mound to the Scythian nomads, who built it for the burial of one of their kings. This version raises very big doubts, since the mound is a masterpiece of engineering and construction art. If we assume that the Tsarsky Kurgan was the work of nomads, then nothing prevented them from erecting skyscrapers, dams and other complex structures.
After the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Empire in 1783, the first travelers were amazed at the abundance of mounds on the Kerch Peninsula. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were more than two thousand of them. Under many were found monumental crypts that have no analogues in other areas of the Northern Black Sea region. Most of them were excavated in the 19th century.
At the end of 1830, the 29-year-old Serb Anton Ashik, who participated in the study of the richest tomb of Kul-Oba on the outskirts of Kerch, did not even suspect that in three years he would have to head the Kerch Museum and join the race to explore the Kerch mounds. The Russian imperial court ordered "to try to tear apart such burial mounds, in which one can hope to find ancient things soon and at low cost." In this situation, Ashik could not bypass a huge mound located 4 versts from Kerch, on the outskirts of the village of Gadzhi-Mushkai.
Researchers, not without reason, believed that the higher the mound, the richer the finds that could be made there. For several years, with interruptions, the workers hired by Ashik tried to get inside the tomb and in February 1837 they succeeded. Through the dome, they entered a completely robbed and empty crypt. This is how Anton Ashik described the tomb:
The most remarkable tomb is undoubtedly the one that I called the Tsar's. There are few monuments that can rival this tomb in grace. Huge walls formed the entrance to the tomb. Almost at the very beginning this entrance was filled with large slabs, fastened at the ends with lead. Although the expenses spent on the excavation of the Tsar's burial mound were not covered by the discovery of treasures, our labors were rewarded with the discovery of a tomb, which in terms of size and structure belongs to the most remarkable monuments of this kind on the Kerch land.
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Time has shown that there is no such tomb either in Greece itself or in the entire Black Sea region. The royal mound stands on a plain and faces the sea. Outside, it is surrounded by a crepe wall made of raw stones. Inside the hill, 17 meters high and with a circumference of about 250 meters, there is a 36-meter corridor made of stone blocks - a dromos and a burial chamber, which is almost square - 4.39 x 4.23 meters. The basement of the burial chamber is carved out of monolithic rock, followed by blocks carefully fitted to each other with a smoothly processed surface.
The chamber is almost 9 meters high. The walls consist of 10 rows of masonry, at the level of the 5th row they gradually turn into a stepped-annular dome, consisting of 12 concentric rings gradually decreasing in diameter, covered with a slab. The corridor leading to the burial chamber resembles a cypress in the shape of a passage, which was considered by the ancient Greeks to be the tree of the dead. Christian religious symbols of a later origin are carved into one of the walls of the burial chamber.
The entrance to the dromos was blocked by a transverse wall. The transition of a square chamber into a circular ceiling has no other analogies in the entire antique architecture. The same technique was later used in the construction of Christian religious monuments.
If you look from the chamber of the tomb towards the exit, it seems that the corridor is much longer than it actually is. This is due to the fact that the thickness of the blocks from which the walls are composed gradually decreases towards the exit. Thus, the narrowing of the ends of each block is only a few millimeters. How it was possible to cut out such precise planes remains a mystery. It is likely that the ancient Greeks sought to achieve this effect on purpose: the path to the afterlife is close, but the way out of it seems so far away.
All blocks of the crypt and dromos were laid dry, without any bonding mortar. In many places, traces of the instrument have been preserved on the walls. Small rectangular grooves in the walls were used by builders for beams and struts in the construction of the crypt. After the completion of construction, all these nests were filled with stone "plugs", which have survived in several places. In the first centuries there was a passage from the vault of the dromos to the chamber, where the first Christians made a place for prayer. Crosses and drawings have survived from this time. Later, the manhole was filled up and forgotten.
The crypt and dromos were covered by a mound consisting of several layers of clay with algae and rubble stones. Such a structure of the embankment protected it from erosion by atmospheric precipitation. For several thousand years, the mound withstood all earthquakes and other cataclysms, did not collapse or leak. All these facts speak of the unconditional skill of the builders. It should be borne in mind that there are several similar mounds nearby. One of them is the Melek-Chesmensky Kurgan in the center of Kerch, which is located just 4.5 km from Kara-Oba.
The mound was completely robbed in ancient times. Legends associated the death of the legendary king Mithridates with the mound. Carlo Bossoli's painting "The Tomb of Mithridates, near the Kerch infirmary" shows the interior of the tomb of the Tsar's mound.
Even today, the empty tomb amazes with its magnificence, at the same time continuing to keep many mysteries: why the entrance of the mound is oriented differently than in other mounds, what is the emptiness that I show the devices in the southern wall of the dromos, why the entire mound was covered with seaweed during construction, is it true that the walls of the mound were hung with carpets during the burial.
Almost nothing is known about the origin and purpose of the mound. The point is that neither then nor in our time, no material finds were found that could help shed light on its purpose and date the mound. When it was built, by whom, for whom and for what purpose, there is no reliable information about it.