At the beginning of the 20th century, strange people with picks and shovels suddenly appeared in the Yalta district. They dug in the ground, set up parking lots, confused the minds of local residents … So in 1911, a real "gold rush" broke out in Crimea.
The reason for this was an article in the newspaper "Novoye Vremya", reprinted by several locals - that "a large nugget of gold was unexpectedly found in the mountains near the Kozmo-Demianovsky monastery", became a real sensation. Immediately, those wishing to get rich quickly went to the mountains. Local experts, having studied the area, shrugged their shoulders: nothing indicates gold-bearing rocks.
A year and a half later, the "gold rush" flared up again. “This summer, for the first time in Crimea, two cases of gold nuggets were found near the Kosmodamianovsky Monastery. Now the hunters, tearing up the ground for a fire, again found grains of gold there. Apparently, the area is gold-bearing and needs serious research ", - wrote" Odessa leaf "in December 1912.
We wish you a beating
Today any geologist will only smile when asked about gold in Crimea: of course, there are no deposits here. More precisely, sometimes traces of precious metal can be found in rocks - they can be given, for example, by a gold jewelry lost or in an ancient burial, industrial waste, etc.
But nature still did not deprive the Crimean peninsula of treasures. Some of them in ancient times were valued, if not by their weight in gold, then by the weight of overseas silk: for example, it was with this kind of "kind" that merchants partially paid for the consignment of Crimean salt.
It was she, salt, that was considered the main natural treasure in the Tavrida, who had just passed under the arm of the great empress Catherine II. Prince Potemkin, who ordered to preserve (or even better to increase) production, gave the salt lakes in the farms - rent to those who wanted to be engaged in pulling. And there were many hunters: it was impossible to take into account the volumes of production for certain, the prospects for deception were enormous. Eight years later, state administration was introduced on the lakes.
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A special salt expedition collected money from tenants. And Potemkin was keenly interested in her work - although, of course, officials both stole, and attributed, and abused confidence. "I established and ordered the Tauride Salt Expedition to release the local salt for bread, and in such a way that whoever brings food to the Perekop store, pay twenty-two poods for a quarter of rye flour, wagon salt, or allow them to collect lake salt thirty poods." This Potemkin order of July 16, 1787 was supposed to stimulate merchants to bring more food to the Crimea.
There were fruitful and "bad" years for lake salt. Long rains diluted brine in the lakes and washed away the salt piles already piled on the banks. And the sun and dry weather contributed to the rapid evaporation of water in the lakes. "Ripe salt" - and as such it was considered when the crust on the surface of the reservoir reached at least an inch (about 18 cm) in thickness. Then the salt layer was chopped up and taken out along wooden walkways to the shore. It was hard manual work. The famous Crimean historian and ethnographer Vasily Kondaraki noted that at the height of the "salt harvest" the highest demand was for Tatar workers.
“You cannot rely on those arriving from other provinces, most of them drop out due to wounds on the legs from the corrosive properties of the salt lakes water. Only the steppe Tatar, who grew up on the salty soil of the Crimea, is not afraid to work from morning until late at night in this murderous brine,”wrote the local historian. But such workers also earned - they were called tafets, not bad: 2-3 rubles a day, and the salt season lasted about two months.
By 1875, when Kondaraki finished and published his work "Description of the Crimea", at least 15 million poods of salt were mined from local lakes. And in the Crimea, wholesalers sold it for 2-3 kopecks per pood (16.3 kg), and in other provinces of Russia they already asked for it from 50 kopecks to a ruble! For comparison, a pood of potatoes could be bought for 12 kopecks. Prices for Crimean salt dropped sharply at the turn of the next century: it began to be mined in Taurida even more!
Ore, coal, "black amber"
There was also iron ore in the Crimean "treasure box". Back in the late 20s of the 19th century, mining engineer Aleksey Guryev began to study it. He highly appreciated the Kamysh-Burunskoye field on the Kerch Peninsula. However, the first attempt to smelt pig iron from local raw materials in 1844 ended in failure. And further research was interrupted by the Crimean War.
The French concessionaires have achieved success. In 1895, engineer Bayar represented a group of industrialists interested in working on the deposit, and it was under his leadership that ore mining began. The first metallurgical plant on the Kerch Peninsula appeared in 1900 and, at the very least (every now and then its profitability was in question), worked until the revolution. The plant became an industrial giant, where ore was mined, enriched and processed, under Soviet rule. At the beginning of the 90s, ore was no longer mined: it was unprofitable.
Not every Crimean old-timer knows about an unusual corner of the peninsula, located in the current Crimean mountain-forest reserve, not far from the five-humped Beshui mountain. This is the only place in Crimea where coal was mined. More precisely, at the end of the 19th century, geologists collected coal samples from near Balaklava, near the village of Terenair (Glubokoe, Simferopol region). But these deposits were not for industrial development.
The Beshuisky deposit, of course, was far from the famous Donbass anthracites in quality, and from the generosity of the Kuznetsk coal basin. Crimean coal is brown, poorly stored, because it quickly cracks, contains a lot of moisture. But with a shortage of fuel, and it is good. Possible reserves at Mount Beshui with very modest coal seams were estimated at up to 2 million tons. But who in the Tauride province needed the dubious coal mines then? Excellent fuel was brought in in excess from the mainland.
But during the Civil War, I had to remember about the brown coal deposit. The initiator of the development was Pyotr Wrangel, a source of fuel in the Crimea, which was actually cut off from the big world, he began to search immediately after the occupation of the peninsula by the Volunteer Army in the summer of 1919.
“These deposits have been known for a long time, but they have not been developed until now, although the seams were superficial, the development is easy and the coal is of good quality,” noted Pyotr Wrangel in his memoirs. - I ordered to urgently investigate the deposit and carry out exploration to carry out a railway line to the coal deposits from the nearest station Beshuy-Suren … Due to the lack of transportation means (horses and carts), the monthly coal production did not exceed fifteen thousand poods."
The partisans were very interested in the Beshuisky mines; during the short time of their work, they tried to blow up the mines several times. The operation under the command of Alexei Mokrousov was the most successful: the entrance was blocked by an explosion and … they got all the cash out of the office's cash register.
The mines began to be restored already in November 1920, right after the Red Army occupied the peninsula. Fuel was vital for the ravaged peninsula. The mines worked until November 1941: they were destroyed by partisans.
"Beshui-Kopi … made it completely unusable: they destroyed the compressor, machines and burned coal reserves of up to 4,000 tons …" - this is how it is written in a report addressed to the head of the Crimean headquarters of the partisan movement Vladimir Bulatov.
Another treasure was found under the city of Beshui: layers of jet. Black stones with a dull sheen were willingly bought by jewelers. From this ornamental stone - it is also called "black amber", beads, mouthpieces, buttons were carved. Here jet was mined long before the opening of the mines. Foresters arranged a hunt for those who collected stones without permission; several boxes of trophies had accumulated. One of them, by the way, went to Chicago, to the World Industrial Exhibition - in the collection of mineral resources of southern Russia.
Fossil perfumery
Considerable are the reserves of not only construction, but also flux limestones used in metallurgy. White quartz sands, zirconium, gypsum - all these are also treasures of the Kerch Peninsula.
Once upon a time … clay was a significant item of Crimean export. Not simple, but special, called Crimean bentonite or keffekilite. The last name is from “Kefe”, “Cafa”: this is how Feodosia was once called. It was from there that ships, loaded with keel, “soapy” clay, left for Turkey. It has long been used by the Crimeans for washing, degreasing skins, and they also treated skin diseases with it.
Keel is "found" in various parts of the peninsula; deposits were developed near Simferopol, Bakhchisarai, Inkerman. Researcher and expert on natural sciences Karl Gablitz, who visited Crimea in 1785, wrote about the kil.
“The soap clay fossil there from the earth deserves a note, which is used by Tatar and Turkish women in baths to wash their hair, and in many cases is released from Balaklava to Constantinople. The Tatars call it keel."
In the Civil War, the killer helped out the Crimeans very much - they sold clay bars in the bazaars, and after the establishment of Soviet power, the Sevastopol chemist Sushitsky developed his own recipe for the “Keel” soap. The goal was to use as little precious and scarce animal fats as possible. A pleasant bonus was that the soap from the keel did not "age", did not deteriorate during long-term storage.
Established production of detergent from keel with the laconic name "Stirpore". In one of the Crimea guidebooks, published in the 1920s, tooth powder from keel was also mentioned - this was produced by local artels, adding perfume or essences to the ground clay. And when life in the Crimea more or less improved, the keel was needed by the textile and paint and varnish industry.
And what, these are all Crimean treasures? Of course not. Nowadays, the main treasures of the Crimea are the reserves of healing mud and mineral waters. How they were searched for, used and are going to be applied in the near future is a separate, exciting story …
Natalia Dremova