Beginning: "Legends of Pleskavia. Izborsk. Part 1".
Another Pechora legend says about a holy elder, a hermit named Titus. He allegedly lived so long ago that no one remembers when it was. But, the city did not exist at that time, which means more than five hundred years ago. His dwelling was … No, not a barrel, but one of the countless caves in a deep ravine, at the bottom of which the river Kamenets flows.
Location of Titov's stone on the map.
It can be called a river, perhaps, "in advance", in its usual state it is just a stream. However, during the rains, it turns into a roaring beast that mercilessly destroys everything in its path, and carries branches and broken trees straight to the walls of the ancient fortress, where it continues its way in a gloomy dungeon under the monastery.
Tower of the upper grates. Pechora Fortress.
The arrow indicates the gates of the upper grilles. Kamenets flows there. And on the opposite side of the monastery, where the river flows out of the underground tunnel, there are exactly the same gates, but they are called the Gate of the Lower Lattices. I was lucky once. He found the grates open, and made an underground, about seven hundred meters, walk through the medieval dungeon. Sadly, this trip was not captured on photos and videos.
By the way, it was at this place that Andrei Tarkovsky filmed one of the main battle scenes for the film "Andrei Rublev".
Near the cave of Titus was a huge granite stone on which he prayed for many years. The stone has absorbed everything that Titus said and thought, felt and dreamed of, and has lived its own life ever since. Its surface is covered with mysterious signs, and at the very top there is an imprint of his, the holy elder, chela. And although Orthodox monks claim that Titus prayed to the Mother of God and Jesus, the local residents - Chud Pskov, who themselves call their people Seto (Setu) do not think so.
Promotional video:
Their language hardly differs from Estonian, and Elder Titus, they call Kitt. Therefore, the stone has two names: - Titov stone in Russian, and Kittov stone (Kivi Kitt) in Seto language.
They are Orthodox faith, but only nominally. Paganism in the Seto is ineradicable. To this day, they perform rituals at the stones - tracers. It is believed that with the help of worship stones, anyone can contact the souls of their ancestors directly, without intermediaries. Just like us, they have mermaids, brownies, goblin, etc.
And the stone was also considered healing. Even in damp, cool weather, it was always warm to the touch. He cured any ailments, but he was especially revered by women who could not give birth. From afar, the unfortunate rode to the Titov's stone, in the hope of healing, in order to give the beloved man heirs. And they claim that it helped! The named list of patients has not been preserved, but rumor claims that those who believed in the help of spirits, and lay on a stone, pressing their stomach tightly against the warm granite, were healed of infertility.
But truly famous, Titov's stone became in the nineties of the last century. The fact is that according to legend, the hermit Titus said that as soon as the forces of evil take possession of Russia, the stone will disappear. The prophecy seems to have been forgotten, but when in 1999 a group of researchers arrived from St. Petersburg with special equipment to document and study the famous stone in detail, and they did not find a muddy clay puddle in place of the stone, the whole city started talking about the old legend!
The stone actually disappeared, but not literally, but hid deep into the earth, drowned in the thickness of sand and clay. And there were a lot of dark conversations about this. How could it be otherwise? Remember what happened in the country in those years? The newscasts were like bulletins from the front. And it seemed that it would never ever end. But now, in the middle of the two thousandth, the news spread around the city that the Titov stone had appeared again!
Again they started talking about the old hermit, and everyone exclaimed with hope that they say everything, they have survived the time of troubles, evil has left Russia, and now we will live happily. Necessarily! The stone won't lie!
Schoolchildren from the military-patriotic club "Rubezh" armed themselves with shovels, stretched a hose to the bottom of the ravine, and began to wash off the clay layer by layer with the help of a water jet, helping the Titov stone to reveal itself to the world in all its glory.
Correspondents from all over the country rushed to capture the sensation, but … In the morning, only broken wooden supports were found in the place of the stone, which the schoolchildren had installed the day before to support the stone on the surface. But will the alder sticks hold the multi-ton granite monolith! The stone, as if "does not like" the attention of strangers. He again went into the thickness of sedimentary rocks.
The next time he showed himself to people in 2009, I stopped following this story. But recently, something pushed me to go to the Titov stone.
I walked along Kuznechnaya, turned onto Ovrazhnaya, and after a hundred meters I ran into dense thickets. A narrow stitch winds steeply down …
Descent into the ravine to the Kamenets river, from the side of Ovrazhnaya street.
The ravine is very deep and the slopes are so steep that climbing in a straight line requires climbing equipment. The vegetation is rampant, as if in the tropics.
Multimeter strata of sedimentary rocks of sand and clay.
Near this slope I finally found a place for a safe descent….
This is where you can get from Ovrazhnaya Street, if you don't know what awaits you at the dead end.
Kamenets river.
At the very bottom there is a stream of muddy muddy water. But when the level of the river rises by two or even three meters, the ravine turns into a chain of lakes in which the boys swim. Sometimes they swim into caves that are inaccessible at other times.
And there are a lot of such walls here. Check the vertical at least with a plumb line.
This cave was completely covered with sand during the flooding of the river. The city still recalls a terrible incident when a young kindergarten teacher took a group of pupils to one of the caves, and a landslide occurred. The children were dug up, but a few were never saved. The woman was sentenced to a maximum term, and nothing is known about her fate to this day. Most likely, after her release, she could not return to the city, where she would have to face on the street with the parents of the children who died through her fault.
But finally, there is a clearing, on which once the Titov stone towered almost two meters above the ground … The grass is chest-high, but I carefully examined the entire surface of the earth. Not a single reminder of the giant boulder! A layer of turf covered the last hints that there was a small rock here just recently. We'll have to use the help of Svetlana Lebed, who in 2009 selflessly dug Titov's stone together with her friend, and a photo report of that expedition has been preserved.
I will leave without comment:
And here is how the Titov stone looked on the eve of its disappearance after appearing to the guys from the Rubezh club:
Titov's stone during its last appearance on the surface.
Well … Let's wait for the next return of the "living" stone!
Pan.
The origin of the word "panic" does not appeal to anyone. The myths of “ancient Greece” in Russian schools are told as if schools in Russia were created exclusively for the Greeks. Therefore, it is not surprising that everyone has a stable opinion that almost all the languages of the world are descended from Greek. And nobody cares that in the 17th century the “Greeks” themselves traveled to Rome and Florence to study their “ancient Greek”, allegedly lost language.
So what scientists tell us:
Quoted from Wikipedia.
Now, who is PAN?
"Pan (" everyone liked "), in Greek mythology, the deity of herds, forests and fields, the son of the messenger of the gods Hermes and the nymph Dryopa. This patron of mountain forests and pastures, goats and sheep was a goat and a horned goat. Driopa was horrified when she saw her newborn son, overgrown with hair and bearded.
Pan and Siringa. 1679. Paris Jean Francois de Troyes.
However, Hermes and the Olympian gods only laughed and named the baby Pan. Together with the satyrs and the strongholds, the demons of the elemental fertile forces of the earth, Pan entered the retinue of Dionysus. Playful and cheerful, he was known for his addiction to wine and gaiety, passionate love and pursuit of nymphs. One of them, Siringa, in fear of the goat-footed god, turned into a reed, from which Pan made a pipe.
Indispensable judge of shepherd musical competitions, he challenged Apollo to the competition and, according to the judge, King Midas, defeated him. In revenge, God awarded the judge with donkey ears. As a deity of the elemental forces of nature, with the sound of his flute, Pan inspired an unreasonable, so-called panic fear on people, especially on a sultry summer afternoon, when forests and fields froze.
Pan helped in battles, terrifying enemies; he helped Zeus in the fight against the titans. The cult of Pan was especially widespread in Arcadia, it is there that the sacred mountain named after him is located. In Roman mythology, Pan corresponds to Faun and Sylvanus."
Well, it is clear … And where, then, in remote places of Russia, there are so many toponyms with the root "pan"?
Here, for example, is a village located a couple of tens of kilometers from my house. Panikovichi is the volost center of the Pechora district of the Pskov region. No matter how much I asked local ethnographers about the history of the name, no one answered anything intelligible. There are two versions:
1) (Unlikely, according to the local historians themselves) - I would have founded the village by a Polish pan. The version does not stand up to criticism. In the north-west of the Pskov region, no one has heard anything about the Poles since they defeated the troops of Stefan Batory in the late 16th century. True, the words "Pole" and "Pan" then hardly anyone heard. The Poles were called at that time simply - "Litvins". And no "lords".
2) The second version says that “PANikovichi” is because before the war there was a large branch of the Estonian agrarian bank, and in Estonian “bank” is written and pronounced like this: - “PANK”.
The bank really was. It existed as a loan office for peasants who could afford to take loans, and there were quite a few of them. I even visited the house of the former manager of this bank; now my friend lives there with his family.
Here I can not help but tell a curious story with this manager. She was witnessed by the father of this friend of mine, who in 1939. was 10 years old.
The USSR then returned the territories of the Baltic countries, which had been alienated from Russia after the First World War. The Red Army soldiers entered the city in trucks, and quickly, in an orderly manner, they began to arrest officials, soldiers, policemen and bankers. We came to the house of the bank manager in Panikovichi. They walk along an alley of poplars from the country road to the house, and towards the peasant in a cap with a beard, in a zipun, belted with a simple rope. They ask: "Is this the road to the manager's house"? "Uh-huh, uh-huh, manager, sons."
"Sons" come to the yard, and there are several local peasants doing housework. They ask in menacing voices: “Where is the manager? Come on, admit it quickly, disagreements! "Contras" answer: - "So you just talked with him on the alley!"
A dumb scene. The Red Army men were convinced that bank managers wore tailcoats, top hats, white gloves, and a cane. In the teeth, there must certainly be a thick cigar, and a gold chain "Breguet" sticking out of the pocket of the vest.
And the manager, meanwhile, flew away through the forests and swamps, and his further fate is unknown. Most likely, he managed to escape to Estonia, because the border was only a couple of kilometers from home.
In general, as you can see, the second version also cannot pretend to be impeccable.
Now the funniest thing:
I had a conversation with one of my acquaintances, who serves as a simple fire master in the Emergency Situations Ministry. He talked about how, in the early sixties, he and his brother discovered in the attic of his grandfather, who lived on a farm in the wilderness of the Palkin forests, a whole fascist warehouse. There were soldiers' boots, gray greatcoats, trousers and tunics. There was even an officer's leather coat with SS braided shoulder straps. In general, a whole company could be equipped. But this is a topic for a separate story, and one slip of the tongue from a friend struck me. He said that when his grandfather handed out slaps to the pioneers dressed in gray fascist tunics and boots, he threatened that if they talked about the find, he would tie them both to a birch at the edge of the swamp, so that PAN would teach them reason to reason.
- Kohl, and what kind of pan is that? - I interrupted the narrator, believing that this is some hero of local folklore.
- Have you not heard of Pan?
- Well, about the Polish lords only …
- And about kikimor, water, goblin heard?
- You hurt. Who has not heard about them!
- Well, Pan is also the same undead. Lives in a swamp, loves to scare mushroom pickers who roam the edge of his possessions in the forest. Ka-a-ak will jump out from under the driftwood, or from behind a tree, but as soon as he gags on the whole forest, a person will pop, and faint. And that's if you're lucky. Usually, they die from a ruptured heart. And if the one who was frightened by Pan wakes up, then he already remains dumb until his death. Our grandmother always told us not to come close to the swamp. Otherwise we will die, or remain dumb.
A character from Slavic mythology Pan. A creature that frightens lonely travelers at the edge of a swamp.
It turns out what a pan is and what a PANika is, respectively. The peasants in the Pskov outback are not that they could not hear about the fauns, they only heard about Greece at school, and even then they forgot.
It turns out that in Russian mythology, at least in some areas, Pan is the same familiar character, known from time immemorial, as a brownie or a goblin. And Greek mythology has nothing to do with it. They took away the memory of generations, made us forget who we are and where we are from, what kind - tribe. We study our traditions from miserable borrowings that have returned to us from emigration.
Someone, once, wrote the mythology of "ancient Greece", and simply stole most of the characters from ancient Slavic folklore. He passed it off as his own cultural heritage, is proud of what was stolen, and now he teaches us, the true heirs of this culture!
12. Execution of the veche bell.
Once, while vacationing on the Black Sea, I was lucky enough to meet a very nice couple
Every morning, on the beach, next to me, visitors from Novy Urengoy, my wife and I, spread their veil. Igor, of course, is a Gazprom employee, and his wife Lena is a history teacher in a secondary school. We met them during the first meeting, and immediately became friends. Lena and I immediately found a lot of topics for conversation, because history, as a science, is my only love for life, and my new friend is a professional historian. In her, I found the perfect companion!
During one of the conversations, I mentioned the medieval Pskov Republic. I will not forget the round eyes of the history teacher.
- Which - which republic?
- Pskov.
- Are you overheated? The republic was in Novgorod!
- Lena! My soul! You are a historian, is it really news to you that Novgorod was not the only city in which there was the rule of the shock law?
- What - what right?
Then I realized that I was faced with a well-known phenomenon. Our children are still taught the history of their own country from textbooks written on the basis of the works of the Germans Bayer, Schloetzer and Miller. And today they argue only about how the "yoke", "Tatar-Mongol", "Mongol-Tatar", or "Horde" was correctly called. The question that there was no yoke at all, and in principle could not be, is not even on the agenda!
Then I began to educate the educator about what a veche is, and on what principles it was based. I had to tell from the very beginning about who had the right to vote, how the voters were chosen, how the voting took place, and how the decision was carried out:
1) Only men had the right to vote. And this is not gender discrimination. A woman is married, and therefore - behind her husband's back, she expresses her will through her representative - her husband. He is a man to be responsible for his wife and children, to be the spokesman for their will.
2) The holy fools, prone to crime, and without a home and family had no right to vote. This is also very reasonable. How can you make an important decision in the interests of the whole city if you cannot even create and support your own family? True, there were exceptions. The familyless had the right to vote if the family was lost for objective reasons. Pestilence, war, and everything that is now understood by the word "force majeure". In addition, the right to participate in the veche was vested with respectable citizens who had proved that they were reasonable, courageous, and could be responsible for their actions.
3) Voters were elected on the basis of representation. In fact, it is the fairest and most reasonable parliament. The exponent of the will of each yard (household), which was essentially one family, was the most respected member of the family with a voice. Such people were called languages. Ten languages, from ten households, elected the most authoritative among them - the ten (exponent of the aspirations of ten households). Centennials were elected in the same way - the elect, by voting of electors from a hundred households.
All ten people gathered for the general assembly, called by the veche bell. This is in the case of particularly important decisions affecting the interests of each citizen. For example, when the question of whether or not it was worth starting a military campaign was being decided.
The centennial resolved issues collegially, without nationwide discussion. The competence of such issues included, for example, decisions of an economic nature, whether to allow the Germans to trade in yuft, and how much duty to collect from the Tver merchants carrying potash to the Hansa.
The Tysyatskys were practically not elected. It was the boyar Duma, professional politicians. They knew their ancestry since the Gods. The word "boyar" itself meant - God Yar (descendant). Boyars are carriers of Yarila's power, and their power on earth was supported directly from Navi, from where the souls of their ancestors went. It was the legislative and, at the same time, judicial branch.
4) But the executive authorities were elective, and were not a priority, but a heavy duty. If the veche decreed that such and such a husband would reign, then so it will be. Nobody will ask whether you want it or not, but you will have to take the responsibility of the "helmsman". And after one year, if the chosen Prince did not cope with the tasks, one outcome awaited him: - "Go away stinking dog!" And this was the most terrible punishment - the people's anger. Therefore, no one aspired to the princes. Prince Dovmont, three times asked the veche to release him from heavy duty, but three times the veche did not release Dovmont. And he had to rule Pskov for thirty-three (note the figure) years. Over the years, Pskov has become one of the largest and richest cities in the Hanseatic League.
Moreover, the Pskovians fought continuously all this time, and under the command of the Macedonian, excuse me, Diocletian, oh again, I made a reservation, Alexander Nevsky! What’s wrong with me today!…, Dovmont, we didn’t lose a single battle!.. And the mothers of the soldiers prayed to the Gods for the health of the Holy Prince, because he took care of his soldiers as children of relatives. For example, during the capture of the fortress of Polotsk, not a single soldier from his squad was killed, but more than four thousand people were captured by the Polotsk. This is what is called an "effective manager" today.
It should be noted that no reprisals were applied to the prisoners. They did not sacrifice, they did not make them slaves. The only requirement is not to raise arms against the inhabitants of Pleskavia. Of the four thousand, only a couple of hundred returned to Polotsk, the rest either joined Dovmont's squad, or married women from Pskov, and engaged in peaceful creative work for the good of their newly found Motherland.
And then Lena was surprised to discover that Pleskavia had its own legislation and its own developed banking system, which was filled with local currency. In general, another adherent of official science, went over to the side of the doubters.
And so smoothly we came to the story of the decline of true democracy in Pleskov in 1510. A very beautiful legend is connected with this event.
Bells are said to have a soul, just like humans. And individual bells can work wonders. The veche bell on the Trinity Belfry of the Pskov Kremlin, which in the local tradition is called "Krom", was also considered such a wonderful bell.
Trinity Cathedral and the bell tower of the Pskov Kremlin.
This is Pskov's Vecheva Square.
They say that in January 1510, the Ambassador of Prince Gabriel (Basil III) arrived from Moscow, who brought a letter from him. It said that from now on "pagan outdated norms" were canceled, and "progressive" Moscow innovations were introduced, which would make the people truly free and happy.
The boyars listened to the speech of the Moscow clerk and wept. Moscow is far away, but they could not disobey it. The veche bell rang for the last time, a full square of people gathered, and under groans and cry, they lowered the bell from heaven to earth.
A kat came with a huge ax, and with dashing blows of the butt cut off the "ears" so that no one would ever hang the bell on the belfry.
The executed bell.
Then the vechevik was taken to Snyatnaya Gora, and there they "imprisoned" like a tat in a deep hole for three days.
After "serving" the bell, the clerk ordered to load it on a sleigh, and took him to Moscow to report to the tsarist accounting department about the work done. But … I missed it.
Already in the middle of the journey, on Valdai, he met messengers from the capital itself, who passed the tsar's decree not to take the "troublemaker" to Moscow, but killed the bell on the spot. Then they found a blacksmith from the nearest village, and ordered him to smash the vechevik into small fragments with his hammer.
Valdai.
The blacksmith, of course, did not dare to disobey, and the task was duly completed. The fragments of bronze were scattered over the adjacent forests at a great distance from each other.
And then, many who wandered into those places, were surprised to find that in calm weather, the melodic sad ringing of many bells was heard from all sides. They say that to this day you can hear it, especially if you put your ear to the ground. But he hears it only to those who do not forget about their ancestors, and whose soul is pure and not vicious.
Check yourself. Go to Valdai. Hear the bells, then everything is in order. And if silence is your interlocutor, then you need to figure out what is wrong. Who was offended, what black thoughts were letting into my head …
Continuation: "Devil's glade in Lokna. Part 3".
Author: kadykchanskiy