This strange gray house No. 1 on Gogol Street is one of the darkest residential mansions in Kaluga, built in 1914-1915. captured Turks.
There are many fables about the massive gray house of architecture atypical for the provincial Kaluga. As if the Gogol spirit really settled in the "Turkish" mansion. They say that at night a child's cry is heard in it. And a ghost lives in the house - the keeper of the residents' peace. Gogol Street is the shortest street in the city. She, one of the few, did not dare to rename it in Soviet times. It is quite possible that this is a tribute to the great writer, who in the middle of the 19th century stayed hundreds of meters from here - in the governor's wooden wing.
Turkish subjects
Among the builders of the house is called the revolutionary journalist Mustafa Subhi (full name - Mustafa Subhi Bey Mevlevi Zade), the future founder of the Communist Party of Turkey (this happened in 1920 in Baku at the 1st Congress of the Communist International). During the First World War, in November 1914, he ended up in exile in Kaluga as an interned Turkish citizen. The political emigrant was accommodated in an ordinary inn "Orlovskoye Podvorie" on Stary Torg Square. As an allowance, they paid 20 kopecks a day. Soon he managed to move to a private apartment with furniture and heating in the Gorbunov house on Blagoveshchenskaya Street. Mustafa Subhi, as a tutor, gave private French lessons to Kaluga high school students. However, the benefits were no longer paid to him. Mustafa Subhi left Kaluga in the fall of 1915.
Turkish subjects, and there were more than 300 of them, were sent to public works: to the Pantyushin brick factory, Meshkov's sawmill. They built the Nikolskaya crossing over the Oka and erected barracks for the infantry regiments in the Zagorodny Garden.
Sometimes the sight of them made a depressing impression on Kaluga residents. Once a reporter from the Kaluzhsky Courier newspaper met two hungry and frozen Turks on the street. They complained that they really want to eat, that they are ready for any job, but no one hires them, and the allowance of 13 kopecks a day is not enough. Hearing this conversation, a merchant passing by hired a Turk to carry the sacks into the cellar of his shop. And the compassionate lady embarrassedly handed the other a silver coin.
One of the inhabitants of Kaluga wrote a letter to the newspaper stating that he witnessed how the captured Turks frightened a schoolgirl, and because of them his servants refused to go to the kiosk for a newspaper in the evenings.
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Time stopped
Having crossed the threshold of this gloomy mysterious house, you will find yourself in another time. Almost nothing has changed here over a century. Rotten floorboards and wooden stairs also creak. Only there are no longer those old women who lived in it before the war and kept the secrets of this house.
“True or not, I don’t know, but I was told that the house was originally built as a country mansion for the Kaluga governor-general,” says one of its current inhabitants, artist Alexander GUSKOV. - During the First World War, the house was used as a hospital for wounded Russian soldiers. For a short time it housed a synagogue. At one time, the house belonged to the Western Branch of the Moscow Railway. Served as a hostel. Almost to the present day, one of the premises housed a railway archive. Old-timers told me that before the 1941 war, the house had a roof of a different design, but a German shell hit it. A secret room was found in the attic. A brick wall was clearly broken in one place. Perhaps they were looking for a treasure or some other hidden values. There are huge basements under the house. The foundation is made of rubble stone. High ceilings allow making the apartment two-level. Huge windows are just a dream for any artist. And although the house looks scary, I like it here: it is quiet, warm and light.
Kaluzhanin Sergey Plastov has been living in a "Turkish" house since his birth - for more than half a century. According to him, in the second entrance he has a guardian angel - a kind ghost who has been helping him all his life. And the aura of the house itself is good. What is one view of the reservoir and Kaluzhsky Bor!
“I have been living in this abandoned“castle”since 1989,” says the oldest resident, pensioner Yevgeny Fedorovich NOVOSYOLOV. - Unfortunately, the house is abandoned. Nobody puts the facade in order. I heard about the poltergeist. When the railway archive moved out of here, the premises were empty at one time. I don't know, mysticism or something else, but satanic circles and crosses were painted on the walls. Something unnatural is happening in our house. Sometimes I see an unusual shadow flying by. There were two times. Once, when a neighbor died, some foreign entity suddenly sank onto my shoulders. I really felt it! Another case: the wife passed away. I heard voices of cosmic sound: they called my name twice. It was also sad. In our entrance on the ground floor, our neighbor Victor hanged himself. He was 30 years old. Apparently,the tragedy occurred on the basis of family troubles with his wife Galina. Early in the morning my wife and I were going to our vegetable garden near the Yachensky reservoir. I saw a neighbor that day. He walked around gloomy and bought a bottle of port. We look, a snake of smoke winds from the door of his apartment. He opened the door, and he was hanging on the pipe. An ambulance, firefighters and police arrived. Apparently, he smoked on the couch, and he caught fire. The mattress began to smolder.
Black 1937
The "Turkish" house in Kaluga belonging to railway employees was included in the databases of the Memorial Foundation. The names of two residents are known - rehabilitated enemies of the people, for whom the black funnel came. These are the senior engineer of the Moscow-Kiev railway administration Pyotr Dmitrievich Pasko and the chief engineer of the construction office of the Moscow-Kiev railway administration, and then the musician of the city theater orchestra Nikolai Germanovich Gais. They were shot on the same day - October 7, 1937, accused of sabotage activities in the track facilities of the road and participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist sabotage organization.
Today, on the facade of the "Turkish" house, there are two commemorative plaques with the names of the repressed Kaluga residents.
Alexey Urusov