The long-standing stable idea of St. Petersburg as a pragmatic and rational city, the expediency of each element of which is thought out and “calculated” in advance, in a strange way coexists with the idea of it as a mystical and surreal city.
Perhaps the most mystical in the territory of the former Soviet Union. Perhaps this is due to the uniqueness of its construction - among swamps, practically on the water. And water, as you know, is one of the most mysterious and changeable elements.
On May 16, 1703, on Hare Island, at the mouth of the Neva River, the Peter and Paul Fortress and the wooden church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul were laid. From here Peter the Great began to build the northern capital of his state.
By the way, the one who claims that the tsar began to cut a window to Europe almost out of the water, to put it mildly, is disingenuous. Indeed, swamps occupied a significant part of the territory. However, there were about forty settlements on the "hummocks" of these swamps. True, the lands were not very fertile, but nevertheless fortresses and churches, palaces and manufactories of St. Petersburg were erected on long-lived places.
And from time immemorial, tribes of the Chukhonts, that is, the Finno-Ugric peoples, lived in those parts: Laplandians, Karelians, Vods, Izhora, Vepsians. Worshiping the ancient gods, these tribes had their sacred temples in the impenetrable forests and swampy mossy swamps, where the pagan magi performed secret rituals.
One of these temples at the beginning of the 18th century was located in the very center of modern St. Petersburg - between Troitskaya Square and the building of the Nakhimov School. The main sacred relic there was a bizarrely twisted ancient pine tree.
On this sacred tree, the Magi predicted the coming floods, the level of rising water, changes in the weather for the coming season and even possible invasions of enemies. Under the crown of a disfigured tree, the Magi made sacrifices to the powerful gods, who from time to time showed their favor and descended to the priests in the form of multi-colored tongues of flame, somewhat similar to the fires of St. Elmo.
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When construction began to boil on the banks of the Neva, the Chukhon priests, frightened that the sacred places of their ancestors would be mocked and destroyed, began to spread prophecies about future troubles that could fall on the wicked inhabitants of the new capital.
Pretty soon these rumors reached Peter I. The emperor, skeptical of all kinds of superstitions, cut down the sacred pine of the Chukhonts with his own hands, and ordered his assistants to saw it for wood and burn it in the soldiers' kitchens.
According to legend, that night a terrible thunderstorm broke out over the city under construction, as a result of which many wooden new buildings burst into flames. However, the fires did not stop the wayward sovereign. In order to prevent the further spread of rumors that aroused seditious thoughts in the minds of forced builders, the tsar ordered to seize the Chukhon Magi and put them to death.
A few moments before the execution, kneeling in front of the chopping block, each of the three captured priests uttered the words of curses that the national memory has managed to convey to our days.
So, the first priest let the new capital, founded by the king from the east, stand for exactly three hundred years - the same as the time of reign of his descendants.
The second sorcerer predicted that the day would come when all the Finno-Ugric peoples and tribes would unite in the sacred union of Kootimaa. And then the end of the rule of the white kings will come.
The third elder threw terrible words into the faces of his tormentors that this city would disappear from the face of the earth when three kings from the east would be buried in it …
Kootymaa is the “common home of the Finns”. This is the name of a kind of almost mythical unity of all the Finno-Ugric peoples inhabiting the immense Russia.
After almost four years of wandering in Western Europe in 1718, the son of Peter I, Tsarevich Alexei, was returned to Russia. In the dining room of the Teremny Kremlin Palace in Moscow, interrogations of the tsarevich and his accomplices, accused of conspiracy against the Russian autocrat, began. Among those under investigation were the offspring of such famous surnames as the Kikins, Vyazemsky, Afanasyevs, Dolgoruky.
In total, more than fifty people were investigated, most of whom were subsequently executed. On June 14, the disgraced son of Peter I was transported from Moscow to the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg, where the Tsar himself took part in the torture of Alexei. On the basis of the facts that surfaced, the prince was put on trial and sentenced to death as a traitor.
According to the official version, on June 26, 1718, Alexei died of natural causes. According to other sources, he was secretly strangled in his cell or even beheaded. One way or another, soon Alexei, in the presence of his father, was buried in the pantheon of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
It was on this day that one of the curses of the Chukhon Magi began to be fulfilled: the first of the eastern rulers, Tsarevich Alexei, who was born in 1690 in Moscow, a city located east of St. Petersburg, was buried in the new capital of Russia.
On a frosty day on January 6, 1725, Peter I caught a cold and soon took to bed. In the opinion of many doctors, the emperor had an exacerbation of chronic kidney stones, complicated by uremia. The English surgeon Horn performed an urgent operation. However, the autocrat developed gangrene, as a result of which Peter I died in terrible agony on January 28 of the same year.
So, the curse continued to be inexorably fulfilled: the second king from the east was buried in St. Petersburg. These events caused an unprecedented confusion in the minds of the townsfolk who remembered the Magi. However, Catherine I, who succeeded Peter the Great on the Russian throne, came from the western Latvian town of Marienburg.
All subsequent rulers of the Romanov dynasty were also not born east of St. Petersburg, which inspired some confidence that the terrible curses of the Chukhon priests, of which the devastating floods and hurricanes that fell on the young capital of the Russian state, would not be fulfilled.
The autocrats themselves, well aware of the last words of the executed Magi, took all measures to prevent the possibility of their implementation.
Empress Catherine II did the same when the famous uprising led by Yemelyan Pugachev broke out in the early 70s of the 18th century. The leader of the peasant revolt posed as the surviving Tsar Peter III, overthrown in a palace coup in the summer of 1762, and managed to subjugate vast territories of the eastern outskirts of the empire to his power.
According to some researchers, it was precisely the fear of the “third leader from the east” that forced the empress, after the impostor was caught, to take him not to the capital, but to Moscow, where he was tortured and executed on Bolotnaya Square.
All subsequent rulers of Russia, buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress of the city on the Neva, up to the October coup, were not born east of St. Petersburg. Moreover, in the Romanov dynasty, before the fall of the Russian monarchy, researchers counted thirty-seven dynastic marriages concluded with German sovereign houses, and six with representatives of other Western monarchical courts.
At the same time, not a single marriage was concluded with representatives of the eastern monarchies, who made repeated attempts to intermarry with the Russian autocrats. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was, among others, the painful memory of the terrible curse of the pagan Magi.
The Bolsheviks who came to power in 1917 and fiercely fought all manifestations of religious feelings among the people, nevertheless, also diligently tried to avoid the fulfillment of destructive prophecies.
Vladimir Lenin was informed about them by his colleague Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, in order to prevent a counterrevolutionary rebellion on the part of the Finno-Ugric peoples, put forward the idea of creating special units - red Latvian riflemen as a kind of alternative to the sacred "common house of Finns" Kootimaa.
Then Dzerzhinsky did insist on granting independence to Finland, after which Estonia and Karelia received freedom. Later, during the time of Joseph Stalin, autonomy was granted to the peoples of Udmurtia, Chuvashia, Komi, Mordovia and Mari.
It is also very interesting that after the death of the leader of the world proletariat, born, as you know, east of the capital of the Russian Empire, Moscow was chosen as the resting place of his body, and not the "cradle of revolution" Petrograd, as suggested by many party members. As a result, the third leader, born in the east, was never buried in the city on the Neva …
Recently St. Petersburg celebrated its anniversary with splendor, confidently stepping over the three-hundred-year mark. Fortunately, so far none of the three curses of the pagan magi have come true.