It has long been known that Europe is entangled in a chain of underground tunnels. It is unknown neither their purpose, nor the time when the first catacombs appeared. It is no coincidence that legends about dwarfs - little men - are so popular among Europeans. But, as it turned out, the fabulous crumbs also visited Russia, for example, in Siberia and the Urals.
The first official information about little people in those parts dates back to 1925. Then the Perm ethnographer M. A. Blinov came across a strange place in the forest. Later, under his editorship, the article "Uncharted Cave" was published. Apparently, Blinov hoped that geographers and researchers would be interested in the mysterious find. However, this did not happen.
Only in 1990, having discovered an article by a local historian, the famous Perm speleologist Igor Lavrov decided to find the lost cave. But it turned out to be not so easy. The fact is that for eighty years the area has changed beyond recognition. And in 2002, an underground passage was opened leading to a huge cave.
The interregional group for studying the secrets and mysteries of the Earth and Space "Labyrinth" also became interested in the mysterious find. Its leader, Andrei Perepelitsyn, says: “At 7 versts from Kungur in the direction of Perm along the Perm tract, there is a large hole under the stone, into which an adult can freely pass. There are small dug steps into the cave. According to popular legend, this cave was once inhabited by "chuchki" - small people ("grimy"). This is what Blinov himself said, but it is quite possible that the mysterious cave found by speleologist Lavrov is the ancient entrance of the Chuchek. " Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything. It is not surprising, because over the years the vault has collapsed in places and many passages simply break off in the middle of the path.
The cave, called Babinogorskaya, is not the only one in the Perm region, where, according to legend, mysterious scarecrows lived. So, for example, a 1970 guide to the Urals mentions a certain mountain Chuchek, located a few kilometers from the city of Suksun. In 2012, a group of Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents conducted their own research. However, there were almost no old-timers left in the town, and only Anna Ivanovna Tretyakova remembered the legend about the ancient people.
“Dwarfs lived there, they were called scarecrows. But even in the old days no one saw them, there is only a legend that they left here when the Russians settled in the Urals and saw them … But the fact that they were small is for sure. From the top of the mountain to the river, ladders of stone were made, steps of this height (the woman spreads her arms to the height of her palm). There were several ladders, I saw them myself. My deceased man always cleared them out. Now they were probably overwhelmed by the earth, everything up there was uprooted, the forest was uprooted … And the river moved away from the mountain for a long time, it washes our bank. Somehow, about fifty years ago, just opposite the Chuchek Mountain, the coast collapsed: log cabins and a tunnel opened. Everyone was surprised, some people came, studied, said, they say, it goes far. Then we came with scuba gear, climbed up and, as they told us, the passage disappeared: it collapsed, the woman said.
Meanwhile, at the request of the editorial board to conduct research on the "underwater tunnel" near the town of Suksun, they just threw up their hands in surprise: neither the Ural cavers, nor speleodivers, nor even archaeologists conducted any studies. Who were the mysterious researchers? What were they looking for: the untold treasures of the underground people, or were they once again trying to erase the mention of the Siberian gnomes?
Elena Ivanovna Konshina, an ethnographer by profession, and now the editor of the Kudymkarskaya newspaper, said: “We have a lot of such stories. She wrote it down herself. Usually they say that these dwarfs, chud, as they were more often called, buried themselves when the conquerors came: they dug a hole, put a roof on the pillars, cut down the pillars … Moans and weeping from the ground were heard for a long time. Until now, people come there every year. Chud is not considered ancestors, but still respected. They even put a cross on the site of one of their "graves."
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However, legends about dwarf miners exist almost throughout Eurasia, but they are called differently: gnomes, zettes, sids, chakli, donbettyrs … Among them, the most realistic, researchers still consider the legends of the Urals. The underground inhabitants are just below the average person, as they say, "from a teenager"; an ancient people, skillful and skillful, but physically weak, forced to hide under the earth from the conquerors.
Vladimir Lagovskoy, a journalist for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, who was directly involved in the search for the mysteriously disappeared "people of dwarfs", tried to find references to the scarecrows in historiographic sources. It is curious that there were a lot of them!
It was possible to find out that even in the times of Peter the Great, the famous academician Simon Pallas wrote about the mysterious "Chud mines". He, like many modern historians, assumed that the Chuchki were none other than the “Chud” people who disappeared under unexplained circumstances. Somewhat later, another Russian academician, Ivan Lepekhin, noted: “The entire Samoyad land and the present Mezen district are filled with desolate dwellings of some ancient people. They are found in many places, near lakes on the tundra and in forests near rivers, made in mountains and hills like caves with holes like doors. Stoves are found in these caves, and iron, copper and clay fragments of household items and, moreover, human bones are found. Russians call these houses the Chud dwellings. These desolate dwellings, according to the Samoyeds, belong to some invisibleactually called sirte in Samoyed."
But this information only adds new questions. In 2001, V. Lagovskoy visited with an expedition in the area of White Mountain (Ural). Interestingly, the researchers actually managed to find mysterious underground passages. However, to everyone's regret, only a child could pass through them, they were so narrow. Are these moves of natural origin, or are they man-made? The question remains open today.