There are names known to every inhabitant of the former great country - the USSR. These include the name of the legendary Queen Tamara (1166-1209). Back in school, we were told about the cruel ruler of Georgia, who lived in the Darial Gorge. We learned about her from the inspired poem by M. Yu. Lermontov. Every night the Caucasian beauty feasted with a new lover - a young man who adored her - and every morning the bloody corpse of her lover was received by the waves of the mighty Terek.
Scary funeral
But in historical works, and in novels, another Tamara appears. She is a wise ruler, whose memory has been preserved in the Caucasus in the form of numerous fortresses that preserve peace in the mountain gorges. There is another Tamara, not a queen, but a faithful friend, who carried through her whole life a great love for her childhood friend, the warlike Alan Soslan, who received the Christian name David after baptism.
The romantic legends about Queen Tamara have survived to our time. One of them, the very last, haunts historians. Tamara ruled over Georgia and her own court in Mtskheta with a firm, sometimes cruel hand, often causing discontent among individual feudal lords, who were used to considering their estates as independent principalities. It was unusual for the freedom-loving Georgian nobility to submit to a “weak” woman.
After the death of the queen, the relatives, not without reason, feared the abuse of her remains. To prevent this from happening, four absolutely identical oak coffins were made. In one of them they put the deceased queen, and in three others - the bodies of women similar to her. At night, four processions secretly left the royal palace and departed in different directions. The places of all four burials are still unknown. They kept their secret in a very simple way. After returning to Mtskheta, the participants in each procession were surrounded by soldiers and mercilessly hacked to death. The foresight of the queen's entourage, who covered the body of their mistress, went further. They were not sure that any of the killed participants in the funeral processions in the last minutes of their lives did not say where the coffin was hidden. A special detachment of the warriors most devoted to the queen destroyed those warriorswho eliminated the participants in the funeral processions.
Expedition; which was not
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The coffin with the body of Queen Tamar was searched for eight centuries. All places that could become the last refuge of the legendary ruler were carefully examined: the royal cemetery of Gelati in Mtskheta, a monastery on the slopes of Mount Kazbek, caves in the Kasar gorge and many others. All searches ended in failure. Gradually, archaeologists and simply amateur search engines abandoned attempts to find the resting place of the queen or at least one of the three women who were killed after her death.
But scientists early refused the opportunity to reveal one of the historical mysteries. There is a place in Georgia where one of the coffins can be kept. I found out about him more than 30 years ago - quite by accident. Unfortunately, I never managed to organize my expedition, the USSR disintegrated into separate independent countries. The alleged burial place of Queen Tamara remained in Georgia, with which Russia is now in strained relations. But sooner or later, the countries that have lived together for hundreds of years must reconcile, and then such an expedition will become a reality.
Mysterious cave
In the winter of 1967, athletes from the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, under the guidance of their coach, master of sports in mountaineering Eduard Grekov, climbed the peaks in the area of the Georgian corner. Among them was the author of this article. Our first overnight stay was in a kosh, located in the upper reaches of the Kistinka River. As it often happens, the excitement from the gloomy beauty of the mountains surrounding the gorge and the spectacle of the fast river carrying its waters to the Terek did not let us sleep, and we listened to our coach's stories about his adventures in the mountains for half the night. Among others, we heard a story that was directly related to Queen Tamara.
Around 1963-1964, a tragedy occurred on the Georgian Military Highway, not far from the high-mountain village of Kazbegi. At a sharp turn, the driver could not hold the car, and she, along with four passengers, crashed into the Terek gorge. The mine rescue team that arrived at the scene had to lift the bodies of the dead travelers onto the road. While descending down the climbing rope, one of the rescuers saw under the eaves of the rock a dark hole in the entrance to the cave, enclosed by a forged rusted grate. Attempts to "pump" to the exit had no success. The rescuers did not have a cat with the help of which they could catch on to the bars, so the survey of the cave was postponed until better times. But they never came. The next year, all participants in the rescue work died while climbing one of the peaks.
Lack of time …
Eduard Grekov learned about the mysterious cave from the head of the rescue team. Both had heard about the mysterious burial of Queen Tamara and believed that the coffin with her remains was hidden behind that forged lattice. But the head of the detachment died, and Grekov soon moved to Moscow and he was no longer up to expeditions with a dubious hope of success.
For three or four years I tried to persuade my friends to go to the Caucasus and try to get into a mysterious cave. But it was quite clear that the search alone would take three months, and I didn't have those months. Geological expeditions, processing the results obtained, collecting materials for a Ph. D. thesis took all the time I had. So the cave found in the Terek gorge is still waiting for enthusiasts who, perhaps, will be able to unravel the last mystery of the legendary Queen Tamara.
I. Reshetnikov. "Secrets of the 20th century"