For nearly five centuries in the villages scattered along the banks of the Don and Voronezh, they tell about the legendary robber Kudeyar and his countless treasures, buried in the ground or hidden in caves.
Kudeyar is a semi-legendary character, a dashing and cruel robber. The robber Anna, Boldyr and his damned daughter Lyubasha were his associates. Tales about Kudeyar and his richest treasures are still alive among the people. And in the Oryol province, Kudeyar was generally considered not a man, but an unclean spirit - a "storekeeper" who guards the conspired treasures.
The years of Kudeyar's life are said to be very ancient, presumably before the Time of Troubles. He put together a gang from which he robbed rich carts. This little gang of robbers took refuge in the woods between Dubok and Lebedyan. She was engaged in robbery of ships carrying goods down the Don to Azov. That is why the Don Cossacks took up arms against the ataman Kudeyar. The Don people tried to catch the famous robber, take possession of his treasure, but nothing came of it.
What happened to him later is hard to say. One story recorded by ethnographers claims that the authorities could not catch Kudeyar: “Where, where Kudeyar did not rob! And in Kaluga, and in Tula, and to Ryazan he came, and to Yelets, and to Voronezh, and to Smolensk - he placed his camps everywhere and buried many treasures in the ground, but all with curses: he was a terrible sorcerer. And what a rotten power he possessed: he would spread a sheepskin coat on the bank of the river and lie down to sleep; sleeps with one eye, guards with the other: is there a pursuit; the right eye fell asleep - the left is watching, and there - the left is asleep, the right is watching; and when he envies the detectives, he jumps to his feet, throws the sheepskin coat on which he slept into the water, and that sheepskin coat becomes a boat with oars; Kudeyar will sit in that boat - remember what his name was … So he died with his death - they could not catch him, no matter how hard they tried.
They say that in his old age, Kudeyar built a church with a golden iconostasis and a silver bell and began to atone for his sins. True, where this church was located is also unknown.
However, what kind of person the famous chieftain was, the people did not remember firmly.
Many legends call Kudeyar a Tatar who knew Russian. Indeed, the very name Khudiyar is of Turkic origin and is formed from two Persian words "hoodi" - "god" and "yar" - "beloved", that is, "beloved by God."
Kudeyar was of great stature and evil disposition. According to documents found in the Saratov and Voronezh provinces, he collected the khan's taxes, and robbed people mercilessly. Then, with great wealth, returning to the Horde, on the Saratov steppe road, he decided to hide the tribute from the khan. Having settled in the Voronezh lands, Kudeyar began to rob. Then he took the Russian beauty into his wife, whom he took with him.
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KING'S BLOOD
Rumors circulated in the central provinces of Russia that Kudeyar was not of simple origin, but … of tsarist origin. That is why his image was endowed with supernatural qualities and abilities.
According to the legend, recorded in the village of Lokh in 1919, Kudeyar was of a royal family and was the younger brother of Ivan the Terrible. The king allegedly heard from someone that his brother, when he grows up, would deprive him of the throne, and therefore decided to kill the child. But his servants Sim and Ivan disobeyed the tsar's orders and fled with the tsarevich to the Turkish sultan. Here the brother of Ivan the Terrible was named Kudeyar and converted to Islam.
As the saying goes, there is no smoke without fire.
Let's look through the history of the Russian state together, paying attention to those places where we are talking about the family life of the collector of Russian lands, the Grand Duke (Caesar) of Moscow Vasily III. For twenty-one years he lived with his first wife, Solomonia Saburova, without having offspring from her.
Basil III had to turn to the holy fathers for permission to divorce Solomon and remarry.
The Grand Duke received from Metropolitan Daniel a blessing for divorce and a new marriage. His wife was the young Lithuanian-Russian princess Elena Glinskaya, who four years later gave Vasily III an heir. So on August 25, 1530, the future Tsar Ivan IV was born. Contemporaries, not without reason, suspected that the father of the child was Elena's lover, Prince I. F. Ovchina-Telepnev-Obolensky.
Tonsted as a nun under the name of Sophia, Solomoniya Saburova, contrary to the church legend of voluntariness, rebelled for several years. At the time of the forced tonsure, they say, she trampled the monastic robe in a violent impulse. For this, the Tsar's advisor Ivan Shigona lashed her with a whip. Nun Sofya spent five years in exile in Kargopol, then she was transferred to Suzdal, to the Intercession Monastery. There, at about the same time as Elena Glinskaya, she became pregnant and, according to knowledgeable monks, also gave birth to a royal son.
The son of the former queen, named George, died in infancy. So Solomonia declared to the envoys of Basil III, who came to Suzdal to sort out this strange case. She even showed them the tomb in the common tomb of the monastery, where her son was supposedly buried. At the same time, Solomonia threatened: the son would grow up and legally take the throne of his father.
The mysterious tomb of the tsar's son George has survived to this day. A scientific autopsy in 1934 made it possible to make sure that instead of a baby in a coffin-deck, a doll was buried in a boy's shirt, wrapped in 16th century cloth and belted with a belt with tassels. The archaeological find allows us to think about two versions: the barren Solomonia did not have any son, or in fact the forty-two-year-old nun, in revenge on Vasily III (the barren one), gave birth to a son George from a man unknown to us and, in order to save him from her ex-husband, declared him dead, passing on to education of faithful people. Apparently, the child was hidden, fearing the assassins sent by the second wife of the Grand Duke, Elena Glinskaya, and secretly transported him to the Crimean khan. According to another version, after the birth of the boy, they were taken to the Kerzhensky forests and secretly brought up in forest monasteries. There he grew up and under the Tatar name Kudeyar appeared in Russia as a pretender to the throne. Failing to achieve success, Kudeyar engaged in robbery, and all his life he was engaged only in taking revenge for the defiled honor of his mother. The compassionate attitude of the Russian people towards the humiliated and insulted by the supreme power gave rise to many oral legends about the legendary robber. Many central provinces of Russia considered him their fellow countryman.
Local historians of the Ryazan province in the 18th century found his robber lair on the banks of the Istra River in the Kamennye Kresty tract (the main thing, as they believed). Local historians considered a giant limestone stone with the name of Kudeyar inscribed on it as indisputable proof.
According to another legend, Kudeyar is the son of Zsigmond Batory, born even before his relative Stefan Batory (Zsigmond was Stephen's nephew) became the king of the Polish state. Having quarreled with his father, who by that time was already old, he fled to the Cossacks on the Dnieper. Then he goes into the service of the Russian Tsar. Thus, he finds himself among the guardsmen of Tsar Ivan the Terrible and his real name is Prince Gabor-Georgy (in the Russian version Sigismundovich).
Another version says that it could have been a traitor Kudeyar Tishenkov (16th century) - a boyar's son, originally from the town of Belyov. Contemporary of Ivan the Terrible. In May 1571, he showed the hordes of the Crimean Khan Devlet I Girey the way to approach Moscow - secret fords across the Oka River. Retreating together with the Crimean Tatars, Kudeyar left the Moscow state and remained in the Crimea.
Due to such an abundance of versions, historians came to the conclusion that there were many robbers in Russia and several atamans used the name Kudeyar. One thing is certain: unlike the defender of the poor, Stepan Razin, Kudeyar was considered an evil robber, from whom people had no mercy. The people condemned and feared him, and in the old days they frightened disobedient children with his name.
KUDEYAROV'S TREASURES
In the legends of many ancient Russian cities, there are versions that Kudeyar buried his treasures on their territory. As one of the places where the treasured treasures are said to be laid, the manuscript called the Devil's fortified settlement or Shutova Gora, not far from the old road from Kozelsk to Likhvin. It was on this road that the evil robber was waiting for the poor fellow merchants.
The Devil's Settlement is located on a high hill overgrown with forest, where it rises with three steep walls of grayish sandstone, wrinkled with numerous cracks and overgrown with moss. The fourth wall was almost level with the landing. According to legend, earlier it was Kudeyar's “castle”, built for him by evil spirits in one night. The devils built a two-story stone house on the mountain, a gate, dug a pond, but then a rooster crowed, and they fled without finishing the construction. On one of the stones lying at the foot of the settlement, a hundred years ago, a trace of the "paw" of an unclean person was clearly visible. They say that treasures are hidden in the settlement, but the evil spirits carefully protect them. Rumor has it that 12 barrels of gold are hidden in the Kudeyarov well.
At night, the ghost of Kudeyar's daughter Lyubasha, who was cursed by her father and imprisoned in the depths of the Devil's fort, appears at the settlement. Her ghost goes up the mountain, sits on the stones and cries, asks: “It's hard for me! Give me a cross! To get rid of evil spirits, the monks installed a cross on the site twice, but this did not help.