Once every ten years, hundreds of Petersburgers flock to the Obvodny Canal, deciding to commit suicide.
The bypass canal is far from the most pleasant and comfortable corner of St. Petersburg. There are still enough dilapidated houses, abandoned workshops and warehouses, and the water has an unimaginably dirty color.
It is not surprising that the inhabitants and casual visitors of these slums now and then see ghosts, werewolves or strange-looking vagrants dressed in multi-colored rags. And maybe they don't seem to be at all. At least, according to one old legend, evil spirits have been hovering over the place where the Obvodny Canal was dug from time immemorial.
A lost place
They began to build the bypass canal at the end of the 1760s in order to limit Petersburg with a wide ditch, mainly for the arrangement of customs points. At that time, the construction went briskly, and in 10 years it was brought to the modern Ligovsky Prospect (then it was also a canal). The work has stalled there. The workers began to die in the hundreds and scatter.
Officials tried to figure out what the matter was, but quickly reached a dead end. They said that the Karelians were luring the workers into the forests. This people lived in the Neva delta long before the arrival of the Russians and Swedes, and when Peter built Petersburg, he preferred to retire deeper into the thickets. It is all the more surprising that during the construction of the Obvodny Moat, the Karelians began to leave the forest and talk about something with excavators. After talking, those abandoned everything, some even families, and went to the swamps. We managed to capture one Karelian. But even after interrogation, they only managed to get out of him an indistinct muttering. “Bad land. You can't dig,”the forester kept saying. For this reason or for another, the construction was abandoned.
Borovoy (Borovsky) bridge in the 1930s before its reconstruction …
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…and after.
We returned to the project under Alexander I. In 1805, a grandiose construction began. The moat was expanded, renamed Obvodny Canal, bridges and road junctions were built. Engineering solutions were the most modern for their time. The canal was supposed to carry several functions at once, as it connected the Neva and the Gulf of Finland bypassing the city. It was the city's border, a transport artery, and, according to the engineers, a safety valve in case of a flood.
By 1833, the work ended. True, exactly in the same place as last time, there was a hitch again. The workers flatly refused to dig at the confluence of the Volkovka River into the canal, repeating in one voice about "a bad place." Nicholas I was already sitting on the throne, under whom they did not stand on ceremony with the common people. The officials simply overtook a company of soldiers, and the instigators of the riot were hanged.
Into the pool with your head
In 1922, a heating main was built along the Obvodny Canal. Going deeper into the ground, the workers stumbled upon strange granite slabs. They were speckled with incomprehensible runes, and under them lay human bones. Archaeologist Gvozdnitsky arrived at the place of discovery. He immediately declared that this is the most valuable monument that has no analogues in the world. X century, no less.
Varshavsky bridge and the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. Illustration: Katya Kasyanova.
The business executives did not share the historian's enthusiasm. No one stopped the work, and Gvozdnitsky's protests were called an attempt to sabotage. Scrap cabbies took the slabs to Ligovka, where they were cut into curbs. The bones most likely went to the junkyard.
In the spring of 1923, a real epidemic of suicides began on Obvodny. People who decided to take their own lives, as if they could not find another place in the huge city, except for a section of the canal from Borovsky Bridge to the mouth of the Volkovka. The police were even forced to post patrols. One of the guards, by the way, also disappeared. The peak of the incomprehensible phenomenon fell in the fall, and in total 89 people drowned in this way.
The depth of Obvodny then still reached 3-5 meters, but here and there the canal began to grow shallow. One suicide got stranded like that. He was a prominent Bolshevik Mesopatamskiy, a member of the RSDLP since 1903, personally acquainted with Lenin. In broad daylight he jumped off the bridge and sat in shallow water until he was pulled out. Naturally, Mesopatamskiy was sent to psychiatrists - flints-party members in their right mind could not commit suicide. He told Dr. Efimson that he did not fall into the water himself, but was as if dragged by the railing of the bridge when he stopped to smoke.
The epidemic ended as if by magic in 1924. But in 1933, Soviet citizens again began to drown themselves in the same section of the canal. Despite the round-the-clock police duty, there were 107 registered drowned people. At the same time, they managed to catch many, and some of them were thoroughly beaten: for the ugly statistics the department lost the rolling Red Banner. Suicides stopped again with the calendar year.
It is not known what else Mesopatamskiy told Efimson there, but the latter lost peace and sleep. He literally besieged Smolny and chased the surviving "jumpers". The city authorities, however, considered the psychiatrist a schizophrenic and sent out of sight to one of the Black Sea health resorts.
In 1943, due to the blockade of the militia, there was no time to fix suicide cases, but ten years later history repeated itself. Efimson still tried to talk to everyone who was caught alive, but the authorities were no longer worried. Every 10 years, suicides flocked to the same section of the canal. The last outbreak of the epidemic was observed by an enthusiastic psychiatrist in 1973, and died a year later. The record year was 1993 - 303 suicide attempts were successful.
The corresponding statistics for 2003 and 2013 are still classified, but many Petersburgers remember that at the very end of 2012 a part of the Obvodny Canal embankment was closed for pedestrian access. The lower ramps turned out to be locked with bars, where in normal times it was possible to walk freely, and in general the slopes to the water were blocked to the best of their ability (now the fences are removed).
Illustration: Nikolai Kochergin.
Ancient curse
Dr. Efimson managed to unearth something. At one time he found Gvozdnitsky and asked about the slabs found in 1923. The archaeologist admitted that he was mistaken in the dating and the find belonged to the XIV century. He still had the sketches of the runes and the layout of the plates. But it was not possible to translate the inscriptions - it was a wild mixture of Hebrew and Latin.
In 1300, at the confluence of the Neva and Okhta, the Scandinavians founded the Landskrona fortress. A little over a year later, Novgorodians recaptured it, but the struggle continued with varying success. Local Karelians did not support either side, trying to get rid of both the Swedes and the Russians.
One of the medieval Swedish chronicles says that in 1303 Marshal Torgils Knutsson began a new war with the Karelians who did not want to accept Christianity. At the mouth of the Volkovka, the Swedes discovered a pagan temple where shamans performed human sacrifices. The knights began to destroy the pagan shrines, and in the midst of the pogrom a shaman appeared from the forest. He cursed the invaders, the temple, and all the surrounding lands. The soldiers killed him and threw the body into the pit. Since then, the Swedish troops and garrisons did not know rest: diseases, strange deaths and mysterious disappearances of people haunted the Swedes.
After 10 years, the successor of Torgils Knutsson ordered to find a local sorcerer who would remove the spell. The pagan ordered to bring slabs to the destroyed temple, carved incomprehensible signs on them and demanded human sacrifices. The Christian warriors were so horrified by the old spell that they agreed. The sorcerer personally killed five captured Karelians, threw the corpses into the pit where the remains of the shaman rested, and granite slabs were placed on top in a special order.
The Swedes were strictly warned that it is impossible to violate the grave - otherwise the spirit of the shaman will burst out and every third year of every decade will collect a bloody harvest.
Among Karelian sorcerers, it is considered the most terrible thing to die without transferring their knowledge to a successor. This is exactly what happened to the slain shaman who cast the spell. It turned out to be so strong that it cannot be removed at all, but can only be "sealed".
In 1923, the builders of the heating main did not know about the history of Landskrona or the secret of the ancient spell. And if, before the opening of the burial ground, evil spirits showed themselves sporadically, then after breaking the seal they had to get loose in full.
Monument to Torgils Knutsson in Vyborg.
Illustration: Katya Kasyanova.
Author: Anton Morozov