How an entire Siberian city died out because of one fur coat, and what has the shaman's curse to do with it?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

There is a legend that once at a fair in the Siberian town of Zashiversk, a local shaman discovered a closed chest in the goods of a visiting merchant. He had a bad feeling, and he ordered to throw the chest into the water, never opening it. But a Christian priest competing with the shaman went against the pagan leader and handed out numerous things to those who wished. The shepherd's son got a sable coat, and he presented an expensive thing as a gift to the shaman's daughter, whom he looked after. After walking a little in a fur coat, the girl soon fell ill and died. And the unfortunate shaman-father cursed the city, which died out before our eyes.

The city swallowed by the tundra

In the middle of the last century, pilots flying over Yakutia could see the old city lost in the middle of the taiga. In its center stood a wooden church, blackened from time to time, and most of the buildings were destroyed to the ground. The old streets were overgrown with tall weeds and willow-trees, and the numerous cemetery crosses seemed to testify to something mysterious that happened here almost two centuries ago.

The history of the forgotten city called Zashiversk began in 1639, when nomadic Russian Cossacks settled on the Arctic shores of the Indigirka. Zashiversk stood in a geographically advantageous place - at the intersection of water and land transport routes of the Yakutsk-Kolymsky tract. In 1783, the settlement, in which a fortress and a church grew up, received the status of a city and an administrative center of the Zashiversky district of the Yakutsk region. By the standards of that time, the city was considered large: the mayor was located in the city hall, there was a county treasury and a criminal court, a large church library, a drinking house, and shops.

The townspeople were fond of fishing, hunting and a little farming. Evens, Kagirs and Yakuts supplied dairy products, bear meat, game, and venison to the city. Periodically, the Tungus aggressors attacked the city of Zashiversk, which is why the territory was surrounded by high fortress walls. Every year, towards the end of autumn, crowded fairs were held near the city walls. Merchants arriving from Yakutsk sold dishes, linens, sugar, beads and tobacco here. The local population exchanged goods for furs, mammoth and walrus tusks.

Zashiverskaya cursed tragedy

The desolation was recorded in 1820, when Peter Wrangel, who was making a long-distance polar expedition, discovered a dozen residential huts all over the town. Two decades later, four people lived in Zashiversk, who soon moved to Verkhoyansk.

There is a legend about the desolation of the city in the Yakut lands, according to which Zashiversk died out due to the curse of a local shaman who competed with a local Christian priest. The latter had a son, and the shaman was raising a beautiful daughter. Once, having discovered at the fair whose chest was unknown, the pagan sage demanded that the suspicious thing be drowned. But his eternal opponent, the priest, opened the find and distributed things to the townspeople. The sable coat, inherited by his son, was presented by the latter to the shaman's daughter. Soon the girl fell ill and died. The inconsolable shaman cursed Zashiversk along with all the inhabitants. The punishment also overtook the priest: the son, tormented by a sense of guilt, committed suicide.

An epidemic began in the city, the population was dying out in severe torment. Soon most of the inhabitants were at the cemetery. A certain traveler, identified in the archival papers by Vinogradov, visited Zashiversk a couple of years after the events described. He found there only "a temple and three yurts, a priest with a clerk, a clerk with a pen, and a stationmaster without horses."

Versions about the reasons for the decline

According to the information available in the "Chronology of Natural Phenomena of Siberia and Mongolia" by geologist Zadonina, the cause of the extinction of Zashiversk was banal blackpox. The epidemic at that time for several centuries, with short interruptions, mowed the Siberian expanses and the Far East. In the 18th century, every 2nd Yakut and Evenk in that area died of smallpox. The disease was brought to the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kamchatka southeast was empty before our eyes. Smallpox came to Verkhoyansk in 1773, and for several years it wandered between camps and villages. Since the incubation period lasted up to 14 days, the locals managed to spread smallpox across the tundra and taiga. The trouble did not go around Zashiversk, where smallpox mowed down all Russians and Yukagirs without exception. In the next wave of 1833, the disease finished off those who survived the first epidemic.

Mysterious deaths of members of the Soviet expedition

In the 1960s, Soviet scientists recalled the mystery of Zashiversk when they came across materials about a lonely historical monument of the extinct city - a unique hipped roof church. In 1969, an experienced historian and founder of the Institute of History, Philosophy and Philology Okladnikov initiated and led an expedition to Yakutia. In addition to the architects who studied the Zashiversky temple, archaeologists worked in those parts. They studied the graves of the townspeople. The grave of the mysteriously deceased shaman's daughter was also opened. After some time, rumors spread throughout Yakutia that the Moscow professor Makovetsky and the cameraman Maksimov, who were in contact with the burial of the girl, became very ill and died suddenly.

So, according to the inhabitants of the taiga, the curse of the shaman overtook even scientists. True, skeptics-contemporaries of those events testified that Makovetsky was not an archeologist at all, and therefore could not open historically valuable graves. Moreover, he was a man of old age and died of old age. And his colleague operator, according to some information, long before the expedition fell ill with cancer, which is why he died 2 years after the expedition. After researching Zashiversk, he managed to shoot two more films. The only thing that historians have no doubts about is the rationality of the old shaman. Most likely, an unknown merchant with an ill-fated chest contracted smallpox and brought it to Zashiversk. The merchant died, and the disease was transmitted to the local residents with his personal belongings.

Mass diseases have afflicted humanity for thousands of years. People's unrest often follows disease. So, in 1771 Muscovites raised the "Plague Riot" and killed Archbishop Ambrose.