What modern megacities appeared on the site of swamps, and How history has preserved the memory of this

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

Which of the major modern cities were built on the swamps? Usually St. Petersburg immediately comes to mind, followed by Amsterdam and Venice. Is the list complete? No matter how it is - in the biography of an impressive number of megalopolises of our time, you can easily find a "swamp" component. Moscow, Kiev, Paris, Berlin are no exception. Once they were built either on swamps, or in the immediate vicinity of them - with all the ensuing consequences.

Moscow swamps

Surprisingly, cities or villages, from which cities later grew, generally very often appeared in swampy areas. At first glance, this is not entirely reasonable - swamps interfered with normal movement, limited housing construction and housekeeping, and with an increase in the number of townspeople, it also became a favorable environment for the spread of infectious diseases. Spring floods washed away and destroyed the erected buildings, agriculture and cattle breeding suffered. And yet, the historical record is full of stories of how cities began in the middle of a quagmire.

For more than three centuries Peter the Great has been blamed for the “strange” choice of a place for the future capital (this choice, in fact, was not at all so illogical on closer examination). But if you take the history of Moscow, which certainly did not appear as a result of someone's political will, it is easy to see that this village was born in an equally muddy place. Of course, the Kremlin was built on a hill, but the land in its immediate vicinity, on the right bank of the Moskva River, was precisely a swamp. Traces of the old "swampy" past are found in the toponyms - the names of the geographical objects of Moscow: Bolotnaya Square, Bolotnaya Embankment. The island, which also bears the name of Bolotny, or Balchug (from the Turkic - "mud"), appeared as a result of the creation of the Vodootvodny canal, which allowed to drain the swamps and protect the city from floods.

At the dawn of its existence, Moscow itself was in some way an "island" - a village among forests and bogs. For a long time, the modern Bolotnaya Square was called "Swamp" - this term has been found in documents since 1514. Then, after a number of attempts to build up this part of Moscow, Tsaritsyn Meadow was organized in its place, where festivals and fireworks were organized, as well as fistfights and executions: the last to be executed on Bolotnaya Square was Emelyan Pugachev in 1775.

European "swamp" place names

Paris was once a no less swampy place - it is no coincidence that the Roman colonialists named the city Lutetia, from the Latin luteus - "dirty, muddy". And one of the quarters of the French capital that still exists today bears the name of the "swamp" - this is the Marais, located on the right bank of the Seine in the immediate vicinity of the Louvre (marais from French - "swamp").

Now the Marais is part of the Parisian historical center, but once these places were outside the city and were used for pasture. A Jewish community was located not far from the swamps in the Middle Ages, and in the 13th century this area was drained by the forces of the Templar Order. Since then, the area has been intensively built up, and even now, having escaped reforms during the ottomanization of Paris, it retains the distant features of a medieval city: narrow dark streets, old stone churches.

London did not escape its "swamp" youth. The Westminster area, bounded by the Thames and the now defunct Tyburn and Westbourne rivers, was once a wet, swampy area. And in the name of Berlin, this state of the landscape was generally fixed forever: according to one version, the origin of this word - "Berlin" - is associated with the West Slavic berl or birl, which means "swamp". Brussels has been known since the end of the 8th century as a “village between swamps”; the name of the city was formed from the Flemish words bruoc - "swamp" - and sela - "housing".

The central square of Kiev - Maidan Nezalezhnosti - was once called "Goat Swamp": it was just that the swamp was located in this place. But not the most favorable geographical conditions did not prevent this part of the city from becoming first the territory of the bazaar, and then the main square of the Ukrainian capital. By the way, Shevchenko Lane, which adjoins the Maidan, used to be called Koziebolotnaya Street.

Why were cities built on swamps?

Why did cities grow so often in low-lying, swampy areas? Obviously, due to the main advantage of this location: a large river, which fed at the same time - through fishing and hunting, and became a transport artery connecting the village with an extensive system of trade relations. In addition, water in any form - whether it was a moat or just a swampy area - served as a natural defense, prevented the capture of the city, or, in any case, to do it suddenly. Often they even preferred to move merchant ships to the "big water" by dragging: in peacetime, some delay in movement could be allowed, and in turbulent times the enemy had to experience difficulties getting to the city walls.

But this is what concerns the cities of the past. Why were the city planners of modern times so attracted to the swamps? For example, Chicago, an American metropolis, was once a small village near the river of the same name, and its banks were constantly flooded. In order to solve this problem, as well as to establish a sewage system, it was decided to turn the Chicago River and build a 45 kilometers long canal. Why was so much effort and money invested in so inconvenient, at first glance, land? The fact is that the city was distinguished by an extremely advantageous geographical location: the proximity of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River provided a connection with the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

And St. Petersburg, which had long and firmly won the fame of "a city in the swamps", was not entirely built on a bog. However, "construction on piles" cannot be denied, of course, as well as the very presence of large swamps on the territory of the future St. Petersburg: one of them, "bottomless", was located approximately where Gostiny Dvor is now located, capturing the territory of the Kazan Cathedral.

The construction of canals allows both to drain excessively humid urban lands, and to provide transport links for trade and political interaction with other villages and states. Therefore, even in antiquity, the prototype of the Suez Canal appeared: that's how he was in the era of the pharaohs.