The earliest mystery of golosov ravine егэ

The mist in Golosov Ravine. Photo by Mikhail Gordov

The time was the early Nineteenth century. The victims were two ordinary peasant men. They staggered back to their village after twenty long year’s absence. They had not aged a single day since their departure!

The story they had to tell has since become something of a legend. Having had enjoyed a night of revelry, they had wandered into a ravine on the way home. Here they became enveloped in a strange fog. What happened next was that they encountered an outlandish being. This being told them that it would not be easy for them to return from whence they came. It would, however, do what it could to help them–and so here they were!

Retold in Yourguide App this constitutes one of a few such tales that centre on a part of Moscow called Golosov Ravine (Golosov Ovrag).

Local attraction

Once known as Vlasov Ravine, this area overlooks the Moskva River on the South East of the city centre and is situated within Kolomenskoye Park. It used to form part of the road that lead onto the town of Kolomna (best known for producing a type of marshmallow).

Most visitors go there to admire the Church of Ascension (built in 1532 to mark the birth of Ivan the Terrible). Then they might walk on to view the reconstructed wooden palace on Prospekt Andropova and linger en route to check out the stone placed there which commemorates the end of serfdom.

To get there is easy. Just take four stops south on the green line from Teatralnaya to Kolomenskaya. On getting out of the metro, ensure that you are on the side of the main road where the supermarket and row of shops are to be found. Proceed up an incline and you should soon find yourself in a tree-lined avenue. To your left is a café with a terrace, a small basement gym, and then a Japanese restaurant. Ahead of you there will be a large iron gate with a sort of checkpoint (although entrance is free). This is Kolomenskoye estate where, during pre-Communist times, Moscow’s elite of royals and dukes congregated for social events and holidays.

Walk straight ahead for a few yards then hang left. Soon you should reach a wooden stairwell. This will take you down into a winding enclosure that might fit a small car and is around the height of three people. Surrounded as you are by trees and bushes, were it not for the muffled groan of traffic, you could be in the wilds. Welcome to Golosov Ravine….

Sinister limbo

The supernatural reputation that belongs to it makes it, if Geo Meridian portal is to be believed, one of the most anomalous areas in central Russia. Even the very name of the place presents an enigma: does it refer to a snake deity worshipped by pagans for ruling over the afterlife (Volos) or to the voices (“golosa”) of the lost souls marooned there?

The best known instance of the latter tells of a party of mounted Tatars called Khan Devlet Giray. It was in the year 1621 when these men were captured on the grounds of the ravine. On being questioned, the bewildered soldiers explained that they had taken to the field in 1571. They had chanced upon a greenish mist in which they had become disorientated. Now it seemed that they had been catapulted fifty years forward in time! (Geo Meridian)

Furthermore, the news site Russia Beyond the Headlines featured a report by Ekaterina Kostikova called “Fear and Horror in the Big City” (November 24th, 2013). The piece recounts an earlier write up in Moskovskie Vedomosti from 1832 in which locals beheld strange tall entities in the ravine. These were donned in hides and soon vanished back into the fog out of which they had come.

Even up until the twenties, in Soviet times, a Moscow newspaper claimed that a group of Young Pioneers had gone to the ravine to search for a “wood goblin” which had been apprehended by locals in the vicinity (Yourguide App).

Geomerid makes some further claims. No matter how cold the weather turns, they claim, the famed spring water of the area never freezes. Moreover, the General Physics Institute has discovered that electromagnetic radiation registers as twelve times higher than the average there. In fact the stones show up as being twenty seven times above the expected level! (The ravine boasts two ancient stones which are thought to have invigorating properties: the “male” Goose stone, and the “female” Deviy stone).

Anomalous Zone?

Could Golosov Ravine be an anomalous zone: a sort of mini-Bermuda Triangle? There are, after all, those who contend that the Earth is dotted with such hotspots. Places where weird occurrences–disappearances, unknown creatures, time slips, strange physics and weather conditions proliferate.

The Russian Federation, with its vast and sparsely populated land mass seems to hold a fair number of such purported zones. Within Permskaya Oblast, for instance, there lies a village called Molyobka. This area hosted a procession of UFO sightings 25 years back and also features magnetic anomalies. Known as M-zone, it now contains Russia’s only statue to Extraterrestrials. Molyobka may be known outside of Russia, but the areas which feature every week in Anomalni Novosti–the St Petersburg based paranormal newspaper are not.

In the light of day

I have crossed through Golosov Ravine on a regular basis. The only beings which I have ever encountered are the New Age types who treat the terrain as a shrine by meditating on the stones and tying coloured ribbons on the trees. Then there are the semi-naked men anointing themselves with the spring water, and an archer who dresses up as a samurai. That and clusters of eager-eyed Chinese tourists.

Then I remind myself that it was only in the 1960’s that this place became an official part of Moscow, and then only between 2006 and 2007 when the local authorities pedestrianised the grounds by installing steps and signs telling of the local flora and fauna.

Have here been any further incidents in recent times? How much has been written on the subject that has never been translated into English? Or, is the whole thing just a patchwork of folk tales designed for the tourist market?

There is only one way to find out. Geomerid claims that the mists are still observed from time to time.

Golosov Ravine is calling to you….

HistoryEdit

The sacred stonesEdit

SpringsEdit

ReferencesEdit

Golosov Ravine (Голосов Овраг), also known as Vlasov (Власов) ravine^[1] is a deep ravine in Moscow, Russia, between the Kolomenskoe Hill and Dyakovo Hill. The ravine has several springs and a brook streaming at its bottom. Up in the ravine, on the left side of it, there is a Neopagan shrine, organized around two venerated «sacred stones». In years 2006–2007, during the renovation of Kolomenskoe sides of the ravine were reinforced, and pedestrian paths and stairs were created on its sides.

History

Since ancient times, the ravine has always been shrouded in mystery. There has always been something strange and inexplicable about this place. Moscow historians have found in their metropolitan archives a document dated 1621 that depicts the sudden and unexpected appearance of a small detachment of Tatars on horseback out of a dense greenish fog at the very gates of the royal palace in Kolomna. They were immediately tied up by the soldiers who guarded the entrance to the palace, and interrogated. Being lost and disoriented, the horsemen claimed to be part of the armies of the Crimean khan Devlet I Giray who had attacked Moscow 50 years earlier, in 1571. Sensing defeat and wanting to avoid capture, the horsemen descended into the ravine, where they were quickly enveloped in the dense fog. Riding along the ravine for only a few minutes, they eventually found themselves in the next century! One of the captives, Murza, said that the fog was unusual — of light greenish color, but none of them paid attention to it in fear of the chasing. Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich ordered to hold an inquiry, which revealed that the men ‘probably told the truth’. They had outdated weapons — arms and armour — mostly of 1560s or 1570s types and old-fashioned clothes.^[2]

This wasn’t the only reported incident that took place in the vicinity of Golosov Ravine. Mysterious disappearances of residents of neighboring the ravine villages repeated time and time again and remain unsolved to this day. Historians argue that the archive of the police department of the Moscow province contains documents that report on the two peasants, Arhip Kuzmin and Ivan Botchkarev, who disappeared in 1810 and unexpectedly appeared 22 years later, in July 1832. They had a big night out at a neighboring village and decided to take a shortcut through the ravine on their way home even though they knew that the ravine was considered to be infamous. A blanket of thick greenish fog settled over the ravine, and all of a sudden, a ‘glowing passage’ unexpectedly emerged, full of greenish light. The men entered it and met large, hairy, manlike creatures who tried by using hand gestures to explain to them that they had fallen into ‘a different world’, from which it would not be easy to get out of, but they would help them. The villagers did, after all, get out of the ravine and moved further. When they got back to their village, they were shocked to find that 22 years had passed. Their wives and children aged significantly and hardly recognized them. The incident was reported to the police who conducted an investigation, during which one of the men dissolved into the fog again and never returned. The other man, seeing this, became depressed and later killed himself. This case was described in the newspaper «Moscovkie vedomosti» in July 1832.

For centuries, both locals and visitors have met some strange hairy manlike creatures in and around Golosov ravine. Such cases were recorded not only in the ancient and medieval chronicles, but also in the Soviet periodical press. These woodland creatures most likely represent the leshy — a sort of bigfoot from Slavic mythology who is more man than ape and more woodland spirit than mortal creature. In 1926, a local police officer stumbled upon a ‘hair-covered wild man in a dense fog’ who was two and half meters tall (8.2 ft). The cop blurted out everything that was in his gun, but ‘the ghost melted away quickly in the fog’. Local schoolchildren were even involved in the search for the unusual guest, but any attempts to locate and catch him were unsuccessful. However, this incident made the front page of one of the metropolitan dailies under the headline «Pioneers are catching a leshy» written by the journalist A.Ryazantsev.

The sacred stones

The «sacred stones of Kolomenskoe» are a pair of local sandstone^[3] rocks of peculiar shape, located high in the ravine. Some sources claim them to be granite boulders of glacial origin,^[4] but this seems to be a misconception. Both rocks have traces of manual processing, both old (exaggerating the shape of the stones), and new (as they have been vandalized by modern graffiti). Initially the stones were located further down the ravine, closer to the springs, but during one of the renovations of the park in the Soviet era they were dragged to the place where they reside now.

From the viewpoint of geology, Moscow is located in the central part of the East European Plain that a solid and strong geological structure. However, it has fault lines that are large enough, and one of the largest of them just passes under Golosov Ravine. Powerful jets of radiations are released through the faults, and since the ravine is located strictly from west to east, it seems to dissect the natural Earth’s natural magnetic field.

Back in 1995-1996, scientists from the Prokhorov General Physics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences carried out measurements of electromagnetic fields near the stones. The results were stunning: it was found that electromagnetic radiation in the ravine exceeds the norm by more than 12 times, and near boulders — 27 times. It has been noticed that sometimes mobile phones suddenly discharge in the ravine, while the arrow on a compass points not to the north, but to the epicenter of the enchanted ravine.

The ancient shrine of Veles

According to a recently popularized theory, Golosov Ravine might have initially hosted a shrine dedicated to the Slavic deity Veles.^[5] The name of Veles is said to be traceable in modern name of the ravine (Golosov or Vlasov, through Volosov, from Velesov).^[6] The shrine might have been later Christianized, with the stones re-interepreted by local inhabitants as traces of a famous battle between St. George (the patron saint of Moscow) and the dragon,^[4][7] thus preserving the ancient mythological motif under new names (see «Enemy of Perun and storm myth» section in Veles article).

Modern veneration practices

The stones have their own names: one is called Deviy (or Devichiy, Russian: Девий, Девичий, meaning «Virgin»), and is associated by modern worshipers with giving fertility to women,^[8] while the other one is called Gus’ (Гусь, meaning «Goose»). Local lore tells that they help to cure certain diseases, so people come and sit by them,^[9][10] and also tie small pieces of tissue onto nearby trees.^[11]

History of the veneration

According to some sources, the stones were not continuously venerated by locals in the 20th century, which would mean that the tradition is discontinuous, and may not follow the older patterns, whatever they might have been.^[3]

Springs

The nearby springs are also considered sacred (miracle-bearing) in contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy,^[12] Neopagan^[13] and New-Age^[14][15] traditions. Before the Revolution of 1917 there was a wooden chapel standing on top of (or near?) the springs,^[4] which implies that the springs were considered «sacred» or «holy» in the past as well. Several springs have (or had) their own names: Kadochka (literally: «Little Tub»; seemingly the most venerated one,^[12] with its sub-springs associated with St. George and Our Lady of Kazan^[3]); Peter and Paul’s spring; the spring of the 12 apostles; St. Nicholas spring.^[3] Some of these springs were destroyed during the recent renovation works in the ravine.^[3]

References

This page was last edited on 16 February 2023, at 20:29