As you know, our favorite places to search for coins and treasures are old abandoned villages. Places that people once left and which nature is trying to bring back, erasing the traces of human activity. The earlier the person left her, the less noticeable the traces on the ground. Probably, every digger has visited abandoned villages, but did he ask himself questions: Why did this village disappear? What made people leave their homes? Indeed, let's take a look.

• Let's start with the oldest. Villages that disappeared in the pre-PGM era. At that time, man was directly dependent on nature and its resources. Be it water, land, etc. And, for example, at one “perfect” moment, the river dried up, or the land lost its fertility and stopped producing crops. Then people were forced to look for a new place for their settlement. The disappeared pre-PGM villages are a real tidbit for treasure hunters, because there is no modern garbage there and everything that falls under the coil will belong to that era. Be it various scales, household items, jewelry. But to find such a village is extremely difficult.
• Villages that disappeared during the revolution and civil war. At that time, the entire male population went to war, therefore the backbone of the village simply simply disappeared. Yes, and the population of villages could be exterminated, and houses burned. In such places, in addition to coins, finds of the “Echo of the Civil War” are possible. Be it rotten shells, weapons, shrapnel, shell casings, etc. So be careful. You can find such settlements only on royal maps.
• Villages that disappeared during the Second World War. Here, as in the previous version, there can be two options. Or the village was abandoned due to the general mobilization of the population, which subsequently did not return from the war or moved to live elsewhere. Or the settlement was destroyed by the Nazi invaders. There are still many explosive "surprises" in such places.
• Villages that disappeared as a result of the process of Khrushchev's enlargement of villages in the 60-70s of the last century. They make up the vast majority of abandoned and forgotten tracts. This is when people from other nearby villages were settled in one village in order to increase the population and merge small collective farms into one large one. These are the places where the bulk of diggers dig. Here we already come across “Soviet” garbage: peakless caps, aluminum wire, and the like. But among this garbage come across interesting finds. Some of these villages may already be marked on the maps of the General Staff as tracts or marked developed. or unlived. It is better to overlay the old map on the General Staff. After all, not all tracts were villages :)
• Villages voluntarily abandoned by residents. Young people tend to move to the city, while the aging population stays at home, in the countryside. In the same place, the people grow old and die, leaving behind unnecessary houses that collapse over time. Classic scheme. Finds depend on the period of existence of the settlement.
• Villages living out their lives. Almost the same as the previous version. They still have a certain number of local residents who can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Well, or where summer residents come for the summer. In such places, the local population is a significant advantage and help. One has only to communicate with the old-timers and you will learn a lot of useful information. In such places, there is almost no one to talk to people and, if you behave decently, they will be happy to establish contact with you. Locals can tell you where the manor house or village that is not on the map was located, show the old part of their village, and so on and so forth.

Well Well, like all the main listed. There are, of course, other factors, but that's another story. Seek and luck will surely smile at you. See you on the fields!

Let's move on to the pictures:

All that remains of a small village after the resettlement in the 60s.

Once a large and prosperous village, but forgotten and unnecessary to anyone. Once upon a time there were a huge number of solid stone houses.

Also once a large village. It even had a school. But she, like other neighboring villages, was also resettled.

There was a long street of the truck village. Was once...

Last option. There is still a sufficient number of people in the village, but the store has already closed and the people have to go to the neighboring village 3 km away for bread. The second photo shows the collective farm office. Naturally also abandoned.

All that is left of a wealthy village.

The ruins of a large two-story stone house. In the second photo, there is a house pit, on the edge of which birch trees grow.

In the Sverdlovsk region, on the banks of the small river Kyrya, there is an abandoned village of Rastess. No one has lived in it for more than sixty years. Houses are dilapidated, and yards and streets have long been overgrown with grass and weeds. However, hunters and travelers are still cautiously trying to bypass the village, because in the 1950s, its entire population, in the midst of everyday bustle, disappeared without a trace, no one knows where.

vanished village

Settlement on Babinovsky tract

Rastess was founded at the end of the 16th century, shortly after the fall of the Siberian Khanate. Boris Godunov, the brother-in-law of the feeble-minded Tsar Fyodor I Ioannovich and the de facto ruler of the Russian state, well understood how the country could benefit from the development of new lands. Therefore, he achieved the signing of the royal decree, according to which the construction of a convenient road for traveling from Europe to Asia was started. This path, by the name of the person who proposed and then carried out its construction, was called the Babinovsky tract.
Posadsky man Artemy Safronovich Babinov, who brought his own project to life, not only paved the road 260 miles long, but also founded settlements along its entire length, which were supposed to serve the tract and protect people traveling along it. One of these settlements was the Rastes guard, later the village of Rastes. Its name goes back to the outdated form of the word "clearing", because the first inhabitants of the settlement were lumberjacks who felled the forest for laying the Babinovsky tract. In Rastess, travelers stopped to rest, and the coachmen changed horses. In the village there was an Orthodox church, a volost government, a parochial school, and later a weather station appeared.
For a century and a half, the Babinovsky tract was the only land route connecting the European part of Russia with the Asian one. Royal decrees were delivered along this road, cash, mail, embassy delegations and scientific expeditions passed through it. In the middle of the 18th century, new roads were built to Siberia, south of Babinovskaya. Over time, it was completely closed. Rastess did not fall into decay only due to the fact that gold and platinum mines began to be developed near him. On them, the inhabitants noticeably improved their well-being, which is eloquently evidenced by the completely non-village-type marble tombstones in the local cemetery.
By the middle of the 20th century, Rastess was a village in which about 500 people lived. But the era of prosperity is behind us. Many residents were forced to go to work in neighboring settlements, from where they returned home only on weekends. A free settlement of prisoners appeared nearby, who repeatedly dug up graves at the Rastess cemetery and robbed the houses of local residents in the hope of finding gold.

Book on the bench

Once, residents of the neighboring village of Kytlym, located about 20 kilometers from Rastess, noticed that the neighbors had not been visiting them for a long time, and for some reason they had not met them in the regional center lately. The Kytlym people gathered a detachment of men who went in cars to a neighboring village to find out what had happened there. What struck the scouts in Rastess was a peculiar silence. All the houses stood still, in many yards birds grazed, and cattle stood in stables. At the same time, they noticed that the cows and pigs were unkempt and somewhat thinner, as if they had not been fed for several days.
Not a single person was found in the entire village. The condition of the houses was also shocking. Many of them had windows open and not locked. entrance doors. The contents of the houses remained intact. Some of the tables were open for dinner. On a bench near one of the houses remained open book, as if the person reading it decided to be distracted literally for a minute. Everything spoke of the mass disappearance of people under mysterious circumstances.

Do you know that…

Victims of disappearances without a trace are often found in the water, in rivers. However, the American researcher David Polides found that often the victim is found upstream of the river relative to the place of loss.

Most of all, the scouts were frightened by the fact that all the graves in the village cemetery were dug up, as if the dead had decided to leave Rastess along with the living.
After returning, the scouts from Kytlym decided to contact law enforcement agencies. First of all, suspicions, of course, fell on the restless neighbors of Rastess in the person of prisoners from a free settlement or some other fugitive criminals. However, this materialistic version was not confirmed by anything: no traces of blood, clashes, nothing at all hinting at such a thing. But the inhabitants of Kytlym remembered that the Rastess, when they last spoke with them, were worried about some "strange light in the sky." They also remembered a certain family, over which the inhabitants of Rastess laughed: they constantly fancied either mermaids, or any evil spirits, or “flying saucers”. They laughed at something, but they themselves sometimes talked about the outgoing whisper at night, from which horror rolls and blood freezes in the veins. Yes, and evil spirits in those places seem to have been fooling around for a long time.
In a word, terrible things began to be said about Rastess. At first, there were still curious people visiting. In the deserted village, they observed unusual lights several times and heard strange, inexplicable sounds. Information about this was preserved in the old documents of the investigation. They began to bypass the deserted village, considering it cursed and dysfunctional. They even refused to see tourists, researchers, ufologists and other lovers of the paranormal there. Over the past 30 years, there have been repeated reports of alleged UFO sightings and unexplained light beams from those places. Among the population of nearby villages, there are many legends and mythical stories about the evil spirits in the vicinity of Rastess.

Rastess doesn't let strangers in

Today, little remains of the lost village: three abandoned dilapidated houses in a field overgrown with weeds and grass, and logs scattered among them. On the outskirts there is one old burial, next to which there are two cast-iron slabs with epitaphs and one marble stone. All the graves in the cemetery are indeed dug, but now it is often believed that treasure seekers did this after the mysterious events. The surrounding area is a swampy field, pitted with pits and stream beds. A certain revival in this dull landscape is brought only by the partially preserved old road, which hunters and travelers avoid due to superstition.
Many researchers have tried to unravel the mystery of the missing village, but the vast majority of expeditions are still plagued by inexplicable failures. A chain of small or large failures and circumstances forces even well-prepared people to turn back. Rustess doesn't let strangers in. Perm explorer Aleksey Fatkulin is one of the few who managed to get to the lost village with the expedition. He believes that nothing should be taken from such places - after all, no one knows what kind of energy objects thrown in such zones can have. In Rastess, according to Fatkulin, he had a strange feeling that there was someone else besides his group.
Fatkulin shared his impressions with TV people from REN-TV: “You never manage to get there the first time. No matter how many times we try, there are always some problems: either the car breaks down, or the weather deteriorates sharply, a thunderstorm starts all night, and we get stuck. Once two cars broke down and a terrible thunderstorm began, from two to six in the morning there were lightning, lightning. There are mountains nearby and it turns out that lightning strikes as if next to you ... The place itself is such that when you walk along it, you feel as if someone is constantly looking at you, although you understand that there is no one, that there it's been abandoned for a long time."
The history of the Ural village is not unique. Under equally mysterious circumstances, back in the 16th century, the English colony of Roanoke in North America similarly disappeared. And the houses there also looked like people had gone away for a minute and never returned. In 1930, an Eskimo tribe village, located on the shores of Lake Anjikuni, disappeared in Canada. Neither the country's authorities nor experts in the field of anomalous phenomena have yet solved this riddle. And in India, once the inhabitants of 85 small villages located in the Thar Desert disappeared altogether. First, those who lived in locality called Kuldhara on the border with Pakistan, and then another 84 nearby villages. Indians believe that this place is forever cursed.
Versions on this matter are put forward very different. They used to talk about witchcraft, and now about the intrigues of aliens or opening doors to parallel worlds. But all this does not reveal the terrible secret of Rastess and similar settlements.

In the middle of the 19th century, the village of Mokeevka appeared in the forests of the Shilovsky district between Lake Kuzhikha and Lake Chudino. It was not marked by anything special, except that the people living in it were smart and hardworking, so the village was prosperous. The inhabitants did not think or guess that in the coming century they would become the heroes of legends, passed in a whisper from mouth to mouth.

After the October Revolution, Mokeevka disappeared. Absolutely... Together with the population, houses, cattle. And it's okay to just disappear. In those bad times, that didn't happen. The strange thing was that periodically the village was seen. Residents of neighboring Nadezhdino will gather for fishing - there is Mokeevka, women will go to the swamp for cranberries - there is Mokeevka. And a detachment of food requisitions came - there is no village. Like a cow licked her tongue. In the place where it should be, impassable thicket.

Once they sent a detachment of CHON (a special-purpose unit designed to fight the enemies of Soviet power) in a hundred sabers to deal with this ideologically harmful village. The detachment, according to all the rules of military science, surrounded the location of the enemy. They sent intelligence. They wait half an hour, an hour - there are no sentinels. The commander with a dozen fighters went on a sortie. And he also disappeared ... In general, when the main detachment pulled up, the Chonians saw an absolutely incredible picture. The village is where it should be. Linen is dried in the yards, warm samovars are still in the huts. But there is not a single living being - neither man, nor cattle, nor chicken, nor dog. Only scouts with a commander roam the yards in complete disorder. The authorities made several more attempts to clarify the situation. And all with the same success. Then they spat and announced: there was no Mokeevka in sight. And all the talk about a ghost village is an ideological sabotage and undermining the authority of the Soviet government on the part of the kulaks and sub-kulakists.

Country on lockdown

We will definitely return to the mysterious story of the village of Mokeevka. But first, let's remember that the Shilovsky region attracted the close attention of scientists 200 years ago as a possible location of the semi-mythical Artania - the city-state of the ancient Russians. Here is a quote from the Big encyclopedic dictionary: “Artania, Arsania, Arta, along with Kuyavia and Slavia, is one of the three centers of Ancient Rus' that existed in the 9th century and is mentioned by Arab and Persian geographers (al-Balkhi, al-Istakhri, Ibn Haukal, etc.). Some researchers identify A. with the territory of the Ants, others with Tmutarakan, and still others with the city of Ryazan. According to one version, hence its name - Arta - Arzya - Yeruzyan - Ryazan.

The main oddity is that no source left us a description ancient city, its streets, buildings, household utensils. In general, no specific data. The conclusion suggests itself: either strangers were not allowed into Artania (one of the translations is “a country on lockdown”), or all these are myths and legends that have no actual evidence. According to some modern ethnographers, Artania was carefully protected from prying eyes, and they did it so skillfully that the idea of ​​attracting some kind of esoteric forces suggests itself.

In the intricacies of the "maze"

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What was kept in ancient Artania? There is a version that it was here that the most revered relics of the ancient Orthodox world were located: the first consecrated icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, the legendary sword of Ares and even the Holy Grail. In fairness, it must be said that not everyone agrees that the mysterious city was located on Ryazan land. Yes, and here, in the Ryazan region, other places of the possible location of the “closed country” are also given.

For example, Pitelinsky district. Here is what the famous Ryazan amateur local historian Vladimir Gribov told about his search for Artania. The inhabitants of one of the villages near the sources of the river Pet pointed out to him a field, with which many mysterious phenomena had long been associated. At first, Vladimir Vasilievich did not notice anything unusual at this place. Field as field. Proceeded it up and down - no finds. I was about to leave and suddenly, quite by accident, I stumbled upon a hefty stone on the very outskirts of this place. In appearance, it exactly coincided with the famous menhirs, repeatedly described in historical documents. Turned to a strict tetrahedron, the top is pointed. Since pagan times, such stones have been placed, believing that they accumulate the energy of the sun. And if you have certain knowledge, this energy can be used, among other things, to create impenetrable protection from prying eyes. Further - more ... Behind the stone was a whole chain of small ravines, in which boulders were scattered, at first glance, chaotically. Not a single path, not a single road nearby.

After a hundred steps, Vladimir Gribov felt a slight dizziness, and after another moment he realized that he was in a huge "maze" - the stones and ravines were arranged in such a way that they twisted into a spiral! He decided to walk to its center, but that was not the case - he passed two ravines and found that he was again standing a few steps from the menhir. Another attempt, same result. Perhaps somewhere here was the entrance to the "secret city" forever hidden from prying eyes? There is one more fact confirming the version of Vladimir Gribov. Old-timers tell a story about Ataman Antonov, whose forward detachments, during the suppression of a peasant rebellion, violently broke through from the Tambov region to the Pitelin region. With fighting, sweeping away the cordons of the Red Army, they still managed to break through. However, the Red Army soldiers nevertheless overlaid the Antonovites in the region of the Pitelin forests. The most desperate made their way to the ravines and sank into the water ...

Nettle didn't help.

But back to modern Shilovo. Sergey Ivanovich Nikanov is one of the few who saw the legendary Mokeevka with his own eyes. “Yes, I was not the only one who saw her,” he says. - Many of us in Nadezhdino have been to Mokeevka, and more than once. In the early 1930s, when collectivization was in full swing, the authorities again became interested in Mokeevka. They began to drag men and women from the surrounding villages for interrogation. We were still just kids ... With a friend we saw the village three times when we ran to fishing on Lake Chudino. True, they did not go into the huts - they were afraid. And when they told us at home, our parents lashed us with nettles so much that they then bypassed this place on the tenth road. Parental nettle did not help. The mysterious Mokeevka sunk into the soul of Sergei Nikanov.

You never dreamed!

“For about twenty years there was neither a rumor nor a spirit about the village,” recalls Sergei Ivanovich. “The story has already been forgotten. But in the mid-60s, tourists stumbled upon it again. We went to Chudino - there was a village, and on the way back, when they wanted to draw water in the well, they saw an impassable thicket. I've gone looking myself several times. And I saw Mokeevka three more times. Only now, if I take the camera with me, I’ll wander through the forest in vain. I’m already in Shilovo and I’ve stopped talking about it. They laugh at me - they think that my grandfather completely lied in his old age. And I still have old photos, still 20s. They just have the same Mokeevka. Then the ethnographers managed to photograph the village and its inhabitants for the only time. Of course, this needs to be seriously dealt with, but my age is not the same, and my health does not allow me to run through forests and swamps. Unfortunately, the format of a newspaper publication does not make it possible to tell about many more mysterious places in the Ryazan region. There are anomalous zones in Shatsk, in Staraya Ryazan, on the Zhokin settlement in the Zakharovsky district. In the near future we will definitely return to this exciting topic. Well, I advise skeptics to remember the words of Shakespeare's Hamlet: "There are many things in the world, friend Horatio, that your wise men never dreamed of."

What happened to these people after their disappearance is anyone's guess, for the exact nature of the force that acted upon them is beyond our understanding. Physical whirlwinds, vortices, time shifts, and dimensional gates have all been proposed to explain paranormal phenomena, but in reality none of these theories seem to be satisfactory.

The missing lighthouse keepers from Flannan Island, the loss of a British battalion in the midst of the Gallipoli campaign, and the missing defenders of Pankin are just one handful of examples out of a thousand that our overly rational minds simply cannot comprehend. But perhaps the most terrible disappearance of our time is the sudden migration of the inhabitants of an entire Eskimo village from their usual habitat on the shores of Lake Anzhikuni in 1930. Until now, the Canadian authorities have not been able to solve this mystery or contact the members of the tribe or their descendants. Everything looks as if the tribe never existed at all.

The mystery arose in November 1930, when a trapper - a fur hunter - named Joe Labelle, having reached the Eskimo village on his snowshoes, suddenly found the familiar huts deserted. Just two weeks ago, when Labelle had been in the village, it had been a bustling, bustling community. Now, instead of a friendly greeting, he was met with deathly silence. Not finding a single living soul, the trapper, out of desperation, began to look for clues to unravel this situation. But all in vain. The Eskimo kayaks were moored in their usual place; in their homes there were various items necessary for the settlers, utensils, rifles. On the shelves of the cold hearths were ordinary pots of caribou stew, a traditional dish of the tribe. Everything was the same as before, except for the people. It seems that an entire tribe of more than two thousand people has suddenly sunk into obscurity in the middle of a completely ordinary day in all respects.

But there was one more detail: Labelle saw, to his great surprise, that no traces led from the village.

Feeling, as he later described, a strange tension in his stomach and fear, the experienced hunter rushed to the nearest telegraph office and alerted the Royal Canadian Mountain Police. The Highlanders have never heard anything like it. An entire expedition was immediately sent to survey the village, and the search for residents began along the entire coast of Lake Anzhikuni. The second event, as you know, failed, and the group dealing with the first mission only deepened the mystery.

Arriving in the abandoned village, the police discovered two more features, each of which strongly pointed to the unnaturalness of what had happened. To begin with, the Eskimos did not bring sledge dogs with them, as Joe LaBelle originally believed. Ice-covered husky husky skeletons were found all over the village deep under a layer of snowdrifts. Tied, they starved to death. Then the most incredible thing was revealed - the graves of tribal ancestors were opened and their bodies disappeared.

Both of these details put the authorities in a complete dead end. It is clear that the Eskimos could not set off without using one or the other means of transport: sleds or kayaks. In the same way, they could not doom their four-legged friends to a slow and painful death. If they had not taken them with them, they would at least have untied them, leaving them to get their own food. The second riddle - the opened graves - could confuse any ethnographer familiar with tribal customs, because the Eskimos are more afraid than death to disturb the peace of the dead. In addition, the earth was then frozen, of steel hardness, and it was absolutely impossible to tear it without the use of technology. As one of the highlander officers put it then, "everything that happened here is simply physically impossible." Sixty-five years later, no one has disputed this assertion.

vanished village .

This village is no longer found on modern maps. Her life has stopped. Houses slowly leveled to the ground. Leaving only barely noticeable mounds. You can get to it, or to the place where it was, from the village of Battle Mountain. Past the remains of farms we move strictly to the south for about five kilometers.

Thanks to the inhabitants of the village of Boevaya Gora, it was established that this village was called Chernovka. The exact date when the last resident left the poor village is unknown. All from the same sources it became known that some of its inhabitants moved to the village of Boevaya Gora.

Arrived at the place. We are met by a tree of the Orenburg steppes - Karagach.

Past the village, and maybe in the past and through its territory there is a country road. If you don’t stop, you won’t immediately understand that there was a village here. Only after walking, you notice the mounds on the site of the destroyed houses. In some places, the outlines of the foundation are visible. And lonely trees.

Our chief specialist in "treasures" Sergey, begins the search for artifacts.

One of the first finds. Chain links. Probably, Fedka the Bull from A. Kozachinsky's story "The Green Van" did not reach here.

Perhaps this is the only slightly surviving foundation.

Another find. Millstone. Looking at their design, you can imagine what percentage of flour was obtained. Clearly the losses were heavy.

Barely visible outlines of the house.

It looks like a log from the roof.

The next item is quite interesting. At first it seemed that it was an ordinary bark. But upon careful study of the little thing, it becomes clear that it was nothing more than some kind of container for storing something.

The village is overgrown with feather grass, turning it into a steppe.

Moved away from the car for a considerable distance. We begin to understand the dimensions of Chernovka.

Another exhibit. It looks like a container with which oil was added to the tractor engine in films about collectivization. Maybe I'm wrong?

Almost all of our findings are pulled together. Here, some parts from a tractor and other agricultural equipment. Parts of the canopy from the gate. Brick with an unknown mark. And some other things, belonging to something, we can not determine.

The sun is going down, and it's time for us to return to Orenburg. We return in a different way. On the roads that run parallel to the Orenburg-Sol-Iletsk highway. Outside the window, interesting names of villages flash by. Korolki. All Korolkovtsy fit in one street. Rote Fahne. German roots are clearly felt.

Lighthouse station. Where are we going for the sake of the elevator. Along the way, we gaze at the local architecture.

The only update is the house number plate. An interesting solution to the problem of strengthening the roof.

We jump into the station and take pictures of its views.

Station water tower. And yet it was interesting to build before. It would seem, what kind of object is a water tower? There is nothing special. No library, no museum. But all the same, all sorts of roundings, arches over the doors, loophole windows, the shape of the roof. And it looks almost like a tower of a fortress.

Railway to Kazakhstan. South direction. By the way, if you go along it, then somehow you can get to my friend and an avid spinner from Uzbekistan