History of Barnaul: urban legends
The history of Barnaul: the legend of the Blue Lady
A mysterious legend, long known to the inhabitants of Barnaul, retold by Altai author Mark Yudalevich.
The modern administrative building of the city of Barnaul is very old. Before that lived in it the head of the mining district Kolyvano-Voznesensky. According to historical information, the mining engineer's name is Pyotr Kuzmich Frolov. In this house he lived at the beginning of the 19th century. Century. At an honorable age he married a young girl. At one of the balls the young woman danced with a visiting engineer.
The jealous husband roughly grabbed his wife by the hand and forcibly led her into the dungeon of his house. Where she was walled up on the orders of her jealous husband. The inhabitants of Barnaul say that the Blue Lady – the restless soul of this unburied girl – appears at night both in the building and on the streets near the administration and plays waltzes at night.
The history of Barnaul: the legend of Demidov
The foundation of Barnaul by building a copper smelter was the work of Akinfiy Demidov, who in the middle of the 18. In the beginning of the 19th century he got land leased from the state. His life, of course, is not without conjecture and legends retold by the inhabitants of Barnaul.
According to the legend about Demidov, he secretly melted silver in Altai factories. This was discovered by the state and all the confiscated property was transferred to the state treasury. The furious Demidov cursed his factories on his deathbed. Since then, disasters regularly occur in May in the area where the factories were located. In 1917 a great fire broke out in this area, killing dozens of people, in the spring of 1973 due to a strong flood of the Ob River there was a flood here, and much later, at the end of May 20, the Imperial Hotel and the BTI building, erected on the site of the old Demidov plant, burned down. Probably, this legend could have been invented by the people of Barnaul themselves to explain the misfortune in some way. However, the history of Barnaul contains many other interesting legends.
History of Barnaul: Dunkina grove
The beautiful legends about the deceased girls probably amuse the people of Barnaul. In 1990 the Altai author Vladislav Kozodoeva wrote a story about Dunka's grove with the title "We come from a legend or the terrible secret of the place name of Barnaul". The grove that stretches from the former Upland Cemetery, now VRZ Park, to the village of Gonba has long been cut down. And the legend is persistently repeated from mouth to mouth by the people of Barnaul.
The grove was named Dunkina after the accident – farmer Evdokia committed suicide there in 1904. Whether she died voluntarily or was helped is not yet known. Since then, residents of Barnaul who live near or directly on the site of Dunka's Grove have seen the ghost of a young girl. Today only a few trees are left from this grove in the center of Barnaul – near building B of Altai State Technical University. By the way, on the basis of this story even a TV series in the West "The Hand of the Cheka" was filmed.
The story of Barnaul: the cursed mansion on Gorky
The two-storey old brick house on Gorky Street is called "cursed" in Barnaul. There you can still see a brick balcony door on the second floor of the building. According to the legend of Barnaul, during the repair work of demolishing the wall in the basement in 1929, the skeleton of a man was discovered. It was immediately noticeable that the skull was broken, many teeth were knocked out.
End of the 19. At the end of the nineteenth century, two brothers lived in this very "cursed" mansion. They did not live very peacefully, as they were constantly fighting for the love of the French servant girl.Once the younger brother allegedly went to a fair in another city and disappeared without a trace. The newspaper people blamed the gang of Grishka Labeled, which was very dangerous for travelers at that time.
But most likely it was different. On a dark, rainy evening during a fight, the older brother brutally killed the guy and then bricked him up in the basement wall.
After a while the deceased appeared to the killer: on rainy nights his image appeared on the balcony with teeth knocked out, bloody and crippled. So the killer brother went mad, could not hold the escaped French woman and died in agony from a severe nervous breakdown.
History of Barnaul: underground tunnels of Barnaul
As you know, there has never been a subway in Barnaul and it has not even started yet. The history of Barnaul includes only the construction of several underground tunnels. Famous buildings connected by numerous underground passages are the buildings of the Altai State Technical University. According to the legends of Barnaul, however, these are not the only buildings with tunnels. Although the legend actually has no confirmation and no justification.
To this day, many are convinced that the building of the wedding palace and the neighboring building have a passage under the ground, where at the beginning of the 20. People were shot in the early twentieth century. In the cellars of these two prison buildings the prisoners waited for their verdict. It is thanks to this that even today you can meet ghosts in these buildings at night.
There are many myths about the tunnels in Barnaul: some are sure that there is a tunnel under the Central Department Store – from the train station to the River Station, but so wide that two trucks would pass through it. And some mythmakers invented a tunnel under the Ob River leading to the other side.