Tomorrow, two years since the Olympic Games opened in Sochi, I continue to reminisce. This picture was taken in April 2009. On it is the Imereti lowland, the whole future Olympic Park. The landmark is a small grove on the right, this is the cemetery of the Old Believers, which was not touched during the construction process, only hidden behind a fence and a high hedge. Another landmark is a small hillock, a mound and a bald spot from a landslide nearby, they can also be found in the second picture to orientate yourself on the ground. Less than FIVE years before the Olympics, grass grew on the venue, there was not even a hint of sports palaces and other structures.

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This photo was taken at the end of May 2009. The circle outlined by the road and pillars is the outer contour of the future Big Ice Palace, the same one where yesterday hockey club Sochi beat Omsk Avangard. This grandiose building was built, by the way, by Omsk residents, by the Mostovik company.

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A few more pictures from May 2009, a site for the future hockey palace, Iceberg, Adler Arena, Medal Plaza will grow a little further. In the distance, as a landmark, one can see Blinovo.

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It's no secret that the design of Olympic facilities continued directly during construction. Here in this tent, before the modular administrative building was built, the designers of Mostovik worked. This is where they dined.

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And this is already September 2009, the same Big Ice Palace with visible outlines.

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And this is the future curling center, the Ice Cube. Initially, it was assumed that after the Olympic Games it would be dismantled and moved to another city. But they didn't. Today, the Ice Cube is one of the most used post-Olympic heritage sites.

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At the peak of the construction of facilities for the Sochi Olympics, more than 150,000 involved specialists worked in Sochi. A significant part of them were such hard-working guys from the sunny republics, who were once in the friendly Soviet family of peoples. Specifically, these guys are from the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan. Here in such modular houses, in such rooms they lived all the years of the Olympic construction. Whatever one may say, but sports objects, and transport interchanges, and Rosa Khutor, and Gorki Gorod, and the entire infrastructure of the new Sochi were built by guest workers.

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2009, construction of a port at the mouth of the Mzymta River. Despite the construction around, people steadfastly rest on the then wild Imeretian beaches.

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Construction of a combined road and railroad to Krasnaya Polyana. The most expensive object of the Sochi-2014 project. Somewhere in the bowels of the mountain, a giant super-mole is working, biting into the thickness of the rock, hitting tunnels for trains and cars.

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Construction of cottages for the resettlement of residents who fell under the demolition in the Imeretinskaya lowland. As a result, the village turned out to be very good.

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A very old picture taken, if I'm not mistaken, in the fall of 2007: the people who started everything. Semyon Vainshtok, the first head of the state corporation Olimpstroy. He did not do anything noticeable in this post, in 2008 he was dismissed and left the country. Governor of Kuban Alexander Tkachev. Withstood the Olympic race, was subsequently appointed Minister of Agriculture. And Dmitry Kozak, the real head of the Sochi-2014 project, personally responsible for it to Vladimir Putin. He carried everything on his shoulders, from beginning to end. He deservedly became an honorary citizen of the city of Sochi.

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Such a Sochi Olympiad was presented at the very beginning, in 2007, when no bunnies and leopards had yet been created.

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And, as evidence of involvement, I am on the Olympic sports ground, in a helmet with the symbols of Olympstroy, in 2009.

Sochi Old Believers are concerned about the status of the cemetery where their ancestors are buried.

The Old Believers of Sochi are asking the city authorities to change the status of the cemetery located in the center of the Olympic Park, where the burial places of their ancestors are located.

“Now a very bad situation is developing in the Old Believer cemetery. We are concerned about what is happening there. They install some kind of fences for family burials, they offer to buy some plots for very large sums, ”Artyom Yefimov, chairman of the local religious organization “Old Orthodox Church Community,” told Interfax.

Efimov said that during the preparations for the 2014 Olympics, they wanted to move the cemetery to another place, but the Old Believers community protested, and the cemetery was left in the center of the Olympic Park, surrounded by a fence and green spaces.

“If the cemetery is sold for family burials, then our people will not be able to buy them, because they do not have these amounts. Therefore, we ask the authorities to change the status of the cemetery from urban to religious,” Yefimov added.

The new status will allow burials in the cemetery not only for the descendants of the Old Believers. But also to the residents of the Rossiya state farm, whose ancestors once inhabited the Imeretinskaya lowland and the bay. This issue will be dealt with by the Board of Trustees, consisting of members of the community of Old Believers and TOS "Sovkhoz Russia". The community of Old Believers in Sochi today has about 200 people.

“This is a very important cultural component for us. Our parents inhabited the bay and are buried there. This is the only place left of the old bay. It is located in the Olympic Park. We are not against family burials, but against the sale of the cemetery,” Yefimov emphasized.

In turn, the director of MUE "Funeral Services Sochi" Alexander Mamulai noted that all city cemeteries have a lot of seized land for family burials.

“We met with the Old Believers, talked. We are not talking about granting land for future burials. There are a lot of arbitrarily occupied territories. That is, a person carried out the burial of his relative and instead of the prescribed 4 square meters. m fenced 20 sq. m,” said Mamulai.

In this regard, the authorities of Sochi are turning to the court and, according to its decision, they are dismantling the seized lands in all cemeteries of Sochi, including the cemetery of the Old Believers in Adler.

“I am ready to support any decision of the community of Old Believers. Or religious status, or the status of a cemetery closed for free burial, but we have to work it out, ”added the director of the MUP.

“The Old Believers do not want to pay money and have fenced off the territories where their relatives are buried. In addition to the Old Believers, residents of the Rossii state farm are also buried there. And if we give the cemetery the status of Old Believers, then residents of nearby villages will not be able to bury their relatives there,” Mamulai said.

Recall that in August the Sochi administration approved a list of city cemeteries where family or ancestral burials can be carried out. The one-time payment for reserving a site for rural districts is 8.5 thousand rubles per 1 sq. km. m, in the rest of Sochi - 14 thousand rubles. for 1 sq. m. The list includes nine cemeteries, including the cemetery in the Olympic Park.

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This is a sovsport.ru material dated 2012 and dedicated to the cemetery of the Old Believers, which is located almost in the center of the Olympic Park. The existence of the graveyard was discovered only during topographical work when marking the territory; it was not on the maps of the area.

The cemetery is active, it appeared without the permission of the authorities near the village of the Old Believer, which was moved to another place. People, members of the community, opposed the demolition of the unauthorized churchyard, and they managed to defend their cemetery. As a result, a fence was built so that tourists and fans walking along the colorful bridges would not see the churchyard.

Photos from the blog ammo1.livejournal.com were used as illustrations for the material.

“Two weeks ago, hundreds of journalists from all over the world visited the facilities of the Sochi Games. The participants of the world Olympic briefing did not hide their astonishment at the pace of construction of sports facilities. hockey arena"Washer"…

DECABRIST-PARATROOPER

In Adler, they are not too concerned with historical heritage. Guests of the upcoming Olympics will only be able to walk along Bestuzhev Square - touch the old cannon, take a picture of the monument to the Decembrist officer Alexander Bestuzhev. Exiled to Siberia after the events on Senate Square, the brave staff captain begged for the Caucasian war. And he died heroically in Adler on June 7, 1837 - as part of the Black Sea battalion during the landing of troops from the frigate Anna. In 1913, at the site of the death of Iskander-bek (as the sailors called their comrade), the townspeople laid out a square by the sea, in 1957 they erected a monument ...

That's all that's left of the old Adler. But in 1839 it was a city of twenty forts and fortresses. The only memory of this - a piece of stone wall on Karl Marx Street - is now propped up by a cell phone store. The royal hunting palace of Nicholas II in Krasnaya Polyana also sank into oblivion - along with the dachas of opera singers Fyodor Chaliapin and Leonid Sobinov.
And only the cemetery of the Old Believers survived the change of centuries ...

"WE BURY ACCORDING TO ALL CUSTOMS ..."

Four years ago, during the visit of the IOC commission, a rally of Old Believers at the cemetery made a lot of noise. People stood between the grave fences, holding SOS posters in their hands. On the contrary - officials and riot police ...

- Seeing our posters, one of the leaders of the city administration shouted: they say, now we will open fire to kill! - recalls the leader of the community Dmitry Drofichov. - The disobedient were thrown to the ground. They trampled the graves. The police drove the Cossacks into the bus, where they forced them to write explanatory notes. ...

What about the IOC commission?

- What do you! We were not allowed to see her.

As a result, the village of the Old Believers Morlinsky was moved a kilometer higher from the sea. But it was not possible to raze the cemetery to the ground: the people blocked the way for bulldozers with their breasts.

In the village of Nekrasovka, where 112 families have moved, I meet Lyubov Markovna Logaryova, a new villager. She flatly forbids taking pictures of herself, they say, these are worldly fun. The Old Believers, by the way, immediately warn: do not shake hands with them, touch things, dishes ...

Are people satisfied with the new houses?

- Yes, what is there! The plots are tiny, there is nowhere to set up a garden, - the interlocutor is not inclined to compromise.

- It's great that you defended the cemetery ...

- Yes. We bury as before, according to all customs, - the interlocutor softens a little. - It’s bad that there is no church, we pray from home (a new Old Believer church in Nekrasovka has been erected since 2011, and the old wooden one in Adler burned down in 1932. - Approx. ed.) ...

"NICHOLAS II CALLED THEM..."

“You can understand the Old Believers, their great-grandfathers were the first settlers here: they drained swamps, died of malaria, built houses, planted gardens,” says Margarita Kuzina, senior researcher at the local history museum of the Adler district of Sochi. This woman, who receives a miserable six thousand rubles a month for her work, knows everything about Adler and the Adlerites. It was the Old Believers who came to her for help when they defended the cemetery.

“The first graves appeared on it in 1911, when 160 families of Old Believers arrived here from Turkey,” says Kuzina. – Descendants of the Don Cossacks and opponents of the church reform of the 17th century. Nicholas II personally called them to their homeland. And before that, as the founder of the community Foma Drofichev said, he and his ancestors in Romania and Turkey were engaged in fishing and farming. And during the Russian-Turkish wars they refused to fight for the Sultan against Russia. Turks with Circassians began to force them out. And after the end of the Caucasian War, the tsarist government carried out the resettlement of Russians in the Black Sea lands liberated from the Ottomans. Foma and 60 other families from the city of Banderma were taken on steamboats through Batumi to Sochi. So the Cossacks settled the Imereti Valley.

“In those days, the seashore was covered with impenetrable forest and boxwood,” local historian Irina Golovina takes the floor. - The emperor gave everyone a loan for the construction of roads and houses, and gave men a deferment from the army for 20 years. All the current Old Believers are the descendants of those settlers. Their faith was not broken even by the revolution with collectivization. The collective farm of the Old Believers named after the VII Congress of Soviets supplied vegetables and herbs to the Kremlin table! And in the Great Patriotic War, the Cossacks were the first to go to the front. It was they who stopped the Germans at the Caucasian Pseashkho Pass.

- Did you advise the Old Believers about the cemetery?

“You could say that,” Kuzina replies. - When the Olympic construction began, they came to me and said: there is a deed of gift for the land, including the cemetery, which Nicholas II issued in 1911. But we did not have such documents. I advised them to go to the Sochi archive, but they were simply laughed at there. As we managed to find out, most likely, the emperor's deed of gift was lost during the war. When the Germans approached the mountain passes in 1942, local officials mothballed all archival documents. They packed them in a hurry in ordinary bags and buried them. Almost everything is rotten - the climate here is humid. But, fortunately, the local authorities changed their minds and did not demolish the cemetery.

"TWO FEELINGS ARE WONDERFULLY CLOSEN TO US..."

You can get to the historical churchyard only with a special pass, which is issued at Olympstroy. At the appointed hour, I stand at checkpoint No. 2 of the Olympic Park. A magnetic card and an escort from the construction department are waiting for me here.

“It’s easier for relatives to get to the graves,” he explains. They're on the security list. It is enough to show your passport.

... The cemetery is like a dusty oasis in the desert. The graves are shrouded in palm branches, covered with tree crowns. Literally across the road - the stadium "Fisht", the Figure Skating Palace...

The area of ​​the cemetery is tiny, 25 meters long and wide. The graves of the Old Believers are easy to identify - they are the most abandoned. Faded wooden crosses on a grassy mound, no nameplates...

“The Old Believers don’t look after their graves,” my aunt, a resident of Adler, Victoria Boldyskul, told me before the trip. She has relatives buried in the Imeretian land along the line of her husband. - They also have a tradition from the Turks: they buried, the grass sprouted - and that's it.
Slowly we walk along the graves. I read names, dates on monuments...

“In fact, in Soviet times, the cemetery ceased to be an Old Believer cemetery,” the guide explains. – Adler migrants were buried here, and in addition to the Old Believers, these are Moldavians, and Armenians, and Orthodox Russians, and even Muslims. Who is not here...

It's time for us to leave. From an island of eternal silence and sadness to the world of a huge construction site that thunders around the clock.

“Still, it’s great that the cemetery has been preserved,” my guide says. - It's a connection of times. Those who lie in this land built a city. And their descendants are building the first Winter Olympics in our history.

And I think that it's not about the Olympics at all. It was impossible to do otherwise in the country that gave Pushkin to the world. “Two feelings are wonderfully close to us, in them the heart finds food: love for the native ashes, love for the father’s coffins ...”

In the sea. The mountains. Expanded clay "

On Monday, on ORT, a new television series was released - “The Sea. The mountains. Expanded clay. It was shot by Tigran Keosayan according to the script by Margarita Simonyan ... straight - "Armenfilm"))) The plot develops during the Sochi Olympic construction and, as I understand it, the authors are from the local Armenian diaspora.
Genre, as stated - comedy, but the announcement from ORT http://www.1tv.ru/cinema/fi=8407
"In one of the coastal villages of Sochi called" Cheerful "Russian Old Believers coexist side by side with Circassians, Armenians, Greeks. A measured life flows: the Old Believers pray and grow vegetables, the rest earn on tourists. The son of the owners of a khinkal Armen falls in love with an Old Believer girl Serafima "Suddenly, the usual life of the village is disturbed by the news: there will be an Olympics in Sochi. An Olympic construction site is coming to the village of Vesely. Local residents perceive the Olympics with hostility ... "

Well, what can I say? The film, of course, is not a masterpiece))), but it’s still nice that they don’t forget about us, about the bearded ones))), it’s also nice that the Old Believers are presented as positive heroes, filmmakers are still joking over the Armenians, they still feel towards the Old Believers respectful attitude ... the only thing all the same, they could fix it ... it’s clear that the artists don’t know how to be baptized, although they squeeze the two-fingered, but we have fingers, they always hold it vertically, and the sign itself is superimposed in a different way .. heroine, constantly praying - on her knees, we not only don’t pray like that, but it’s also forbidden - like a Latin custom ... we bow down to the ground, but this is of course something else ... well, a ladder - they could teach how to use , the assistants would have bought from us in the shop, well, of course, there are no such prayers as they depicted ...))) although, of course, all this is trifles ... it will do!)))

That's just it - the "grandfather of the heroine", Nikonenko with a glued beard ... by the way, he looks very plausible.)))

Not much historical background: The settlement "Nizhneimetinskaya Bay" was founded in 1911 by Christian Old Believers (Beglopopovtsy). All of them come from the lower reaches of the Don and are descendants of the Don Cossacks. In our time, this is the city of Novocherkassk and the village of Starocherkasskaya. There were impenetrable forests, swamps and swamps, the settlers created this land with their own hands. Three years later, after settling in the Nizhneimeretinsky Bay, half of the settlers died of malaria and fever. During the Soviet Union, the Bay people created their own collective farm, the Collective Farm named after the Seventh Congress of Soviets, by the way, was advanced. Before the start of construction and resettlement, about 400 indigenous Old Believers lived in the Nizhneimeretinsky Bay, more than 100 households. In the film, of course, too “colorfully”, they portrayed local residents, of course there are people who fully comply with all the rules both in everyday life and in clothes, but mostly these are old people, young people dress like that only for service.

Regarding the real events in the Imeretinskaya lowland in the Sochi region, not everything was so comedic during construction. The whole village, no matter how the residents resisted, was demolished, only a piece of the cemetery was able to defend, it is just located in the center Olympic village. (in the form of a circle behind the fence)

Here in the video, you can see what a serious fight was ... sorry, a lot of obscene vocabulary ... although it's a non-standard situation, all the same, the Old Believers - there's no trace of swearing.

By by and large, some locals, maybe even won, from shacks, they were moved to decent houses ... but many, and so, lived in beautiful houses.

But still, all the same, people weren’t thrown out into the street at all, the only thing, as I understood it, the promised church was not built, they didn’t build a fig ... I had to chip in myself. Here is a report from RTR

Sochi Old Believers appealed to the city authorities with a request to change the status of the cemetery located on the territory Imereti Lowland Olympic Park v Adler region resort towns, urban on the religious. This is due to changes in the regulations for reserving places in cemeteries for family burials.

They install some fences for family graves, some plots are offered to be bought for very large sums. If the cemetery is sold for family burials, then our people will not be able to buy them, because they do not have these amounts. We are not against family burials, but against the sale of the cemetery,” said the chairman of the local religious organization “ Community ancientlOrthodox churches» priestArtem uy Efimov .

Director of the Sochi Municipal Unitary Enterprise " Funeral services to the population» Alexander Mamulai said that at the Old Believer cemetery in the Olympic Park there are a lot of arbitrarily seized territories for family burials.

That is, a person buried his relative and instead of the prescribed 4 m² he fenced 20 m². But the status has nothing to do with arbitrarily occupied territories. The Old Believers do not want to pay money and have fenced off the territories where their relatives are buried. In addition to the Old Believers, residents of the state farm are also buried there. Russia". And if we give the cemetery the status of Old Believers, then residents of nearby villages will not be able to bury their relatives there,” he said.

According to him, the Sochi authorities are forced to apply to the court and, according to its decision, carry out the dismantling of the seized lands in all cemeteries of Sochi, including the cemetery where the ancestors of the Old Believers are buried.

I am ready to support any decision of the community of Old Believers. Or a religious status, or the status of a cemetery closed for free burial, but we must work it out,” A. Mamulai noted.

He recalled that burial in Sochi is regulated 131 Rdecision of the Sochi City Council approved in 2011. The Sochi administration has approved a list of city cemeteries where family or ancestral burials are allowed. A one-time fee is charged for reserving a site to the city budget. For rural districts, the fee is 8.5 thousand rubles per 1 sq.m., in the rest of Sochi - 14 thousand rubles per 1 sq.m. The list to which the innovation applies includes nine cemeteries, including the cemetery of the Old Believers in the Imereti lowland.

Do you understand the meaning of the Old Believer cemetery? We have a small piece of land enough for a thousand years. Because Old Believer cemeteries do not grow - wooden crosses are placed, and after a lapse of time (after 25-35 years), when the cross rots and falls, and there is no longer a coffin or body, we bury another person in this place. And if this cemetery were left alone, it would last for hundreds of years, which is why the question of a new cemetery is not worth it. Within the boundaries, it does not grow anywhere, and we do not provide for fences, because we do not worship the dead. We began to put up fences when others began to be buried with the graves of our people. And so, the cemetery should have a chapel and graves, there should be cleanliness and order, - said Priest Artemy Efimov.

The cemetery is located next to the Olympic venues: stadiums, ice arenas and other structures. During preparation for Olympic Games the organizers were going to demolish the cemetery. However, the local community protested, and the object was left on the territory of the Olympic Park, enclosing it with a fence.

We stood here with our chests. There were even clashes between people and the police… 10 years have passed, and now the city hall officials remembered that there is a cemetery here and transferred it to a municipal cemetery. It has never been a city and never will be. The city did not establish this cemetery. It was founded by the Old Believers. Their graves are the first and oldest here. We take care of them ourselves,” said a member of the Old Believer community Dmitry Drofichov.

Recall that the settlement of the Old Believers in the area of ​​the Imeretinskaya Bay arose at the beginning of the 20th century. It was founded by families of Old Believers who returned to Russia from Ottoman Empire after the issuance of a decree on religious tolerance in 1905.