Analytical Report: Historical Anbar near Maryina Roshcha

 

“Out of diligence, they dismantled the bodies with their bare hands”

Kommersant

17 min

January 30, 2021

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250 years ago, in 1771, the establishment was finally closed, the spirit of which caused consternation even among the most persistent residents of Moscow. Formally, the “anbar near Maryina Roshcha” was ordered to be demolished eight years earlier, after Empress Catherine II learned of its existence and was horrified. But only the attack that befell the country could change the order that had existed for centuries.

“The inhabitants of this city have a custom on this day, Thursday after Pentecost, to go out of town” Photo: Rosinform / Kommersant

“They become hard as a rock.”

The most terrible place in Moscow was described in the documents in a dull and indistinct manner. Thus, the decree about it was called “On the maintenance of an anbar near Maryina Grove for the burial of dead bodies.” But how could anyone in a Christian country be buried in a barn?

There was a little more information in the text of this Senate decree of May 22, 1744. It said that a member of the Main Police Chief's Office, Assessor Molchanov, submitted a report to the Senate “to fix the anbar on the wretched house, which is near Maryina Grove for burying dead bodies.” The police authorities, “due to the lack of money in the Police,” proposed to repair the barn at the expense of the Moscow province and the body that helped the Moscow bishop manage the diocese - the spiritual dicastery (in the same year, all dicasteries in the country were renamed into spiritual consistories). After discussing the matter, the senators ordered:

“For the burial of dead bodies, the anbar is now being built and will continue to be repaired by the Moscow Provincial Chancellery, from the unpaid income of that province.”

Such laconicism, uncharacteristic for that time, was explained quite simply. Our own people already understood everything, but outsiders didn’t need to know anything. That is why foreigners who came to Moscow and learned about such an amazing feature of Russian life could only speculate. Thus, Giles Fletcher, an envoy of the English Queen Elizabeth I, who arrived at the court of Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich on November 25, 1588, decided that the wretched house, which he called God’s house, owed its appearance to the fierce Russian winter:

“In winter, when everything is covered with snow and the ground freezes so much that it is impossible to use either a spade or a crowbar, they do not bury the dead, but place them (as many as die during the winter) in a house built in the suburbs or outside the city, which is called Bozhedom, or God's house: here the corpses are piled on top of each other, like firewood in the forest, and from the frost they become hard as stone; in the spring, when the ice has melted, everyone takes his dead person and confuses his body to the ground.”

Having visited Moscow twice, in 1576 and 1578, Daniel Prince von Buchau, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation Maximilian II, compiled for his sovereign a description of Russian customs, in which the functions of the wretched house looked different:

“For the burial of the common people, they dig a large ditch and lay it in it, and if someone died without sacred rites, they do not throw away the earth at all, but after three or four months they build a house there, and the funeral is accompanied by great weeping and screaming over the dead from all the relatives who have gathered and neighbors, but are buried according to religious rites.

These ceremonies are performed three times annually.

Although the corpses of the dead give rise to the greatest stench, you can easily see that a large crowd of people flock to this kind of funeral; at the end of them, in order to forget their sadness, they indulge in drunkenness in a nearby tavern.”

However, in fact, the bodies of noble people also ended up in the wretched house. In addition, not all commoners ended their mortal journey in this way. The description given by von Buchau suffered from approximateness in some other details.

But even with regard to the awareness of our own people, the situation was little better. As it turned out in 1763, when Empress Catherine II became interested in the poor house, the knowledge of those who were directly responsible for it was neither deep nor accurate. In the Holy Governing Synod, and then in the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory, there were no documents describing the history of its appearance and specific rules of operation.

And the rector of the Vozdvizhenskaya Church, priest M. Andreev, who was in charge of a wretched house near Maryina Roshcha, was summoned to the consistory, and was able to provide only a few copies of relatively recent papers that he had inherited from his predecessors.

“During Otrepyev’s stay at the Poor House, various wonderful and terrible ghosts were seen above him, screams and howls were heard.”

"The Soulless Remains of the Restless Dead"

Little by little, domestic historians began to find out the origins of the wretched house. They agreed that the first mass and unorganized burials of beggars and other homeless people arose in ancient times. In ancient Rome, for example, the ditch where their bodies were thrown was called a fossa, but it did not last long. And the original name of such places in Rus' - “skudelnitsy”, was believed to have arisen in Judea, where those who came from distant places to worship in the Jerusalem Temple and who suddenly died were buried in a special skudelnichy field in pits from which clay had previously been extracted.

Skudelnitsy were mentioned in Russian chronicles as places where the dead were buried during epidemics and famine. It was claimed that in some cases the bodies of many people could have found their final resting place in one vast and deep hole. At the same time, different numbers were mentioned - 200–300 in Kholmogory, about 10 thousand in Novgorod, more than 40 thousand in Moscow.

However, the commemoration of the dead that existed after the burial of the poor was very similar to the funeral feasts of the pre-Christian era. Even greater rejection of the Orthodox clergy was caused by “Semik” - a common day of remembrance of all the dead that had taken root among the people. After all, they celebrated it in the groves that grew up around poor women, with curling birch branches, fortune telling and other pagan rituals.

Therefore, the church, as in the case of other ancient holidays beloved by its flock, began to gradually modify their essence. And the achievement of the goal was helped to a large extent by the beliefs that existed among the people since pagan times.

“In ancient Rus',” wrote the prominent ethnographer D.K. Zelenin, “the corpses of persons who died an unnatural death were not buried in the usual way in the ground, apparently in order to avoid desecration of the earth, and were not burned, but thrown out on the surface of the earth in desert places.

Spring frosts harmful to the growth of grain were attributed to the burial of such corpses in the ground.

Later, such corpses began to be thrown into damp, swampy places and rivers, and their burial in the cemetery was attributed to lack of rain and drought.”

The position of the hierarchy, as Zelenin pointed out, was exactly the opposite:

“Our hierarchs often punished the guilty children of the Church by depriving them of a church funeral and commemoration, just as the burial place was sometimes turned into an instrument of punishment or reward; but they always and everywhere recognized only one method of burial - through burying in the ground.”

The new type of burial that eventually emerged - placement in open pits or ditches, over which in some places a wooden structure was built for protection from bad weather, animals and birds, but in others not, looked like a concession by the church to the people or a compromise. But this impression was deceptive. After a certain time, those placed in such “wretched houses” were buried and covered with earth. Moreover, in Semik. So the pagan commemoration slowly and gradually turned into a Christian one.

In addition to this, not all those who suddenly died were sent to poor houses, the number of which was growing in the capital. No exceptions were made for the unidentified, but the bodies of the faithful children of the church, who regularly confessed, took communion and suddenly and unwillingly passed away from life, were spared a similar fate. However, this rule did not apply even to the highest-ranking believers, if at the time of their death they were in disgrace or died at the hands of the royal executioner.

Moreover, placement in a squalid house did not escape even some of the country's top officials.

“The body of Tsar Boris Godunov,” wrote about the events of 1605, corresponding member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences I. M. Snegirev, “buried with honor in the Archangel Cathedral, by order of Demetrius the Pretender, was taken out of the tomb, and not at the door, but through a hole deliberately punched in the wall of the Cathedral, it was thrown out.”

The new burial place of Tsar Boris was the Moscow Varsonofevsky Monastery, where at that time one of the poor houses was located. But the next year, 1606, they treated the body of the overthrown and murdered False Dmitry I even worse.

“The corpse of Dimitri the Pretender,” Snegirev narrated, “ulcerated, naked and cursed by the people, like the hated remains of a villain, was taken to the Poor House (where the Pokrovsky Monastery of the Pokrovsky is now); but the drays on which Otrepiev was lying did not pass through the gates of this house: in the spirit of that time, this was attributed to a miracle - the corpse was taken off the ditch and dragged into a pit.”

However, the funeral service and burial of the imaginary Dmitry Ioannovich, even in a wretched house, never happened:

“During the stay of Otrepyev’s body at the Poor House, as the chronicler of that time testifies, various wonderful and terrible ghosts were seen above him, screams and howls were heard; His corpse seemed to appear either a mile away in front of the Wretched House or close to it; To this end, deep snow fell, cold set in, and terrible whirlwinds raged (this was in May 1606). From which they then concluded that the earth does not accept the Pretender - and they transported the soulless remains of the restless dead man to the Serpukhov road and in the town of Kotlah they burned him and scattered the ashes in the air.”

“On Semitic Thursday I attended a divine service

"With the Tsar, Queen and Patriarch"

After the accession of the Romanovs, the use of poor houses continued according to the established tradition, and the changes made did not change its essence. Thus, in 1619, the father and co-ruler of the first tsar of the dynasty, Mikhail Fedorovich, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Philaret, clarified the rules that should guide the clergy when determining whether or not to send the body of a suddenly deceased person to a poor home. If, for example, a person drowned while swimming, then it was necessary. But if you didn’t swim out, having fallen into the water against your will, then no. The remains of the one who was killed by falling from a swing awaited months of detention in an unfilled hole. At the same time, those who were stabbed to death in a fight, as well as those who choked to death on food, were subject to an ordinary Christian burial.

The number of days a year on which funeral services took place and bodies were buried in poor houses also changed. At some periods there were two or three of them. But always and invariably, the main day for closing pits and ditches remained Semik - Thursday in the seventh week after Easter.

At the same time, the location of poor houses changed not often, but regularly. In Moscow, for example, land was allocated for them on the outskirts or uninhabited places where they built a temple, at some distance from it they dug the first hole and built a watchman’s guardhouse, called the house of God.

“Unfortunately born babies” were thrown to this gatehouse, whose birth threatened their parents with accusations of fornication.

Childless families took them from there. And for many decades the same picture was observed in the capital. Bozhedom carried a large basket with children sitting and lying in it through the streets and asked for alms to feed them. They claimed that the phrase in his recitative: “Or maybe they are yours!” acted flawlessly on representatives of all classes.

However, Semik brought the main income to both the godly and the clergy of the church at the wretched house. Muscovites, who were moved during the mournful ceremony - after all, any of them could get into the pit - generously threw food and coins onto the mound that appeared on the site of the pit. They, without any hesitation, participated in digging out the next place where the bodies were deposited. And they fervently prayed for the repose of the souls of the dead, not skimping on candles or alms for the orphans of God and the numerous beggars.

In addition, the relatives of suicides, after bringing the body to a squalid house, had to pay considerable “funeral” fees - hryvnia.

Meanwhile, Moscow was growing, and new courtyards were moving closer and closer to the wretched house. Then either the space for new pits and ditches ran out, or the patience of the surrounding residents, who were no longer able to endure the stinking spirit, ran out. And the wretched house was moved to a new outlying or empty place.

Over the years, the composition of those who participated in the funeral service and burial of those who died without repentance in Semik also changed. Thus, in the description of the stay of Patriarch Macarius III of Antioch in Russia in 1654–1656 there is an interesting detail about Moscow:

“The inhabitants of this city have a custom on this day, Thursday after Pentecost, to go out of town with the king, queen and patriarch to distribute alms and perform services and memorials for all the dead, drowned in water, killed, as well as for dead strangers, with full joy and fun; all the merchants of the city and markets are moving their trade outside the city.”

Whether Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich visited there regularly or just wanted to demonstrate to the foreign hierarch his piety and the people’s love for themselves did not matter much. The participation of the first person in a mournful ceremony, like any other, had the same consequences as usual.

All the rich and noble who sought his favor began to bend over backwards to show their zeal, while transgressing all reasonable boundaries.

And following their example, the rest did the same. Thus, holes in poor houses are no longer simply covered with earth.

“On Semitic Thursday,” wrote I. M. Snegirev, “on the seventh week after Easter, there was a religious procession from the nearest monastery or cathedral to the Divine House (poor house) and people flocked with coffins, clothes and shrouds for the dead; The pious themselves, out of zeal, dismantled the bodies with their bare hands, mostly wrapped in matting, and out of Christian charity, not disdaining the disgusting look and smell of the corpses that had been lying for a long time in the pit of the barn, “hidden” them, put white shirts and shrouds on them, then laid them into coffins, lowered into holes prepared for this purpose and buried.”

"Those thieves and robbers

“Put in the field on new pits”

The turning point in the history of poor houses came after the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Adrian approved the “Instructions for priestly elders” on December 22, 1697. In accordance with this document, the bodies of only captured thieves and robbers who, before dying from illness or wounds or before execution, confessed and the priest allowed them to receive communion, were necessarily sent into pits and ditches. That is why the archers, who rebelled in 1698, ended up in the pits of those cities where their cases were being investigated and where, after the verdict, they were handed over to the master craftsmen.

Those unrepentant before passing away or killed during the capture of thieves and robbers, as well as all those who were considered guilty of their own death, the instructions prescribed to be “laid in the forest or in the field, except in cemeteries and wretched houses.” Moreover, determining the degree of guilt of the deceased in his own death was entrusted to the priests, from whom the instructions required “to thoroughly search about those people,” that is, to find out everything absolutely precisely.

However, what was called the “delicacy of the priests” was no secret to anyone, and in the same instructions the priesthood was urged not to take money from those who would “beat the deceased with their foreheads.” So, if the suicide was not demonstratively obvious or the blame for the accidental death could be blamed on some circumstances, the relatives of the deceased and the clergy agreed to mutual satisfaction on the funeral service and burial at the church or in the monastery cemetery.

As a result, over the years, poor houses turned into a kind of morgue, albeit with a temperature that differed little from the ambient temperature. They were primarily used to transport those executed and those who died in custody and unidentified corpses from the streets.

The similarity with morgues was added by the fact that Peter I ordered the bodies anatomized in hospitals to be sent to the pits.

“Anbars” over pits, and in some cities they were made of stone and locked, became an indispensable attribute of poor houses. But this did not stop thieves and robbers from using them to their advantage. They broke the locks and threw the people they robbed and killed into the pit. After all, an accurate count of bodies was never kept there.

By the end of the reign of the reformer tsar, against the backdrop of his policy of Europeanization, the squalid houses smelled not only of decay, but also of medieval savagery. However, the desire to change something appeared only in his royal niece, Anna Ioannovna. According to historians, in 1730, on the eve of the coronation in the Mother See, she wanted to abolish the last of the wretched houses remaining in Moscow. But in reality, in 1732, it was limited to moving it away from the Kremlin - to Maryina Roshcha.

The decree of the Moscow Dicastery to the rector of the Vozdvizhenskaya Church dated November 16, 1732 said:

“The newly defined hangar, which was moved from the site of the Church of the Exaltation of the Exaltation, and placed in the field on new pits for the cemetery of human dead wretched bodies, to know and watch, and to hold the key to the hangar and to put human dead bodies sent from various orders into the hangar and throughout the summer on Thursday the seventh weeks of Passover are for the burial of dead bodies and the commemoration of repairing your butt.”

But the clergy of the Vozdvizhenskaya Church could only dream of sole disposal of the income from commemorations in the Semik clergy. On this day, monks from different monasteries came to the poor house to collect donations, and the clergy of the surrounding churches also tried to get something. And a little later, the beginning of the mournful ceremony was a religious procession from the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin to Maryina Roshcha, in which many prominent Moscow church figures of that time participated. And this attracted even more believers and donors to the commemorations in the wretched house.

“Crews with dandies and dandies, modest droshky and crowds of pedestrians rush together to Maryina Roshcha for the sake of Semik” Photo: Rosinform / Kommersant

“Bury the earth and level it immediately”

It would seem that Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, who could not stand odors, especially cadaverous ones, could put an end to the history of wretched houses. For example, while in Moscow, on July 2, 1848, she signed a decree prohibiting burials near all churches on the way from the Kremlin Assumption Cathedral to her palace on the Yauza: “It is very indecent and dangerous to bury dead bodies here.” The decree, in addition, ordered that all the crypts where there were unburied coffins be filled with earth, from which a spirit emanated, although incomparable with a wretched house, but quite strong.

“The consistory,” wrote church historian N.P. Rozanov, “on August 2, 1748, ordered the parish clergy along the main streets from the Kremlin to the palace on the Yauza ... not to bury the dead; level the old graves; and use tombstones from graves for church buildings as needed. Until the time of construction of a special cemetery, other nearby churches are indicated for the burial of the bodies of the dead in the parishes of churches in which burials are prohibited. However, after the Empress’s departure from Moscow, the Consistory began to allow the burial of the dead in those churches where it was prohibited.”

Given the way things were going, taking on the task of liquidating a wretched house meant wasting time. Empress Catherine II fully realized this truth. Unlike her predecessors on the throne, she, considering herself an enlightened ruler, did not want to put up with the existence of the Yamniki in her state. There is a version that she personally visited Maryina Roshcha and was horrified. And the main user of the wretched house, the police authorities, called to account by her, immediately appealed to the Holy Governing Synod, indicating:

“The spring time is coming, in which the air may be thin and contagious from those dead bodies.”

And on April 18, 1763, the Synod ordered all dead bodies “to be buried and leveled immediately after the usual funeral chanting....”

“From now on,” said the decree of the Synod, “bodies brought from various public places, after the departure of the funeral, will be buried at the same time on the kosht (with funds - “History” ) of the places from which they will be brought.”

At the same time, the religious procession to Maryina Roshcha was also prohibited. The activity of the poor houses was completed. And not only in Moscow - the decree of the Synod was sent to all dioceses. But it was carried out no better than Elizabeth Petrovna’s decree on burials at churches.

Almost eight years later, on March 15, 1771, the Moscow Office of the Synod reminded the Moscow Spiritual Consistory that the decree on the liquidation of the wretched house and the prohibition of religious processions to it should still be carried out. However, the last point in the history of burials in pits and ditches was helped by a disaster - the plague epidemic.

Fear of a growing pestilence forced the authorities to act as harshly as possible. On October 15, 1771, it was strictly ordered that all the dead be buried without delay, and violators faced the most severe punishment. Later, a decree appeared on funerals only and exclusively in cemeteries, and priests who violated it were immediately transferred to the poorest parish in the diocese. There were no people willing to disobey among the clergy who were seriously frightened by such a prospect.

The last time the authorities remembered the wretched house was in 1812, after Napoleon’s army left Moscow.

In the Mother See there remained many corpses of enemy soldiers who died from wounds and diseases. And they, as Moscow old-timers claimed, were burned in Maryina Roshcha, where there used to be pit pits.

What about Semik? It continued to be celebrated many decades later, but not at all in the same way as before.

“The modern Moscow Semik,” wrote the historian and publicist S.P. Korablev in 1855, “does not differ strikingly from other Moscow festivities... Crews with dandies and dandies, modest droshky and crowds of pedestrians rush together to Maryina Grove for the sake of Semik. At the entrance to the grove, first of all, there is a tavern with a garden for outdoor tea drinking and a music choir; it is followed by various folk amusements: swings, comedies and round dances.”

The ancient holiday, as intended, has changed completely:

“Divination with wreaths and curling them also seems to have disappeared in the ancient capital... With the destruction of the poor women, the commemoration of them was also destroyed, being replaced by the institution of the Church to remember all the fathers and brothers who had previously departed.”

Evgeny Zhirnov

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