Balimer

The Balymer settlement has been preserved to this day, located on the southern outskirts of the village and covers approximately 3.5 hectares. The Balymer fortification is connected by an earthen rampart with a fortified castle or fortress - Maklasheevsky II fortification and an observation point on the cape on one side and a watch post at the site of the more ancient settlement “Sholom”. Behind the rampart were residential and farm buildings of the posad and craft estates. Stretching for several kilometers, the agglomeration of settlements was obviously an important trading center of the area. Evidence of this is the corresponding finds that were made in the area.

There is a point of view that the basis of the Balymer settlement is "a large village, which had the significance of the tribal center of the nearby Gorodets settlements", turned as a result of its capture by the Bulgars into a small feudal city.

Graves and mounds belong to the burial places of the Volga Bulgars and Rus of the 9th – 10th centuries, as well as nomads of the times of the Golden Horde of the 13th – 14th centuries. There is an opinion that it was in Balymer that the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan observed the funeral ceremony of the Rus (the so-called burial in the boat ), which he described in his memoirs ^[1] .

As the Kazan historian and archaeologist Iskander Izmailov writes: “the mounds were located in a group of 25 embankments that were located 1 mile to the north-west from the village of Balymer (according to pre-revolutionary spelling - Bulymer) on the banks of the Volga River on a high terrace covered with oak forest ... In total Over the years, 15 embankments were investigated. The mounds had a domed shape, with a height of not more than 0.7-0.9 m and a width of 6.3 to 8.5 m ”

From a guidebook on the Volga of the 19th century: On the hill going from Spassk to the Utka River, lies the village of Nikolskaya Polyanka. It has a church in the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, built in 1778. The first settlement of Polyany was at the beginning of the 17th century. Tsar Boris Godunov erected a Tetyushskaya zaseka to protect the borders of the Kazan kingdom and founded the inland town, or prison, here. In ancient documents stored in the landowner's house of this village, it is called Ostrog and Polyansky town. At the estate there is a tract along which an earthen rampart goes to the north side. It’s hard to say who it was poured over, ”writes N. Bogolyubov,“ but the proximity of the village of Balymer suggests that this rampart is the remnant of the ancient Bulgarian city of Balymat. Moreover, Balymer is sometimes called Balymat, as can be seen from ancient acts on the lands of this village. Balymat, among other cities attached, was given to Prince Fyodor Rostislavich Smolensky ^[2] .

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