Crocodiles in Eastern Europe

In historical sources dating to different periods, as well as in Belarusian folk traditions, children's games and choral songs, information on crocodiles or large lizards found on the territory of modern Belarus is repeatedly found ^[1] .

The Austrian diplomat, Baron Sigismund von Herberstein , who twice visited the Russian lands in 1517 and 1526, in an analytical review of Notes on Muscovite Affairs , where he described in detail the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , mentioned the following about Zhemaiti :

This area is replete with groves and forests in which terrible phenomena can be observed. There are still a lot of idolaters who feed at home penates , some kind of snakes with four short paws, like lizards with a black and fat body, with no more than three spans ^[3] in length and called givuoites (Givuoites). In due days, people cleanse their home and with some fear with the whole family reverently worship them, crawling out to the set food. Misfortune is attributed to the fact that the snake deity was poorly fed.

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In 1589, an English diplomat, Jerome Horsey , wrote in his Notes on Russia that during one of his visits to Russia near the border of modern Poland and Belarus, he found a crocodile’s corpse on the river bank and was seriously ill when trying to study it:

I left Warsaw in the evening, crossed the river, where on the shore lay a poisonous dead crocodile, crocodileserpent, to which my people had torn their belly with spears. At the same time, such a stench spread that I was poisoned by it and lay sick in a nearby village, where I met such sympathy and Christian help for me, a foreigner, that I miraculously recovered.

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In the form of the second half of the XIX century, which described the property of one of the Belarusian churches, the skeleton of a crocodile is mentioned:

As we opened the church cellar, we saw the shkilet, very ancient, because it was no longer yellow, but white and white. One skillet is like a man, only growing huge, the other is a certain beast, like a crocodile. Lying side by side, and between them a lot of krayl scattered.

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According to legend, in the Tatar swamp, located in the city of Minsk , large black lizards resembled crocodiles. In size, they were significantly inferior to African crocodiles; their length reached only half a meter. However, these animals were quite aggressive. During the frequent spills of the Svisloch, the creatures crawled out of the swamp onto the streets of the city and could bite people. The last Minsk "crocodile" was killed in 1885, after which his stuffed animal was placed in the office of the director of one of the city real schools. However, during the First World War and the Civil War, it disappeared without a trace. On the maps of Minsk at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, the Starorechitsa swamp is shown, located to the north-west of the castle . Its second name, Tatarskoe, was associated with the compact residence of Crimean Tatars in this area, whose ancestors were captured during the Battle of Kletsk on August 6, 1506. This district of Minsk was called the Tatar Sloboda, and the names Tatar end and Tatar suburb also met. On the maps of Minsk in 1898-1903, the Tatar swamp is already absent. The Sports Palace ^{[1] is} currently located in the area.

Crocodiles are also mentioned repeatedly in Russian chronicles. Usually this word is found in the form of “corcodile” (probably as a result of inaccurate transliteration from other Greek. Κροκόδειλος ) ^[6] .

For example, in the Second Novgorod Archive Chronicle, the invasion of crocodiles in Pskov in 1582 is mentioned:

In the summer of 7090 ... of that summer, the lucid corecods were emptied out of the river and the gate was closed, there were a lot of people, and people were shrinking and praying for God all over the earth. And packs hiding, and others hitting. That same year, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich introduced himself in Sloboda, on December 14 at 14.

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In the Mazurin chronicler , a metaphorical description is mentioned, according to which the son of Sloven Volkhov, in whose honor the Volkhov River was named, had the ability of a werewolf and could transform into a "corcodile":

The great son of this prince, Sloven Volkhov, who is not pleasing to him and sorcerer, pours into people quickly, making demonic tricks and dreams and transforming into the image of a short-haired beast of the corpscrafter, and lying down in that river Volkhov the waterway and those who do not bow to him, spewing out the flood; therefore, for the sake of the people, then ignoramus, the true god of that damned Naritzah and his Thunder, or Perun, the reproach.

“Korkodil” is also mentioned after the death of Volkhov:

with much weeping from neveglas, he was buried swiftly cursed with a great filthy scumbag, and the grave was thrown high above it, as if it were filthy. And after three days of that damned sacrifice, the earth woke up and the vile body was devastated, and its grave woke up above it to the bottom of hellish, even today, they will tell you like that, the sign of your pit is not filled.

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It is known that in the territory of modern Novgorod and Pskov regions the pagans had a cult of the pangolin. According to legend, before the creation of the sanctuary of Perun in Veliky Novgorod in 983, in its place was the sanctuary of a certain "corcodile." The archeologist and researcher of the Slavic culture and history of Ancient Russia Boris Rybakov associated the names of Yashchino Lake, the villages and the Yaschera River , the villages of Bolshaya and Malaya Yaschera , the village of Spas-Korkodino and others ^{[2] with} reptiles living in these and other places.

Also known is the legend about the Arzamas monster , witnessed in the annals of the city of Arzamas , signed by the Zemstvo commissioner Vasily Shtykov:

Summer 1719 June 4 days in the county a great storm, and a tornado, and hail, and many cattle and all living creatures died. And the serpent fell, scorched by the wrath of God, and stinked disgustingly. And remembering the Decree of God by the grace of our Sovereign All-Russian Peter Alekseevich from the summer of 1718 to the Kunstkamera and collecting for her various wonders, monsters and freaks of all kinds, stones of heaven and other miracles, this serpent was thrown into a barrel with strong double wine ... ^[8] ...

According to the description, the creature had short paws and a mouth with a large number of sharp teeth, and besides, a strong stench emanated from it. All this suggests that it was similar to the quinoites mentioned by Sigismund von Herberstein and the poisonous crocodile described by Jerome Gorsey. However, the find was lost in the archives of the Kunstkamera or did not reach it at all. There is a semi-joking assumption that the transporting barrel opened it and drank its contents ^{[2] [9]} .

June 26, 1889 the peasants of the villages of Chebolaksha and Lukin Navolok of the Petrozavodsk district of the Olonets province (now Kondopoga district of the Republic of Karelia ) observed in the Chebolaksha bay of Lake Onega a beast that resembled a crocodile (one of the peasants saw the same beast in a book about Africa) ^[10] .

Crocodiles cannot live on the territory of Russia or Belarus, since they are not able to tolerate cold winters, the temperature for their life should exceed +11 ° C ^[11] . At temperatures below +20 ° C, many crocodiles lie motionless. For the normal development of crocodile eggs, it is necessary that for 90-100 days the temperature be kept at +25 ° C, which is impossible in Eastern Europe. According to herpetologist M. B. Efimov, the last crocodiles disappeared from Russia about 15 million years ago. The last place they lived was the territory of the Novgorod region ^[12] .

Regarding the mention in the Novgorod Chronicle of “cortodiles” in Pskov, there is a version that this is a metaphor describing the death of Ivan the Terrible ’s son Ivan , which is mentioned below, although not everyone agrees with this ^[6] .

There is also an assumption that there were indeed crocodiles in the Velikaya River, however, most likely, they fled from the merchant who acquired them during a visit to one of the eastern countries, possibly to Syria . It is worth noting that crocodiles are also not found in Syria, but noble Arabs could well keep and sell them. This may explain the singularity of mention of a similar event in this record. In addition, grazing means to bite , and not eat , which indicates the insignificance of the damage caused by crocodiles. The mistake is considered unlikely due to the fact that in those years in Russia it was known who these crocodiles are. The crocodile was described in the Chronicle of the Byzantine monk Geogry Amartol in the 9th century, which already in the 11th century was translated into Old Slavonic ^{[13] [14]} . Also, the description of the crocodile was found in the book Chronograph of 1512. The merchant Vasily Poznyakov , who visited Egypt in 1559 as part of the Russian embassy, ​​described these reptiles in detail. In 1582, which refers to the invasion of crocodiles, the palace clerk Trifon Korobeinikov also visited Egypt ^[6] .

According to the descriptions of the “crocodiles”, who supposedly lived in Minsk before the end of the 19th century, they looked more like not a crocodile, but an ichthyostega , an animal from the extinct maxillary family of the Ichthyostegidae family of the tetrapodomorph clade, living in the Devonian period and representing the first intermediate and amphibians (between carpenter fish and first terrestrial vertebrates). The ichthyosteg paws were poorly adapted for walking and, possibly, served as fins. They also had a caudal fin and a number of sensory organs that function only in the aquatic environment. The body of the ichthyosteg was covered with small scales. However, according to official data, ichthyostegs became extinct 360.7 million years ago ^[15] . Therefore, the fact that they survived to the end of the 19th century seems rather dubious ^[1] .

According to the writer Nikolai Nepomnyashchy , the disappearance in recent historical times of the crocodile-like creatures that inhabited Eastern Europe is associated with the veneration and deification of their pagans and the subsequent fight against paganism on the part of Christianity, as a result of which these lizards were completely exterminated by man:

Most likely, that's why they did not live out that they were too revered! The fact is that for the Christianity implanted in the XI-XVI centuries ... the pagan pangolin god was certainly the most dangerous ideological adversary, since it was impossible to convince people to renounce the powerful and deified animal that they knew well. Most likely, there could be only one way out in this situation: the merciless physical extermination of all sacred animals and, at the same time, the complete eradication of any memory of them. That is why the lizards are referred to in the Christian annals as “godly vile and possessed river sorcerers,” “fiends of hell,” and “devilish reptiles.”

There are versions about the natural causes of the extinction of dinosaurs in Eastern Europe, such as epidemics, climate change, etc. ^[1] .

Cryptozoologists are convinced that in the impenetrable swamps of the Novgorod region , where there are a lot of poorly studied lakes, some of which are located in tectonic faults and can have a “second bottom” and a depth of 150-200 meters, crocodiles live today. Local residents often notice large footprints similar to those of birds, only five-fingered, as well as furrows on moist soil leading to water. They also notice strange animals up to two meters long in water, however, as a rule, they cannot be clearly seen. On the banks of the reservoirs, zoologists discover strange holes that are supposedly used by crocodiles for wintering. Cryptozoologists believe that local crocodiles hibernate for the winter like a Chinese alligator . Official science is skeptical of such encounters and the possibility of crocodiles living in Russia ^[16] .

From time to time, untrustworthy messages about crocodiles in Belarus appear on the Internet ^[17] .

On January 27, 2017, the weather and nature program “ Tebarometer ” on Belarus 2 reported that one of the subscribers to the program group on VKontakte sent a photograph of a crocodile supposedly left to winter in a swamp in Chervensky district . An attempt was also made to add such information to Wikipedia . However, the fraud was quickly revealed - photographs similar to those sent by the subscriber were found on one of the foreign sites. Then the user decided to falsify the tracks of the crocodile in the snow and again sent their photo to the “Telebarometer”. The host of the program said this (probably joked) that crocodiles hibernate for the winter ^[18] .

• Crocodiles in the sewers