Where, where? In Non-Moscow! The village of Sapozhok
Village Freezer, Yb, village Loch — Russia has plenty of villages and hamlets with unusual, funny, and sometimes absurd names. "NeMoskva" tells about them. This time, it's a village called boot.
Sapozhok is a regional center 135 kilometers from Ryazan. In the center, tourists will encounter a monument to Lenin, pointing the way to the regional center and standing on the site of the destroyed Assumption Cathedral. Before the advent of Soviet rule, there were five churches in the village, connected by underground passages. Only two remain. The square is surrounded by two-story 19th-century merchant mansions, housing shops and residents. A little further away is an international landmark: parents' house Anastasia Filatova, who became the wife of the General Secretary of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Yumzhagiina Tsedenbala.
Small Boot is a treasure trove for lovers of antiquity: more than 30 houses are of historical and architectural value, and in the local history museum kept The skull of a giant deer with antler skeletons. The animal's remains were found near Sapozhok, and the entire skeleton, complete with 2,5-meter antlers, was taken to the Moscow Paleontological Museum. Sapozhok is, in general, a remote provincial town where life came to a standstill at the end of the last century. The only modern amenities are a Pyaterochka store and sparse internet access. Historic buildings are destroyed.
There are several versions of the name of the village. emerged In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was a military border town of the Russian state, and the first version is related to this. Allegedly, Cossacks transferred from Moscow to serve in this area named it after one of Moscow's old squares, Sapozhkovskaya, in one of whose churches was an ancient icon of the Mother of God in Red Boots. According to the second version, the name is connected to the Sapozhok River. And the folklorist and lexicographer Mikhail Makarov писал"A boot, or sometimes a nozhka, was the name given to a tract of land that remained between swamps or rivers, or between foreign lands, yet adjoining its wide end to one's own." A boot, it turns out, was none other than a section of arable land or meadow, extending into forests, or through forests into meadows, valleys, and tongues of water. This version is true and banal, but there is another. Supposedly, one of the tsars (either Ivan the Terrible or Boris Godunov) lost a morocco boot in the local impassable mud.
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