Grebeshok

Grebeshok (Yarilina Gora) is a historic locality in the Nizhegorodsky District of Nizhny Novgorod: a small plateau of the Dyatlov Hills above the steep right bank of the Oka, south of Gremyachaya Gora, from which it is separated by the Pokhvalinskiy Descent ^[1][2]. In plan, the ravine-cut bank resembles a rooster's comb — hence the name ^[1]. Until the mid-19th century the hill was called Yarilina or simply Yarila, after a pagan deity, and festivities were held there ^[1][3]. Today Grebeshok consists of four streets and one lane (Sorevnovaniya, Yaroslavskaya, Chernyshevsky, Grebeshkovsky Otkos, and Kazbeksky Lane) ^[4], a dozen and a half old houses, a hospital in a former noblemen's shelter, and one of the best viewpoints in the city: from here one can see the Oka, Zarechye, the Strelka, and the yarmarka (fair) ^[3].

Where Grebeshok and Grebeshkovsky Otkos are located

Grebeshok is a plateau above the Oka, bounded on all sides by scree slopes of steep cliffs; below it, one step lower, stands the Blagoveschenskiy Monastery, and lower still, right by the water, stretch the former Blagoveshchenskaya Sloboda (settlement), the Romodanovskiy Railway Station, a flour mill, and Chernigovskaya Street ^[5][3].

It is easy to confuse the name of a locality with the name of a street. Grebeshok is the whole hill; Grebeshkovsky Otkos Street is only one of its streets, the one that runs along the brow above the Pokhvalinsky Descent. Besides it, the streets of Sorevnovaniya, Yaroslavskaya, and Chernyshevskogo and Kazbeksky Lane lie on Grebeshok; the main landmark of the lane is the mansion of the Bashkirov merchants ^[4][1].

To the north, Grebeshok is cut off from Gremyachaya Gora by a ravine, along the bottom of which the Pokhvalinsky Descent was laid in the 1830s — a road for freight traveling from the Murom–Moscow and Arzamas highways to the yarmarka (trade fair), bypassing the city ^[6]. The ravine and the hill were called Gremyachy after a noisy spring, and the Nizhny Novgorod historian Nikolay Khramtsovsky recorded this distinction as early as the mid-19th century ^[2].

To the southeast, the boundary was another ravine — the Yarilsky, also known as the Gendarme Ravine, which separated "Yarilo's field" from the city ^[7][4]. The clergy house, the merchant gates, and the terrace staircases that connect the local sidewalks have survived to this day; below Grebeshok begins the Bolshie Ovragi district.

The Pokhvalinsky Descent begins near Pokhvalinskaya Street and ends, as stated above, at the square by the Kunavino ferry. It is laid along a ravine known in olden times by the name of Gremyachy: both the ravine and the hill itself bore the name Gremyachy after a spring that flowed in the ravine and thundered — that is, babbled quite loudly

Yarilina Gora

Until the mid-19th century, the hill was often called simply "Yarilo" even in official papers. According to legend, in pagan times a shrine stood here: girls led round dances and chose a handsome young man — a living embodiment of Yarilo, the god of spring, love, and beauty — dressed him up, put a wreath on him, and led him along the hill ^[8][3]. The parishioners of the monastery standing at the foot of the hill disliked such a neighbor, and attempts were made to change the hill's name ^[3].

That this was more than just a legend is evident from Maxim Gorky: in his novella "In the World" he describes the ravine, the field, and the rite of the fiery wheel, which his grandmother told him about ^[7].

The Gendarme Spring ran along the bottom of a deep ravine, descending toward the Oka, and the ravine cut off from the city a field named after an ancient god — Yarilo. On this field, at the Semik holiday, the city's townsfolk held festivities; my grandmother told me that in the years of her youth the people still believed in Yarilo and made sacrifice to him: they took a wheel, wrapped it in tarred tow, and, sending it rolling down the hill, with shouts and songs, watched to see whether the fiery wheel would roll all the way to the Oka. If it did, the god Yarilo had accepted the sacrifice: the summer would be sunny and happy

Monastery land, Minin's yard, and the legend of the landslide

At the beginning of the 17th century, the land "on the hill in the open field" belonged to the Annunciation Monastery. Here, on a "hollow" (empty) site, the monastery's widows' yard and the yards of "newly arrived people" — the monastery's bobyls (landless peasants) and peasants — were built in the 1620s ^[1].

The Nizhny Novgorod local historian Mikhail Chizhov, studying archival documents, concluded that the first yard of Kuzma Minin stood precisely on Grebeshok: by his calculation, on the site of a three-story apartment building built in 1959 at Grebeshkovsky Otkos, 9a ^[4].

According to legend, part of the settlement rising from the Annunciation Monastery collapsed downward in the early 16th century, and the remaining cliffs came to be called Grebeshok. Local historians attribute the account of such a landslide — "the mountain slid down from above over the settlement and buried 150 yards, with the people and all the livestock" — to the neighboring Gremyachaya Gora and to the mid-15th century, when Khan Ulu Muhammad stood outside Nizhny Novgorod; for more detail see Nizhny Novgorod Landslide ^[6].

St. Nicholas Church on Grebeshok

The main loss of Grebeshok was the church that stood almost over the ravine. Officially it was called the Church of the Hodegetria, or of St. Nicholas on Grebeshok: its main altar was consecrated in honor of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria, but Nicholas the Wonderworker was regarded as the people's protector, and the church was simply called St. Nicholas's ^[5][8].

The stone church was built in 1715–1719 "through the efforts of the parish priest Fyodor Fyodorovsky" on the site of the wooden Church of St. Nicholas that burned down in 1715; one of the new church's altars was dedicated to St. Nicholas ^[5]. Two streets took their names from the church — Staro-Nikolskaya and Novo-Nikolskaya — at whose junction it stood ^[8].

The church housed an ancient icon with an unusual title, "He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep"; Archpriest M. Dobrovolsky described it thus: "The icon depicts Christ in the form of a youth reclining on a couch set amid greenery, with the Mother of God and an Angel standing beside Christ, above them the Lord Sabaoth with rays issuing from his lips, and on either side the sun and the moon" ^[5].

Neither a church nor an icon remains: an apartment building stands on the site of the church at 4a Sorevnovaniya Street, and Novonikolskaya was renamed so that the name would recall nothing of the past, becoming Sorevnovaniya Street ^[5].

"The Muravyov Beanpole"

The best-known structure on the Grebeshok stood for less than forty years and vanished more than a century ago. The clock tower was erected here, opposite the yarmarka (trade fair), on the orders of a former Decembrist, Major General Aleksandr Nikolaevich Muravyov, the military governor of Nizhny Novgorod, who ruled the governorate from September 17, 1856 to September 16, 1861 ^[9].

The idea was a generous one: pocket watches were still a luxury, and the governor wanted everyone at the yarmarka to be able to learn the time by glancing across the Oka, and anyone who could not make out the hands would hear the chimes ^[8]. A special building committee was set up for the construction, and the money was raised by obliging every stall at the yarmarka to contribute ten rubles; the contract went to P. E. Bugrov, the founder of the merchant dynasty, and the bells for the chimes were bought from the honorary citizen Olovyanishnikov: 176 poods for 3,008 rubles ^[9].

The idea failed. The three-arshin hands could not be read from the left bank, and the hourly chimes carried for kilometers and irritated the entire city. Contemporaries immediately nicknamed the tower the "Tower of Babel" and the "Muravyov Beanpole" (the second nickname is attributed to the historian M. I. Semevsky), and satirical verses called "Muravyada" began to circulate, later printed in "Russkaya Starina"; the legal historian Yuri Galay quoted in full their passage about the tower ^[9]. The local historian Mikhail Chizhov adds two more reasons to the list: the great distance and the constant haze over the river ^[4].

The building is clumsy, / With clocks on three sides, / Like a hefty peasant woman, / A refuge for crows. / It gives the city / No beauty or benefit at all, / They hope that downhill / In time it will slide away

This tower was built to hold a clock. They thought everyone would be able to see it from the yarmarka. And so they can — but only through a large telescope

Karataev Almshouse

The large four-story building on the steep bank of the Oka, where City Clinical Hospital No. 38 operates today, began as a noble estate. After the reform of 1861, the petty gentry rapidly grew poorer, and on May 31, 1872, at an emergency assembly of the nobility, Mikhail Borisovich Prutchenko — a hereditary nobleman, former governorate marshal of the nobility, and kammerjunker — proposed founding an almshouse and contributed 15,000 rubles toward it; the assembly added another thousand ^[10].

In 1873, the hereditary noblewoman Ekaterina Dmitrievna Karataeva (née Roshtein) bequeathed to the almshouse her estate on the Oka's Grebeshok — a stone house with land, a garden, and all outbuildings. Her husband's brother, Aleksandr Yakovlevich Karataev, took on the task of converting the manor house; with his funds, a church of the Holy Great Martyr Catherine was built at the almshouse. In all, the Karataevs donated 130,000 rubles to the impoverished nobility of Nizhny Novgorod, and on February 3, 1895, an extraordinary assembly of the nobility resolved to name the almshouse the Karataev Almshouse ^[10].

The first eleven residents moved in in 1879. The petitions to the almshouse read like a chronicle of ruin — among them was the petition of the mother of the future pilot Pyotr Nesterov ^[10]. According to an account cited by Mikhail Chizhov, Nesterova had many children, and she was placed in the Bugrov Widows' House ^[4].

As the number of residents kept growing, a new two-story stone building was erected alongside and joined to the old one by an enclosed passage: four two-room apartments for families, twenty separate rooms for single residents, a bright dining hall, and a room for children's games — at a cost of 53,774 rubles. The old Karataev house was thoroughly renovated: a marble ceremonial staircase, a caretaker's lodge, water heating, plumbing, ventilation, and electric lighting in all living quarters, while a house church was set at the junction of the two buildings. There was also a library of more than 1,300 books and a Becker piano bought by subscription ^[10].

After 1917, both buildings were nationalized. During the Great Patriotic War the Naval Preparatory School operated here — its cadets were called "podgoty" — and before and during the war the future hospital building housed a school for junior aviation specialists; later came an agricultural school and party courses. Since 1962 the building has housed City Clinical Hospital No. 38, and since 1967 also a university department ^[10].

Left after the death of my husband, Staff Captain Nikolay Fyodorovich Nesterov, with three young children — Nikolay, aged 8, Petr, aged 3, and my daughter Aleksandra, aged 4 — without any means of support, I have the honor to most humbly petition Your Honor to admit me and my children to the Nobility Shelter

Dachas, Mansions, and the Bashkirovs

Starting in the mid-19th century, dachas, mansions, and income-generating apartment buildings went up on Grebeshok — the spot was prestigious because of its view ^[1]. The most important surviving house is the mansion of Matvey Yemelyanovich Bashkirov at 4 Kazbekskiy Lane: a hereditary honorary citizen, first-guild merchant, and patron of the arts from a dynasty of steamship owners and flour millers, he settled his youngest son here ^[3][11]. On April 26, 2020, the "House of M. E. Bashkirov" was added to the register of cultural heritage sites of regional significance as a building with architectural and artistic, urban-planning, and memorial value; it now contains residential apartments ^[11].

Inside, residents still look after the whitewashed ceilings with stucco molding and the columns that divided the hall into two parts — one for listeners and one for musicians: the Bashkirovs were fond of music, and musical evenings at their house were not unusual ^[5]. The trading house "Yemelyan Bashkirov and Sons" was founded on November 23, 1871, and in November 1891, after the founder's death, the sons split up the firm: Matvey received the mill directly below Grebeshok, Yakov the one in the Zarechye part of the city, and Nikolay the one in Samara ^[5]. It is said that in 1995, while a foundation pit was being dug nearby, the Bashkirovs' family silver was found — about ten kilograms of jewelry, tableware, and a silver ship with a figure of Bashkirov himself; there is no documentary confirmation of this story, and it is known only from residents' accounts ^[3].

From the mill yard under the hill a world of its own unfolded: long corridors of the workers' house, a family behind every door, a shared kitchen with running water — a luxury in a district where water was carried on yokes from street pumps. An old-timer recorded by local historians at the end of the 20th century listed the varieties of Bashkirov flour by heart: first-grade premium "pervach," second-grade "pervach" — the blue one, red "pervach," "pervach repey," "podrukavnaya" flour in four colors, wheat "podsev," and wheat dust ^[5].

By the early 1950s there were only three stone buildings on Grebeshok: residential building No. 12 — the former income-generating apartment building of the merchant Remizov, the Karatayev Shelter, and Secondary School No. 40, which later moved to Varvarskaya Street ^[4]. Everything else was wooden.

Today, according to a local-history guidebook, five sites on Grebeshok are under protection ^[12]:

• house of M. E. Bashkirov — 4 Kazbekskiy Lane ^[12];
• Karataev Shelter, now Hospital No. 38 ^[12];
• residential building at 20 Chernyshevsky Street ^[12];
• residential building at 14 Sorevnovaniya Street ^[12];
• residential building at 13 Yaroslavskaya Street ^[12].

Zhandarmsky Ravine and Maxim Gorky

The ravine that separated Grebeshok from the city had two names — Yarilsky and Zhandarmsky ("Gendarme"). Explanations of the second name differ: Mikhail Chizhov writes of a gendarme post with a barrier gate that stood here in the 19th century ^[4]; a description of the early-century development of these slopes mentions a gendarme settlement with stables and a riding hall ^[6].

A full-flowing stream, fed by springs, ran along the bottom. Nikolay Khramtsovsky left a testimony about its water that Nizhny Novgorod residents like to repeat ^[4]:

clean, light, and pleasant to the taste; it was delivered for the consumption of Empress Catherine II when Her Majesty deigned to be in Nizhny in 1767. Her Majesty found that the water of this spring was in no way inferior to that of the Neva

We boys used to dam the stream and swim in the terribly icy water, arguing about who could last in it the longest

How the ravine disappeared

The slopes of the ravine were built up: a photograph by Andrey Karelin titled "Gendarme Ravine" has survived, in which wooden houses cling to the steep slope "like swallows' nests." All the residents were resettled by the early 1950s, and not a single house remained in the ravine ^[4].

It was in this same stream that the teenage Alyosha Peshkov — the future Maxim Gorky — rinsed laundry; the washerwomen who worked here in the icy water in winter became characters in "My Apprenticeship" ^[7]. Gorky himself lived with his family in Grebeshok for a time in 1898 ^[4]. A local tale, which Chizhov retells from old-timers, derives the writer's very pseudonym from those years — supposedly he got the nickname "Gorky" ("bitter") for his fondness for "gorkaya" (vodka) during meetings with Ivan Rukavishnikov; there is no documentary evidence for this version, and the local historian links the story "The Hermit" to the dugouts that boys stumbled upon in the ravine ^[4].

In 1965, for the twentieth anniversary of Victory, the stream was hidden in pipes, and a narrow road was laid along the bottom of the ravine; in the 2000s a highway to the Metro Bridge was built over it ^[4]. The ravine itself was filled in with earth in the 1960s, part of it was taken up by residential development and Maslyakova Street, and on the surviving section at the intersection with Malaya Pokrovskaya a small park has been laid out, where in 1990 a wooden memorial cross was erected with a plaque for the victims of the Red Terror of 1918–1922 who were shot and buried here ^[8].

Landslides and slope reinforcement

Grebeshok is part of the Oka Slope of Nizhny Novgorod (Окский откос), which is a landslide ledge: the rivers undercut the bank, springs erode the soil from within, and the slope begins to move. Yevgeny Kochurov, a hydrogeologist with Volgageologiya, said that the landslide problem "will fall to our children, and even our great-grandchildren," and that the larger deformations are linked primarily to man-made causes — building on the slopes and the operation of water mains ^[13].

And so it turned out. On the evening of March 18, 2020, on the Pokhvalinsky Descent below Grebeshok, a pedestrian staircase slid down together with the soil and buried the roadway. City Hall named a burst water main in the basement of a vacated, condemned building on Chernyshevsky Street as the cause of the slide — the building was due to be demolished about a week later ^[14]. Two lanes were closed, and the detour was routed via Ilyinskaya, the Zelensky Descent, the Nizhne-Volzhskaya Embankment, and the Kanavinsky Bridge, or via the Metro Bridge and the Molitovsky Bridge ^[15]. On March 19, the soil slid again ^[16].

What followed was classic landslide-control work: excavation of the slid soil, an engineering-geodetic survey and geological investigations, several boreholes in the slope, a pile field, and a retaining wall ^[16]. By the end of April, fifty piles had been installed and a pile cap beam laid on top of them; to restore the slope to its former appearance, the contractor needed about 500 KamAZ truckloads of sand, and the slope was then covered with geogrid, soil, and turf ^[17].

Traffic of passenger cars and trucks was restored about a week after the landslide, and on June 15, 2020, all four lanes were opened and public transport returned to the descent ^[18].

The reinforced belt is already ready, the formwork is 50% installed and the concrete poured; we plan to finish by the end of the week. Then, over the next two weeks, the concrete will gain strength, and the retaining wall will be ready

The Tornado of July 3, 1974

Landslides were not the only thing to strike Grebeshok. On July 3, 1974, a Tornado hit the city, the strongest in a hundred years of observation: a gust of wind reached 48 meters per second. From Gagarin Avenue the vortex descended to the Oka, passed over Strelka, and died down in the meadows across the Volga ^[19].

About a hundred buildings were damaged; the city was left without electricity, and a damaged water tower caused interruptions in the water supply. Moving down toward the Kanavinsky Bridge, the tornado broke the domes and bent the crosses at the Blagoveschensky Monastery, and at Strelka it threw a 240-ton port crane into the river ^[19]. On Grebeshok itself, the vortex knocked down trees — this can be seen in photographs by the Gorky photographer Boris Shemyakin, who was then working at the Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve ^[19].

Viewpoint

People came here for the view. From Grebeshok one can see the whole lower part of the city, Zarechye, the Metro Bridge, the flour mill, Blagoveschenskaya Sloboda, and the Romodanovsky Railway Station ^[3]. The Nikolskaya Church on Grebeshok was photographed in the late 19th century by Andrey Osipovich Karelin — he photographed the Yarmarka from here as well ^[5].

The first "observation deck" here was created by the Muravyov Tower: the only benefit of it that a correspondent for the Yarmarka newspaper could name was the view — to the right Balakhna could be seen, to the left Gorbatov gleamed white ^[9].

the gaze takes in the Oka and the Volga at once, and the whole city lies before you as if from a bird's-eye view, like a living plan

What Is on Grebeshok Today

For a long time the Grebeshkovsky Otkos area was abandoned: no infrastructure, no zones for walking or relaxing — Ilya Lagutin, head of the Nizhegorodsky District administration, called the territory a "headache" ^[20]. A pre-design survey of the site behind building 4A on Sorevnovaniya Street describes a small green area dominated by box elder (ash-leaved maple): the territory is used for walking and dog walking, and its main problems are litter, many hazardous trees, lack of lighting, and a broken network of roads and footpaths ^[1].

Nizhny Novgorod residents chose the slope of the Grebeshkovsky Otkos, together with the Lykova Dam, in a rating vote under the "Formation of a Comfortable Urban Environment" program: it made the list of thirty public spaces for 2022, then, due to a shortage of funding, the list was cut to fifteen and both territories were dropped from it, but at the end of March 2022 the Governor backed all thirty ^[20].

In April 2023, Mayor Yuri Shalabaev announced that the Region's Ministry of Property and Land Relations had concluded a concession agreement for the improvement of the otkos: the concept has been prepared, the road along the edge has been repaired, and the concession, by the city's calculation, will save budget funds ^[21][22].

At the same time, Grebeshok is being built up anew: on Yaroslavskaya Street a six-story club-format residential building with penthouses and underground parking has been completed, and another building was planned on Sorevnovaniya Street ^[20]. And below, at the foot of the hill, people are arguing about the future of the entire embankment: an investor proposed building thirteen-story buildings on the Chernigovskaya Embankment, from the Metro Bridge to the Molitovsky Bridge, instead of the permitted six stories. Ecologist Askhat Kayumov objected that the high bank of the Oka is "simply a beautiful viewpoint and a potentially promising recreational area," while Anna Davydova, an expert of the Ministry of Culture, warned that the historic river panorama would turn "into a forest of high-rises" ^[23].

I am sure that a new waiting space will emerge, both for residents and for tourists. It will connect the Annunciation Monastery, the Fedorovsky Embankment, and the Internationalists Square. In this way, a transit tourist route will be formed

What Gets Confused with What

The name "Grebeshok" is found not only in Nizhny Novgorod, and within the city it is easy to confuse the hill itself with the street and with neighboring hills. A short guide:

• Grebeshok is the whole historic locality, a hill; Grebeshkovsky Otkos Street is only one of its streets, running along the brow above the Pokhvalinsky Descent ^[4][1];
• Gremyachaya Gora is a neighboring hill of the same Dyatlov ridge, with the Pokhvalinsky Descent lying between it and Grebeshok; the legend of a settlement buried by a landslide refers to it, not to Grebeshok ^[2][6];
• Yarilina Gora is the former name of Grebeshok itself, not a separate place ^[1];
• Kamen Grebeshki (also called by the singular form, Grebeshok) is a set of cliffs up to 30 meters high on the left bank of the Chusovaya River in Shalinsky District, Sverdlovsk Region, a natural monument ^[24];
• the recreation center "Grebeshok" is a tourist base in Gorodetsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Region, on the shore of the Gorky Reservoir near the village of Korobovo ^[25].

See also

• Otkos
• Dyatlov Hills
• Bolshie Ovragi
• Pokhvalinskiy Descent
• Bashkirova Estate on Grebeshok
• Nizhny Novgorod Landslide
• Romodanovskiy Railway Station
• Fedorovsky Embankment

Sources

1. cgnn.ru — Nizhegorodgrazhdanproekt (municipal budgetary institution) — historical background and pre-design survey of the area — Pokhvalinsky Descent (Slope of the Grebeshkovsky Otkos) (archive)
2. ipbatman.blogspot.com — Ilya Starkov — an analysis of the names of Nizhny Novgorod's hills with quotations from N. I. Khramtsovsky and Maxim Gorky — Names of the Dyatlov Hills (Nizhny Novgorod) (archive)
3. novation-nn.ru — Novatsii — an essay on the Grebeshkovsky Otkos, the Bashkirov House, and the Muravyovskaya Tower — The Grebeshkovsky Otkos: What You Need to Know About One of Nizhny Novgorod's Most Picturesque Places (archive)
4. dengoroda-nn.ru — Den Goroda. Nizhny Novgorod — an account by local historian Mikhail Chizhov about the Grebeshok, No. 024 (2253), March 11, 2026 — Secrets of the Grebeshok (archive)
5. web.archive.org — "Walks Along the Streets of Nizhny" — a local-history route through the Grebeshok, the Nikolskaya Church, the Bashkirov House, and the Romodanovsky Railway Station (web archive) (archive)
6. milutkin.livejournal.com — A local-history essay on Gremyachaya Gora: the legend of the buried settlement and the construction of the Pokhvalinsky Descent in the 1830s — Corners of Nizhny. Zapochainye. Part V. Gremyachaya Gora (archive)
7. ru.wikisource.org — Wikisource — the text of Maxim Gorky's novella describing the Gendarme Spring and Yarilovo Field — My Apprenticeship (archive)
8. web.archive.org — Youth magazine ILI — an analysis of an old photograph of the Grebeshok, March 24, 2020 (web archive) — The Story of One Photograph: the Gendarme Ravine, the Nikolayevskaya Church, and the Muravyovskaya Tower (archive)
9. web.archive.org — Yuri Galay — an article on the Muravyovskaya Tower based on City Duma and TsANO documents, journal Nizhegorodskaya Starina, No. 9, 2004 (web archive) — "The Tower of Babel" in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
10. web.archive.org — City Clinical Hospital No. 38 — the history of the building, from the Karataeva estate and the nobles' shelter (web archive) (archive)
11. web.archive.org — Center 800 — on the inclusion of M. E. Bashkirov's house in the register of cultural heritage sites, April 26, 2020 (web archive) (archive)
12. autotravel-nn.ru — Guide to the Sights of Nizhny Novgorod Region — a list of protected sites on the Grebeshok — "The Grebeshok" in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
13. KP — Nizhny Novgorod — Komsomolskaya Pravda — an overview of the city's landslide hazard and a chronicle of major landslides — A Landslide? Good Enough! (archive)
14. Kommersant (Volga Region) — on the causes of the landslide and the closure of traffic, March 18, 2020 — Pokhvalinsky Descent Closed Due to Landslide (archive)
15. Vremya N — a live report from the landslide site and detour maps, March 18, 2020 — Photos of the Landslide on the Pokhvalinsky Descent Published (archive)
16. Business News. Time to Earn — on the surveys and the choice of method for reinforcing the slope, March 24, 2020 — Pokhvalinsky Descent in Nizhny Novgorod to Be Reinforced with Piles and a Retaining Wall (archive)
17. domostroynn.ru — Domostroy — the progress of work on the retaining wall according to Deputy Mayor Viktor Sdobnyakov, April 29, 2020 — Retaining Wall Will Protect the Pokhvalinsky Descent from Landslides (archive)
18. nn.rbc.ru — RBC Nizhny Novgorod — on the completion of the descent's restoration, June 2020 — Pokhvalinsky Descent to Fully Reopen to Traffic from June 15 (archive)
19. web.archive.org — NN.ru — photographer Boris Shemyakin's account of the tornado of July 3, 1974, with his photographs, November 20, 2024 (web archive) (archive)
20. GIPERNN — GiperNN — on plans to improve the otkos and the Lykova Dam, with comments by Ilya Lagutin, April 4, 2022 — Grebeshkovsky Otkos and Lykova Dam to Be Improved in Nizhny Novgorod in 2022 (archive)
21. NIA "Nizhny Novgorod" — on the concession agreement, according to Yuri Shalabaev — Grebeshkovsky Otkos in Nizhny Novgorod to Be Improved Under a Concession Agreement (archive)
22. domostroynn.ru — Domostroy — on the prepared concept and the repair of the road along the edge of the otkos, April 14, 2023 — Grebeshkovsky Otkos to Be Improved in the Center of Nizhny Novgorod Under a Concession (archive)
23. Kommersant (Volga Region) — on the dispute over the height of buildings on the Oka bank beneath the Grebeshok — A Bit Higher by the River (archive)
24. uraloved.ru — Uraloved — on the cliffs of the same name on the Chusovaya River, a natural monument of Sverdlovsk Region — Grebeshki (Grebeshok) Rock on the Chusovaya River (archive)
25. mirturbaz.ru — Mir Turbaz — a listing for the recreation center of the same name in Gorodetsky District — Grebeshok Recreation Center (archive)