Purgasovo Gorodishche, Purgasovo Gorodishche (Erzya: «Purgazon' oshpando»), «Kladovaya Vershina» (Erzya: «Kaznen' prya», «Utomprya») — an archaeological site of the Iron Age and Early Middle Ages near the selo of Polyanki (Republic of Mordovia).

Located on a promontory formed by two ravines.

On the open side — two defensive earthworks 1.8–2 m high, with ditches. The platform measures 75 m in length and up to 35 m in width.

The name («Purgazon' oshpando») is apparently connected to the name of Purgaz.

Mentioned in 17th-century documents (1628, 1630): «…from Purgasovsky gorodishche along the ravine Arge…» (Arge ravine = Orgodema latko?)

What stands near Polyanki

The site that has come to be known as Purgasovo Gorodishche lies two kilometers to the east of the selo of Polyanki in the Temnikovsky District of Mordovia, and eight kilometers to the north of Purdoshki, in the Yuva ravine between the head of the Arga ravine and the Kaftar river. It was discovered in 1945 by an expedition of the Mordovian Scientific Research Institute led by Pyotr Stepanov; local residents called the place «Klady» and «Kladovaya Vershina» — in Erzya, «Kaznen' prya».[1]

During the survey, forty-nine pottery sherds and many animal bones were collected, and the gorodishche was classified as a site of the Gorodetsky type with mat-impressed ceramics. Stepanov himself wrote that there were no grounds for attributing the construction of the gorodishche to Purgaz, who lived in the early 13th century. Stationary excavations conducted by Vladimir Ledyaykin in 1971 confirmed the Gorodetsky culture and pushed the site back to the second half of the first millennium BC — that is, more than a thousand years before the inyazor (Erzya prince).[1]

The dispute over the name

There are two gorodishches known in scholarship as Purgasovy. The second is the Ponetayevskoye, in Shatkovsky District: a circular platform one hundred and twenty-seven meters in diameter, a ring earthwork with ditches, an arc-shaped embankment more than a kilometer long, and an almost empty cultural layer — four fragments of hand-built vessels. The name became attached to it from Stepanov's personal archive.[1]

In 2021, Aleksandr Inzhutov, director of the Shatkovsky museum, and Moscow researcher Evgeniy Paradeev demonstrated that neither of the previously proposed sites is the true Purgasovo Gorodishche: in seventeenth-century documents, that name belonged to the Sarov hillfort. Bills of sale by the Tereberdeev murzas, dated 31 January 1628 and 7 April 1630, describe a boundary "from the Purgasovsky hillfort along the ravine of the Arga to the Alatyrskaya watershed," while a cadastral survey book of the 1620s mentions "the Kirmalskoy fishery tract on the Satis River at the Purgasev hillfort."[1]

The name became garbled in successive copies: Purgasovo turned into Barsovo, then Borisovo, then Baysovo. The culprit was the Moscow fire of May 1626, which destroyed the archive of the Kazan Palace chancellery; from that point on, land records were copied from copies. By the eighteenth century the hillfort was simply called Staroye ("the Old One"), and later a legend grew up around it — a story of a Golden Horde city called Saraklych, conveniently useful to the monastery in its land disputes.[1]

The Sarov Hillfort

The city that seventeenth-century documents called Purgasovo is impressive in scale: forty-four hectares, four lines of earthen ramparts, a population of up to five thousand — the third largest hillfort in Nizhny Novgorod Region by area, after Gorodets and Nizhny Novgorod itself. The ramparts stand between three and a half and five and a half metres tall in different sections; the ditch is about two metres deep and fifteen to twenty metres wide. The fourth, eastern line stretched for nearly one and a half kilometres and survived into the 1950s.[2][3]

Excavations conducted by Nikolay Gribov in 1993–1995, covering 375 square metres, uncovered dwellings, production structures, and seven separate hearths. Among the finds were thirty-six bronze sülgame (fibula-type brooches), padlocks, traces of lead, copper, and bronze casting, a slate spindle whorl of Kievan workmanship, and ceramics of Bulgar type. The city perished in the early thirteenth century, destroyed by military assault.[3]

Excavations by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2018 opened more than fifteen hundred square metres — the largest dig at the site to date. Three of several dwellings had burned; inside one of the structures lay charred human remains in no anatomical order, mixed together with animal bones.[4]

Purgaz's Volost and Nizhny Novgorod

The boundaries of Purgaz's volost have been disputed since the mid-nineteenth century: some scholars placed it in Temnikovsky Uyezd on the right bank of the Moksha, others nearer the Murom borderlands, and still others in the northwest of the Erzya lands. Vladimir Martyanov, writing in 1976, drew its limits as follows: the Tyosha to the north and east, the Alatyr and Moksha to the south, the Oka to the west — and identified these lands as predominantly Erzya.[1]

On 14 January 1229, Grand Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich of Vladimir, together with his brother Yaroslav, his nephews, and the Prince of Murom, entered Purgaz's volost: they burned grain, ruined fields, slaughtered livestock, while the Mordva withdrew into forested strongholds. In April of the same year, Purgaz advanced on Nizhny Novgorod, was repulsed by the townspeople, burned the Monastery of the Holy Mother of God and a church outside the city walls, and withdrew, taking his dead with him. Shortly afterward, Puresh's son, with Cuman allies, defeated his army, and the inyazor himself barely escaped. The fortress at the mouth of the Oka had stood for eight years.[1]

By the thirteenth century, Mordva settlements and burial grounds in the region between the Moksha and the Tyosha ceased to exist — along with the Sarov hillfort.[5]

See also

Sources

  1. academia.edu — Inzhutov A. A., Paradeev E. I. Purgasovo Gorodishche / Sarovskoye Gorodishche. Issues of Historical and Ecological Regional Studies. Arzamas: NNSU branch, 2021. Pp. 4–33
  2. ngsarov.ru — Valeriya Aleksandrova. The Sarovskoye Gorodishche, or An Almost Detective Story About Ancient Ramparts and Ditches. "Novy Gorod," Sarov, November 28, 2024 (archive)
  3. sarpust.ru — Gribov N. N. Sarovskoye Gorodishche (Based on Archaeological Excavation Materials from 1993–1995). Sarov: "Sarovskaya Pustyn," 1996 (archive)
  4. archaeolog.ru — Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Research at the Sarovskoye Gorodishche in 2018, December 4, 2018 (archive)
  5. cyberleninka.ru — Zeleneyev Yu. A., Zelentsova O. V. Medieval Mordva According to Archaeological Data. Volga Region Archaeology, 2012 (archive)