Myths of the modern urban environment, which, while formally a space organized on strictly rational principles, is in reality saturated with a multitude of irrational phenomena. This is precisely what the very existence and evolution of a whole series of urban legends underscores.

Buildings No. 34 on Pushkina Street, known among locals as the "suicide houses," stand on the site of an Old Believer skete established in the 1870s by Nikolay Bugrov, and of the only cemetery in the city where Old Believers were buried.[1] The Theater Staircase leading to the Drama Theater was built in 1945–1946; contrary to a widespread urban legend, it could not have been erected in time for the visit of Emperor Nicholas II.[1] At the Actors' House (the S.T.D. theater) there is a legend of a ghostly cat that periodically appears on the Small Stage during performances; the story was first published in one of the theater's internal newspapers.[1] The Tainitskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin is associated with a legend of a hiding place concealed beneath it: according to folk tradition, the library of Ivan the Terrible is hidden there, supposedly left by him during his campaign against Kazan; the official version explains the tower's name by a secret underground passage leading toward the Lykova Dam, the last remains of which were discovered in the late 1880s.[1][2] According to the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin museum, the underground passage ran from the tower to the Pochaina River: during sieges it was used to fetch water and to make sorties against the enemy camp; by the nineteenth century the passage was almost entirely destroyed and had been filled in to prevent landslides.[2] One of the best-known Nizhny Novgorod urban legends concerns the Koromyslova Tower of the Kremlin: according to tradition, a townswoman named Alyona, who died during the siege of the city, was buried beneath it; in one version of the legend she was the victim of a ritual burial at the laying of the tower's foundation, in another she fought the enemy heroically with a yoke (koromyslo) and gave the tower its name.[1] The urban legends of Nizhny Novgorod were collected and systematized by the ethnographer Lidiya Senyutkina in the book "Urban Legends of Nizhny Novgorod."[1]

Sources

  1. GIPERNN — Urban Legends of Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
  2. KP — Nizhny Novgorod — Taynitskaya Tower Will Reveal Its Secrets to Nizhny Novgorod Residents (archive)