White Cliffs of ancient sea. Divnogorie is located just 150 km from Voronezh, and from Moscow by car can be reached within 6-8 hours. They are, of course, worth taking to see with your own eyes. Extraordinarily beautiful area, decorated with crisp white rocky ridges resembling a pyramid. Once people affected by overlooking quaint Cretaceous poles, called divas the name – Divnogorie, that has survived to the present day.
Divnogorie is the miracle of nature and man – cave churches and a monastery in Cretaceous rocks, furnished here by hermits. And this is a unique “pantry” of rare plants and insects. Here you can meet representatives of the flora of mountain steppe slopes of Russia and of the Mediterranean, caught here in the warm interglacial period.
Veniamin Petrovich Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, the son of the famous traveler P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, was obsessed with the idea to create a park-like open-air museum. However, the revolution in 1917 prevented the plans, and specialists returned to the idea much later. Only in 1991 natural architectural and archaeological museum was organized here.
Today the museum “Divnogorie” occupies an area of 1,100 hectares. Its territory includes the floodplain of the rivers Tikhaya Sosna (Quiet Pine) and Don, the steep slopes of the indigenous right bank of these rivers, steppe areas with the Cretaceous sediments. By the way, according to the Guinness Book of Records, in the Quiet Pine River 80 years ago was caught the most valuable fish of all time – the sturgeon weighing 1,227 kilograms. That had in the womb 245 kilograms of high-grade caviar, today it would cost 289 thousand dollars. In our time, sturgeon in the river is not found, but there are unique landscape formations, relict vegetation and insects.
Here are the historical and architectural monuments nationwide. Most valuable – chalk cave church of middle of the XVII century and the archaeological complex of monuments of IX-X centuries. The settlement of Saltovo-Mayak culture tribes lived here in the IX-X centuries, dependent on the Khazar Khanate, they spoke Alan language.
On the same territory of the reserve coexist side by side miracles of nature and man – cave churches and a monastery in Cretaceous rocks, furnished here by hermits
Translated from the article by Irina Jackiewicz, Photos: Oleg Glebov.