Tales from different expeditions

There lived two masters of Soviet archeology, who were considered almost deities in the field of studying Staraya Ladoga, Ancient Novgorod, Pskov, Izborsk, in a word - the Principality of Novgorod.

One was called Kamenev, the other was Kirpichnikov. And they made a bet. Whoever is the first to come across a standing birch bark letter that season, puts down a box.

Kamenev was a meticulous and painstaking man, Kirpichnikov was impetuous, with incredible intuition. One did his job without leaving the archives for days, the other relied on an almost animal instinct.

Both are recognized luminaries and masters.

And so Kamenev, after spending the next six months in laboratories, archives and museum collections, from Leningrad to Arkhangelsk and Kargopol, took his team to the next excavation site. They identified a new, unexcavated place; Kamenev was almost certainly sure that a previously unknown settlement would be found there, lost for centuries, at a depth of three to four meters, on the way from the Varangians to the Greeks. They studied documents, chronicles and lists all winter and spring. Conducted a thorough preliminary reconnaissance. They figured out the place, they brought the camp. They removed the turf and went through the cultural layer plowed up by centuries of peasant labor. And we came across some semblance of the remains of a wooden wall.

They spent a week tending two rotten, rotten logs with sweepers and tweezers, and birch bark was discovered in the gap between them. Kamenev suddenly realized that he had won the bet. He not only won the bet, he won fame - he discovered a previously unknown ancient Russian city. It was both fame and work for several, perhaps many, years to come. But at that moment he thought about the bet and the box. With trembling hands and two tweezers, Kamenev slowly, like a feather, released a piece of old, grooved, torn birch bark, dropped it, and annoyedly grabbed the tweezers.

The team—thirty sweaty, rugged, sophisticated men, a few excited women, a couple of student interns—all huddled around his shoulders. This find contained not only a year of their labor, but also perhaps the meaning of their lives for many years to come. Kamenev turned the reverent scroll towards himself, and the team read three words written in beautiful monastic script of the twelfth century: “Greetings from Kirpichnikov.”