Butterfly hunting

“Digne in southern France. Ragusa in Dalmatia, Sarepta on the Volga - famous, expensive places known to every entomologist, where they caught small evil spirits, to the surprise and fear of the aborigines, strange people who came from afar - these are places famous for their fauna.
V.N. Nabokov. Pilgrim.

In 1894, 1,700 people lived in the colony. Of these, 1102 were colonists, 222 Russians, 133 Kalmyks, 39 Tatars. By 1912, the number of residents increased to 3096. The Sarepta volost of the Tsaritsynsky district of the Saratov province included, in addition to the volost center, the Schönbrunn farm, Chapurnikovskaya gully, Sareptsky island with a total population of 90 people.

Those heading to Sarepta along the Tomsk Highway, from Tsatsa and Chapurnikov, had a picturesque view of the colony. The ridge of Ergeninsky hills, stretching from Tsaritsyn along the Volga coast, as if yielding to the waters of Sarpa, at Sarepta turned sharply to the south, merging at the horizon with the windswept Kalmyk steppe. The hillsides and lands adjacent to the colony were occupied by apple, peach, plum, cherry orchards and extensive vineyards.

In 1901, only one bush of “white Hungarian” grapes in V. Kreter’s garden produced 6 pounds of berries. In good years, up to 5 thousand wagons of agricultural products were loaded at the Sarepta station, mainly watermelons, which here were “almost the size of an arm’s length and about a pound in weight.” On Sundays, carts from surrounding villages and even Tsaritsyn came to Sarepta, since the colony was connected with the district by an “excellent steppe road.” From Svetly Yar and Raigorod - the Volga Russian villages closest to the colony - they brought fresh and salted fish, beluga and sturgeon caviar from 12 to 20 rubles per pood, from large and small Chapurniki, where the Tatars lived, - mustard raw materials and bread, from Tsatsa and Oak Ravine, connecting the colony with the Kalmyk lands and Kuban - watermelon honey and cattle.

Trade usually took place on Church Square. Here there was a church with a belfry and a clock, a parsonage, the House of Single Sisters, occupied by a real school, the House of Brothers, where a shelter for lonely old people was located, Scheierman's inn, the trading houses of Goldbach and Becker, a pharmacy, a representative office of the Singer and Co. campaign, the volost government . All buildings were painted pink or dark blue, tiled, and had running water. Water flowed from the hills through wooden pipes coated with asphalt varnish on the outside. In addition, the community financed the maintenance of captages - oak frames placed at the places where the springs came to the surface, one of which stood in the middle of a small garden laid out in the square. “Sarepta is a German colony, distinguished by its extraordinary cleanliness and improvement,” wrote the “Guide to the Volga and Caspian Sea” in 1903. “Clean houses, powerful streets, an abundance of greenery make Sarepta extremely cozy in appearance.”

Most of the Sareptan colonists lived their quiet, measured lives, inconspicuous to the prying eye, in work and contemplation of the results of their labor, in prayers, music, since there was a piano in almost every house, and books. Events here were considered to be cases like the one described on the pages of the Saratov Leaflet newspaper in 1880: “A recent incident forced the entire Sarepta society to speak. One young Sarepta woman, taking advantage of her husband’s absence, went to Tsaritsyn and brought back a young man who stayed with her for two days. But as luck would have it, the husband unexpectedly showed up and found the ladies' man in his apartment. At first he did not find out about the presence of the uninvited guest, but the smell of a cigar, galoshes in the hall and a man's hat on the table forced him to start searching through the rooms. Having discovered the womanizer, the offended husband, after a brief explanation, entered into hand-to-hand combat with him, but was defeated, because his opponent turned out to be more well-fed. However, the latter, in order to avoid further development of the scandal, hastily retreated, leaving an umbrella and galoshes at the battle site. The public opinion caused by this event was expressed, however, in a rather practical sense, namely: that if the visits of the womanizer continue, then the offended husband will eventually build up a solid collection of umbrellas and galoshes and may open a shop.”

Calling Sarepta an “oasis of well-fed contentment” and an “economic kultuk” - a sand-covered bed of the Volga with no exit, the authors of numerous newspaper articles and essays dedicated to the colony, nevertheless recognized that the descendants of the same settlers who once walked to Russia “on foot from Lübeck... reached, in some cases, a million-dollar fortune.” Trading house “Heirs of I.K. Glicha" together with the "Heirs of Knobloch" in 1884 sold mustard and mustard powder for 2 million rubles. In conditions of fierce competition - and then there were 8 mustard factories in the Tsaritsyn district - the Glich factories and the Tsaritsyn trading house "Brothers Voronin and Co" annually threw over 150 thousand pounds of mustard oil and 200 thousand pounds of mustard powder onto the market. Products of the trading house “Heirs of I.K. Glicha" were sold in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Astrakhan, Saratov. In 1913, 19.9 thousand pounds of Sarepta mustard were exported to Germany, 11.1 thousand to China, 10.5 thousand to Denmark, 5.1 thousand pounds to France, as well as to England, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey. , Persia. In 1911, the annual turnover of the Glich plant was 162 thousand rubles with 70 workers, and the Knobloch plant was 45 thousand with 26 workers. In 1910, the centenary of the Glich plant was solemnly celebrated. Plant workers were provided with free medical care, and they were also not charged for kindergarten.

Beer produced at the G. Krautwurst plant was bottled and oak barrels and sent to Tsaritsyn, Saratov, and Astrakhan. In 1905, Sarepta, together with the villages of Dubovka, Rudnya, Elan and Nikolaevskoye, was equated to cities in terms of the drinking trade period.
Infused with three dozen steppe herbs, including calamus, sage, cinnamon, lemon balm, thyme, mint, anise, fireweed and ginger, reaching an 80-degree strength, Karl Langerfeld's Sarepta balsam conquered the Paris World Exhibition in 1867, receiving a gold medal there. medal.

Honey gingerbread baked by Andrei Mekkel received a commendation at an exhibition of beekeeping items in St. Petersburg in 1893 and a gold medal at an exhibition in Rostov-on-Don in 1910.

There were also two sawmills in the colony, owned by industrialist V. Rudakov from Svetly Yar and Karl Bauer. A native of Sarepta, Bauer was the owner of both a candle and soap factory, constantly expanding production. At his sawmill, the number of workers increased from 28 in 1911 to 70 in 1917. In addition, the trading house of brothers P. and K. Bauer owned a 4-story steam mill.

The brick-tile factory of Wilhelm Niedenthal, the tannery of V. Rudakov, where 88 workers worked, the plant of M. Reichman for the production of masts and ropes, the sausage shop of G. Geier, the carpentry workshop of E. Loshader, the forge of the Gaun family - a very incomplete list of small enterprises, providing the Sareptans with everything they needed. Two dozen shops and shops selling flour and textiles (owner P. Bauer), iron and hardware (owner O. Lukstedt), groceries (owner V. Mert), again flour and textiles (owner W. Goldbach). But “there are no public stores for refilling bread, because you can have the bread you need at any time from the local grain merchants.”

Copies of the Highest Letters of Gift with gold seals and monograms of Empress Catherine II, Emperors Paul I, Alexander I, and Nicholas I belonging to the community were kept in the church. Administration of the colony was concentrated in the hands of the descendants of the Sarepta pioneers, who called themselves “Sareptans.” The remaining residents of Sarepta of German nationality were called “colonists.”

In addition to mustard and beer, Sarepta gingerbread, Sarepta was known for its entomologists. A native of Gerngut, Sarepta teacher Hugo Christopher (1831 - 1894) traveled throughout Northern Persia and Transcaucasia, Central Asia and the Far East, Abkhazia and Adjara, supplying butterflies to the collection of the grandson of Nicholas I, Grand Duke N.M. Romanova. Most of Hugo Christopher's personal collection came to England after his death and is now kept in the British Museum of Natural History. In 1880, the Moscow Society of Natural Scientists received “from F.F. Christophe of Sarepta” types of butterflies he described, which were subsequently lost.

Native Sareptian Alexander Becker (1818 – 1901) described about 800 species of plants hitherto unknown to science, discovered by him on the slopes of Ergeni, earning “a permanent livelihood by supplying herbariums and entomological collections to Russian and foreign museums, learned societies and universities,” wrote R. Viren in the obituary “In Memory of Becker”, published in the “Russian Entomological Review” in 1901. “Parcels with insects from Becker almost annually arrived at the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences; the collected materials were used to establish many taxa of the B. Gerhard species group.”

Archaeologist and Sanskritologist August Hermann Franke, who visited the colony in 1914 and left memories of that “Through Central Asia to Indian Captivity,” wrote that a Georgian prince and two Englishmen who came to Sarepta “for the purpose of hunting butterflies” stayed at the hotel with him ": "When I once accompanied Mr. Albert H. Jones on a butterfly hunt, I said that I had heard that the beautiful club-whiskered butterfly, in respect of which England was superior to the continent, was on the other side (the English Channel, i.e. . in the British Isles - S.Ts.) is almost completely exterminated. Mr. Jones confirmed that in fact this is the case and that the destroyed species belongs to the so-called. "fire birds" We are talking about a relative of the irgus butterfly, a rather large butterfly of a sparkling red color. “It is wonderful,” continued Mr. Jones, “that I intend just today to find here, on the marsh bank of Sarpa, the closest relative of the butterfly that was destroyed in England.” Unfortunately, August Hermann Franke left the colony the next day without knowing whether Mr. Jones had found the “firebird” on the banks of the Sarpa.

In addition to butterflies, in the vicinity of the colony, local antiquities lovers found the bones of a rhinoceros, a “Greek coin of the 2nd century BC.” (Chronicle Becker during garden work), an iron Sarmatian sword (now in the Sarepta Museum), an iron helmet of Persian work (sent by K. Bauer to the Berlin Museum), three stone women from the Sarepta mounds are now one in Saratov, two in Sarepta in Glich’s garden,” wrote academician F. Ballod in 1923.

In 1903-04, the Finnish scientist G. Ramstedt and the Russian orientalist A. Rudnev worked in Sarepta, making observations of the peculiarities of the speech of local Kalmyks... whose speech was not yet clogged with newfangled word formations gleaned from newspapers.” The result of the trip was the works of A. Rudnev “Kalmyk Songs” and “Kalmyk Tales”, “Kalmyk-German Dictionary” by G. Ramstedt, as well as a collection of Tibetan herbs donated by the learned Sarepta pharmacist Hugo Christoph.
On June 13, 1904, Sarepta was visited by the Saratov governor Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin. “I’m sorry that I can’t show you and the children Sarepta,” he wrote to his wife Olga Borisovna, born in Neidgard. – This is a corner of ancient Westphalia, entirely transferred to our steppes. A village of stone houses, all paved, with running water, all with gardens and vineyards. The volost elder, clerk, and volost judges are European educated. The old volost clerk enthusiastically plays his improvisations on the piano. Order - nothing to complain about. At the same time, there is complete correctness - everything is in Russian. At a modest meal, when their amateur orchestra played the anthem, all the Germans loudly sang “God Save the Tsar.” Despite his good manners and education, the foreman at his factory showed us in front of us how he makes pots, and the chairman of the volost court in his bakery brought me some gingerbread he made.”

In 1903, the Sarepta community turned to the Tsaritsyn district police officer with a request to abolish the post of police officer in the colony. On January 1, 1904, the police station in Sarepta was liquidated “as unnecessary.”