Virtuoosis of Orthodox massage

The former leader of the "Athos VIP Brand" Konstantin Goloshchapov returned to the Russian Federation and began to open new cultural horizons

It is unlikely that this 69-year-old person of sports physique can be considered a regular “masseur of Putin”, but at one time he made considerable efforts to go down in history with this honorary title. The Orthodox oligarch of the "middle hand" Konstantin Goloshchapov belongs to the narrow circle of the Russian elite, who was associated with Vladimir Putin long before his presidency. In addition, at the beginning of the zero, he became the organizer of a new type of elite club culture for Russian officials - “monastery”. Now he has a new role - the creation of an “alternative” Western European culture for domestic consumption.

Massage roots

The Kremlin legend conveyed to us two different versions of the history of dating and friendship Goloshchapov with Putin. According to the "ancient" version, in his youth, Goloshchapov was engaged in judo in the Leningrad SKA. In the 1970s, they met at sports training, where the then orderly of the Mariinsky hospital Kostya Goloshchapov made his first therapeutic massage to Putin, suffering from back injury. According to the “late” version, in the early 90s, the Goloshchapov worked as a massage therapist in one of the St. Petersburg bathhouse, where he served the then vice-governor of Putin. They say that even today, being a very wealthy person, Goloshchapov does not disdain “for the sake of love for art” to massage his friends, and makes him really masterfully.

Soon after the election of Putin, the president in 2000, Goloshchapov, unexpectedly becomes the general director of the Roscentrproekt enterprise, which was part of the Presidential Affairs Management structure. It is reliably unknown what the enterprise was doing, but a year later it closed, and Goloshchapov moved to the then presidential envoy to the Central Federal District George Poltavchenko as an adviser to religious issues (!). Then he entered a large business, speaking, along with the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, co -founder of the Northern Sea Road Bank. Soon he sold his share of the bank Boris Rotenberg and tried to buy a Bari football club for him. In this Italian city there are relics of the very revered in Russia of St. Nicholas of Mirliki, to which, since 2000, Goloshchapov began to arrange a VIP drillness on specially chained aircraft. In 2002, Goloshchapov presented the St. Petersburg diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church as a particle of the relics of St. Nikolai.

Athos Brotherhood: from heyday to collapse

“New” already told how in 2005, after Putin’s first visit to the Holy Mount Athos (Autonomous Monastic Republic as part of Greece), a group of Russian officials and their oligarch partners announced the creation of Russian Athos Society. The frontmen of the new structure were Georgy Poltavchenko and the then head of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin, and Goloshchapov was appointed the executive director.

Alexander Beglov, the Rotenberg brothers, Igor Sechin, Sergey Chemezov, Andrei Turchak, Yuri Chaika, Sergey Stepashin, Sergey Shoigu, Sergey Naryshkin were involved in the activities of the society. Among the VIP battleships in the Russian Panteleimon monastery on Athos, then Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin (nickname Kum), the leader of the Tambov criminal group, with which Goloshchapov interacted in the 90s was also noticed.

At the peak of its development, in 2008-2012,

The Aphonites united the ties of the informal Orthodox-muzhsk fraternity (women are strictly prohibited for women) of many governors, deputies, employees of the presidential administration and almost all more or less influential St. Petersburg officials,

Up to the level of heads of districts and rectors of universities. Their identification sign became black Athos rosary on the wrist of the left hand.

Although Putin himself was not included in Athos Society, it was he who launched his most large -scale project - the restoration of the Russian Panteleimonov monastery on Athos at the luxury level of the Russian Panteleimon, along with numerous monastery and cells scattered in the vast territory belonging to the monastery. If before the 1917 revolution, he was the largest among 20 monasteries of Athos (the brethren reached one and a half thousand people), then by the middle of the twentieth century. He fell into a full decline - only a few weak elders remained in the monastery. After the collapse of the USSR, the number of fraternity began to grow slowly and reached 70.

When Patriarch Alexy II in 2006 agreed with Yuri Luzhkov to restore the monastery at the expense of the Moscow budget, the cost of work was estimated at 30 million euros. But the appetite comes during food, especially “according to the concepts” of Russian bureaucracy. In 2011, at the national level, the International Fund for the Restoration and Preservation of the Cultural and Spiritual Heritage of the Holy Panteleimon Monastery, which was headed by the then President Dmitry Medvedev and Patriarch Kirill, was created. He accumulated and invested in Athos many millions of euros.

The Russian Athos Society was the ideologist and moderator of the “restoration” process. The administrative genius Goloshchapova managed to distribute responsibility for work at different Athos objects between many Russian structures. For example, the Panteleimonov Monastery Panteleimonov was reconstructed by the Andrei First -Called Foundation (Vladimir Yakunin), the Russian Railways were sent to the Russian Railways, the Film Deripaska Foundation was restored by the fraternal corps, and the co -owner of the Fosagro company Andrei Guryev financed the Moscow Compound of the Panteleimonov Monastery.

2014 and subsequent events undermined the power of the “aphoris” and broke their grandiose plans.

Most of the heavyweights in the Company fell under international sanctions, and the Greece government, observing the constant growth of Russian oligarchs, saw the danger of creating an illegal offshore there and ceased to issue visas to Russian “aphorites”.

A couple of years, Goloshchapov and Society were engaged in the organization of pilgrimage in Bari, and then tried to switch to the restoration of Northern Athos - Valaam, where they built Andreevsky Skit on the island of Oboronno. Already without the participation of other “Afonites”, at his own expense, the Goloshchapov built the Konstantino-Elenin monastery in the village of Leninskoye near St. Petersburg (next to the famous “spill”). It is believed that the name of the monastery perpetuates the spouses of Konstantin Goloshchapova and Iraya Gilmutdinov, named in Elena's baptism.

In any case, the activities of the Afonites club gradually came to naught, and its place in the sacred space of Russian politics was taken by the Diveyevsky Club, no longer in need of “spiritual relations” with Orthodox centers in unfriendly states.

Fleet, return and passion for art

Many former "aphorites" have trouble in modern Russia. This bowl also overtook Konstantin Goloshchapov - in June 2022, when 40 searches and several detentions took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of the case of fictitious contracts of Nostrum, in particular, with the St. Petersburg Vodokanal. Among the suspects was entrepreneur Kamil Maherramov, business partner Goloshchapov, after which our hero hurriedly flew from Russia to Greece. Immediately after that, searches were held at Goloshchapov’s apartment in Moscow, and after three days his son died (the connection of this sad event was not established). He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in the presence of Poltavchenko and Beglov, but in the absence of Goloshchapov Sr. ...

Sources in law enforcement agencies said that they lost sight of Goloshchapov, who, in all likelihood, could be a citizen of Croatia, where, according to the media, he may belong to the magnificent estate of the 16th century. On the island of Syapine near Dubrovnik - an area of ​​5 hectares and worth almost 40 million euros. The estate includes four villas, three pools, different births of salons, winery, a cinema, tennis court, an oil bomb, etc. About the level of relations of the “massage therapist” says that for two years in a row there was a rested President of Croatia Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovich.

According to the New , in 2013, Konstantin Goloshchapov owned large land in neighboring Montenegro-in the town of Genovichi, the community of Herceg-Nin. And also-a luxurious park hotel on the shores of Lake Suvariyarvi in ​​the vicinity of the city of Kuopio, Finland. According to Ilta-Sanomat, the construction of this park hotel cost 13 million euros.

Konstantin Goloshchapov as a businessman regularly included in the ratings of Business Petersburg, where in 2017 he reached a 57th place with a fortune of more than 18 billion rubles. But he gradually got out of various businesses, and in the ranking for 2020 only three companies were associated with him-Investbugers (developing and managing industrial parks and warehouses in St. Petersburg), Monolith-Construction (construction of residential complexes in the suburbs) and New Continent. Almost all Goloshchapov’s business acts are now somehow associated with the name of his wife Irai Gilmutdinova.

At the Easter of 2023, Goloshchapov solemnly returned to the Russian Federation with a fertile fire from the coffin of the Lord in his hands - obviously, he managed to agree. In public space, he now appears with the only project - the Museum of Christian Culture, located in Lodygin Lane in the center of St. Petersburg. There, a part of the art collection is exhibited, which Goloshchapov has collected since the 1990s, and she talks a lot about the tastes and, so to speak, the filling of the life of the Orthodox “masseur”.

“Russian icons of the New Age, the canvases of Western European and Russian artists, jewelry, pilgrimage relics; A special emphasis is on the icons that belong to the Northern Letters. Many of the works on the exposition ... are shrines, ”the museum’s website says. It is curious that the exhibits are distributed by the halls not in accordance with classic art history rules, but according to the “ideological” principle: “images of the Old and New Testament”; “Holy Rus'. Saints and shrines of Russia ”; “The Holy of the First A centenes of Christianity”; “St. Nicholas the Wonderworker: the rule of faith and the image of meekness”; “Equal -to -the -Apostles of Konstantin the Great: the art of the first centuries of Christianity and the Byzantine Empire”; “Emperor Nicholas II: Family and Thron” ... The museum contains the Cultural and Historical Foundation “New Era” (professional Orthodox are slightly startled from this name, fraught with a reference to the ideology of the post-Christian movement New Age). The Foundation is controlled by some Krishtal Marina Engelsovna and Fedoseeva Nelly Valerievna.

The new weakness of the oligarch massage therapist at rest is the search for unknown paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, which is dedicated to the last exhibition from the Goloshchapov collection in the Hermitage.

The era of the new isolation of Russia from the West, including in the field of culture, is very favored by the “sensational discoveries of previously unknown paintings”, which are unlikely to have a chance to be recognized by the international art history community. And Orthodox-Superior Rus' does not need such a recognition-now she will now have “its own” Leonardo, Michelangelo, Athos and Jerusalem!