B. M. Matveev A Tour Through Sestroretsk. Sestroretsk. A bird’s-eye view. - http://sestroretsk.info/news/3024- fotorelaks-sestroreck- podpischiki-ssestroreck-s-vysoty-2000m To see all or almost all showplaces in Sestroretsk in one day, one needs to come to this St. Petersburg’s suburb early in the morning on a suburban electric train from St. Petersburg-Finlyandsky railway station. Of course, you can drive in your own car. A car will allow considerably reducing the trip time, but will deprive you of the joy of an hours-long walk in the fresh air. Besides, a lot worth your attention will surely fly by. Many interesting details will be left unseen, with no time to think them through. In both cases, the most important thing is nice weather. We recommend you to start your introductory tour by getting off at Razliv station. A little right of the platform starts 2nd Poperechnaya Street which runs into 4th Tarkhovskaya Street. After reaching it, you need to turn left and then right to Yemelyanova Street. 1 Here lies the famous Saray Museum where soviet tourists used to be brought by buses from every corner of the Soviet Union back in the day. Nowadays, the museum is visited in an orderly manner by the local children during the school studies period. Which is a pity, since there is much interesting to see and learn at the Saray and nearby. The Saray Museum. A photo dated 05.03.2017. 2 A sculpture of V. I. Lenin at the Saray Museum A photo dated 05.03.2017. The territory east of Razliv station limited by the railroad from the west, by 3rd Poperechnaya Street from the south, and by the Sestroretsk Razliv Lake from the east and north is a unique reserved place where old log cabins with windows decorated with carved frames built mostly in the last quarter of the XIX century still remain. Each year, their number decreases, but more and more architectural masterpieces appear, barely visible behind the tall stone fences. There is very little place to approach the bank of Sestroretsk Razliv here, since new real estate developers are particularly attracted by the waterside territories. 3 4 The old houses of Sestroretsk locals near the Saray Museum. A photo dated 05.03.2017. In 1868, an enormous fire took place in Sestroretsk: within several hours, all that was left from most of the buildings was a pile of burning wreckage; even the cemetery with all its crosses and the church had burnt down. No more than 50 houses had remained in the whole settlement. In order to 5 avoid the reoccurrence of this tragedy, which had happened due to the crowding of wooden buildings, after the fire it was decided to expand the land lots for private housing. According to the verdict of the rural community as of August 18, 1898, only 320 house owners (out of 532) chosen by lot had been given land lots within the territory of the 33 burnt blocks of the settlement. The rest 219 homeless fire victims received land lots in Novye Mesta (New Places) marked off to the north of the former limits of the settlement along Vyborgskaya Road. These are the places that have endured to a considerable degree to this day within the blocks adjacent to the Razliv station between Poperechnaya and Tarkhovskaya streets. Even today, many houses are inhabited by the descendants of Sestroretsk gunsmiths who had built them in the seventies of the XIX century. After taking a walk though Poperechnaya and Tarkhovskaya streets, return to the station where several nearby cafes and stores will help you satisfy your hunger and thirst. The street named after famous Sestroretsk gunsmith S.I. Mosin1, which they are located on, is also a part of the “post-fire” layout and real estate development of the town. It also has several remaining old houses from the late XIX century, but they are mostly rebuilt to a great extent. After walking down this street, you will end up on a dam that separates Zavodskoy Basin from the Vodoslivnoy Channel at the drop point. By the late XVIII century, irreversible large-scale alterations had occurred in the dune terrain to the south of Sestroretsk. The easily eroded soil in this area as well as unreliability of the waterside structures combined with their ineffective maintenance had led to the forming of a wide and deep hollow coming from Zavodskoy Basin directly to the cove located in the south-eastern part of Dubkovskaya Spit. Some maps of the first half of the XVIII century picture a short creek at the location of this hollow flowing from the western slope of the sand ridge and ending in the swampy waterside lowland. The bed of this creek was later repeatedly expanded and deepened with the flow of water breaking from Sestroretsk Lake during spring floods. The first major outbreak on the right (western) bank of Zavodskoy Basin happened “near the dam” in 1756, during which some factories had been completely torn down (including the mint built under the plant in 1752 for recoining old money) while others were significantly damaged by strong water pressure. 1 Sergei Ivanovich Mosin (1849 – 1902) is a Russian engineer and arms production organizer, a Major General of the Russian Army. Mosin had developed his first internal magazine-fed rifles in 1853. For example, he modified the Berdan rifle by attaching an eight-round magazine to it. In 1899, Mosin offered a 3-line caliber (7.62 mm) rifle, based on his own previously designed single-shot one, for a contest. On April 16, 1891, Emperor Alexander III approved of the prototype crossing out the word “Russian”, so the rifle was ordered into production under the name of “3-line rifle M1891”. The production began in 1892 at Tula, Izhevsk and Sestroretsk arms plants. The original design of the rifle had been altered in the process of production and usage already within the first few years after it was put into commission. For his work, S.I. Mosin was given the colonel rank. On April 21, 1894, Chairman of the Admission Board of the Tula Arms Plant Colonel S. I. Mosin was appointed the head of the Sestroretsk Arms Plant. In 1900, the 3-line rifle M1891 received the Grand Prize of Exposition Universelle in Paris. It had remained in service in the Red Army from the moment it was created and until the end of the Great Patriotic War. After the war, the rifles remained in military schools. A considerable number of rifles was handed over to DOSAAF and used for gunnery training and basic military training. 6 A new outbreak of Zavodskoy Basin took place in 1807. Within two hours, the place known as “the drop point” became a 40-sazhen-wide river (84 meters). The water had plowed up the nearby area and flowed to Gagarka Creek carrying entire sand hills with it. On the third day, by eroding the right bank of the shaped riverbed, the water broke to the north through a sand hill into the hollow surrounding the commander’s garden, which possibly was the old riverbed of the River Sestra, and joined the flow from the downward dam after paving its way to the waterbed of the Zavodskaya river. The break in the riverbank was soon closed. In 1833, it was replaced with a stone drop structure with a spillway. But the newly built structure was washed out and destroyed in the spring the same year. The water created a 100-sazhen-long water gall (210 meters) and washed away several adjacent buildings, further extending and deepening the hollow created in 1807, and rushed into the Gulf of Finland. This time, the break had been closed with a solid stone dam. Another powerful outbreak of the River Sestra happened north of Sestroretsk. In the early XIX century, a dam and a flood-gate had been built where the river made a sharp turn to the south, and behind them – a drainage channel intended for regulating the water level of the reservoir in case of high water. In 1840, upon washing away the artificial barrier, the river rushed through the drainage channel directly into the gulf not only bypassing the water reservoir but also carrying a part of the water that flowed into it from the Chyornaya River. While prior to this outbreak the flow of the River Sestra had been equally distributed along its natural riverbed for 15-20 kilometers, in the new riverbed the same amount of water was running downward from the same height within only 2 kilometers. The significantly accelerated flow started rapidly demolishing not only the soft sand bottom and banks of the drainage channel but also of the main riverbed. All the attempts of stopping the water flow had failed. Within several years, the width of the river in its almost 8-verst-long lower part (8.5 kilometers) had expanded from 6 to 20 sazhens (from 12.8 to 42.6 meters). The overflow of water from the reservoir was soon stopped by a hastily built check dam in the south part of the old riverbed left by the river. However, since 1840, Sestroretsk Razliv had been deprived of its main influx for almost a quarter of a century and filled with water only by the River Chyornaya. 7 The Gausman Dam. A postcard from the early XX century. The forces of nature continued inflicting enormous damage on the built structures. In autumn and winter, when west winds were blowing, the water flowed upward from the seashore and flooded the Kanonirsky District and Dubki.