Traveling in the Urals: Irbit – fair capital
Even from school, we know that Irbit was famous for its fair, on a scale comparable to Nizhny Novgorod. But hardly anyone thought about what today looks like the place where the richest merchants of not only the Russian Empire, but also other countries, for example, China. What does it remind you of a century ago? What secrets do once elegant merchant houses keep, and what legends surround them?
The Urals, as you know, are mountainous. Hence the specificity of cities, or rather, urban planning policy: most Ural cities are factory, so the streets are symmetrical to each other, and the city plan resembles a mosaic of flat rectangles. Trading cities, rare in the Urals, do not have such geometric rigor. It is in the location and direction of the streets of Irbit that the fair trail is read. From the central square of the city radiates five streets: from whichever side the merchant arrived in Irbit, on one of the streets-rays he will come straight to the Passage.
The Irbit Passage burned and rebuilt several times. "Modern" was built in 1864. Under the floors of the shopping rows, typical of any Passage, in the basements, the goods left after the fair closed were stored until the following year. During the Civil War, the cellars of Passage were a prison where an ideological opponent was massacred without trial. Hence the legends of ruined souls wandering through the dark corners of the dungeons. The cellars have an extensive network: low heavy vaults, narrow transitions from one room to another. The light bulb illuminates only the part of the basement used today, but now and then you can notice narrow passages, drawn by a web, going into darkness. In the city there are legends about underground passages leading to the Passage. Why were they needed in the trading city? One can only guess.
Another fair sign of Irbit can be considered houses in the historical center of the city. As a rule, these are two-storey houses: the first floor is stone, during the fair there was a shop and goods were stored. In the event of a fire, the goods were safe. The second floor is residential, wooden. In addition, many houses had an underground floor. Merchants coming to Irbit for the fair, rented one of the houses, which brought significant income to the owners. Residents of Irbit, seeking to get a good amount, rented not only the first but also the second floor, and the whole family moved to the basement for a month. In one of the houses that “saw” the fair, today the Irbit Museum of Local Lore is located. In the basement, where the owners of the house lived during the fair, now there is a museum vault: the room is quite spacious, high in human growth, heated (after all, the fair took place from late January to late February).
The richer merchants built their own houses in Irbit, so the architecture of the city is diverse and luxurious (if we do not take into account the modern state of the buildings). Many houses are located close to each other, which is characteristic of the capital building. It is with this that stories are connected, telling that the adjacent walls of neighboring houses are connected by a common wall about a meter wide. Merchants did not spare their riches for fun, performances of visiting theater troupes. At the same time, the stories of the townspeople reflected the fate of provincial actresses: it was these dungeons that had a bad reputation. Already in Soviet times, there were cases when thieves entered one house through another, using the same dungeons.
And of course, the homes of wealthy merchants are surrounded by rumors of treasures. Descendants, enthusiasts and local historians periodically turn to materials indicating the location of the caches. They say about the discovery of one treasure and that in the house of the most famous Irbit merchant Zyazin are waiting for their hour two more treasures.
Today Irbit is not the same: times have changed, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the fair witnesses have grown old, and who knows how many secrets of the fair Irbit have already sunk into oblivion: we can only come, watch and guess.
Anna Menshchikova