In the mid-18th century, shepherds from Kabardino-Balkaria accidentally discovered a tomb with strange mummies and many gold ornaments. When they started robbing the crypt, they heard a voice warning of revenge. What happened next reached the highest ecclesiastical authority in the Russian Empire, and then the trail goes cold.
On April 3, 1767, the Kizlyar Commandant, Major General N.A. Potapov, sent an unusual report to the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, the highest ecclesiastical authority in the empire. Since the language of eighteenth-century administrative Russian has shifted considerably, what follows is a plain-language rendering of the report’s contents rather than a literal transcription.
According to the report, a resident of the Chegem Gorge, in what is now Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, found a pit three kilometers from a sheep-grazing site with a door set into it. Walking inside, he found an elderly man and a girl seated, unresponsive. A book lay in front of the old man. In front of the girl sat a golden pan filled with gold and silver objects, and a gold ring on one of her fingers.
The shepherd told six companions and they returned together, taking the gold and silver. When they reached for the ring, the report states the girl spoke, warning that death would follow if they took it. They ignored the warning, carried the treasure to their village, and for three nights afterward a voice was reportedly heard in the village demanding the treasure’s return. The villagers returned part of what they had taken, and by the time they did, the man and girl were gone from the crypt.
On the fourth night, the report states, all the shepherds and their families died. Other villagers died afterward.
Captain Kireev and a special commission were dispatched to investigate the deaths.
Captain Kireev’s Report
Kireev’s own account, as rendered in Potapov’s report, attributes the account to two named local informants: the landowner Kasai Atazukin and a Chegem resident, Barak Beshtov. They described an infection that struck the area in the fall, tracing its origin to a shepherd who fell into a pit while grazing his sheep in the mountains and found a door inside it. Beyond the door, he reportedly found treasures, several gold and silver crosses, and two incorrupt bodies: a man in a monk’s robe and a girl. As in Potapov’s account, the shepherd’s companions took the treasure and ignored a warning voice, and death followed, ultimately killing around twenty people, including wives and children, over roughly two months. The remaining villagers returned the treasure and performed rituals, after which the deaths stopped.
Kireev states he ordered Colonel Kopitowski and Peter Davidov, both present in the region, to inspect the site and report on it without disturbing anything they found.
Potapov’s report also requested that an experienced missionary, the Georgian Abbot Gregory, be sent to assist. A corresponding decree was issued in May 1767, and Gregory was reportedly summoned to the Holy Synod’s office on May 20 and asked to travel to the Caucasus to investigate what the record calls “the human incorruptible bodies found in the dugout.” The surviving administrative note instructs that an exact copy of Potapov’s report be sent to the College of Foreign Affairs for review, a routine bureaucratic step that at least confirms the report was taken seriously enough to be formally logged and circulated between offices of the Russian state.
Historian V. Vinogradov places the report in its real institutional context: the 1760s were the period when the Russian government’s Ossetian spiritual mission was actively working to spread Christianity among the highland peoples of the central Caucasus. A report of unexplained deaths connected to a crypt, arriving in the middle of an active missionary campaign in that exact region, would have carried real institutional weight, independent of whatever actually happened at the site.
What happened after Gregory’s dispatch is where the trail actually ends. No follow-up record of the Chegem investigation has been found, despite considerable archival research. Potapov’s name recurs often in surviving records concerning events in Kabarda more broadly, and Gregory’s name appears elsewhere too, but neither the fate of the crypt’s occupants nor the treasure’s final disposition is recorded anywhere in the documents historians have located.
What the Chegem Crypts Actually Are
Separate from the 1767 legend, the Chegem Gorge contains a real, extensively documented necropolis known locally as Fardyk-Keshene, or the City of the Dead, near the Balkar village of Eltyubyu, also called Verkhny Chegem. This is one of the three largest and best-preserved medieval necropolises in the North Caucasus, and it is a genuine site of ongoing academic study, not a fringe claim.
The crypts, known in the Balkar language as keshene, fall into two architecturally distinct groups. The older group, quadrangular in plan with simple gable roofs, dates to roughly the 10th through 12th centuries and is attributed to the region’s local Christian population of the period. The later group, hexagonal or octagonal, dates to the 17th and 18th centuries and reflects the area’s subsequent Muslim population, though the site shows traces of earlier traditions layered beneath both, including some scholars’ suggestion of Zoroastrian influence. Roughly eight crypts survive in well-preserved condition today. Structurally, the builders used a corbelled, or false, vault: each course of stone oversails the one below it, narrowing the gap between opposite walls gradually until the structure closes, a genuine and skillful pre-modern engineering solution that required no keystone arch.
A 2025 academic study published in History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Caucasus by researchers Muslim Barazbiev and Aslan Bogatyrev examined the Arabic-language tombstone inscriptions at the Eltyubyu cemetery in detail, identifying the burials as belonging to the principal aristocratic families of the historical Chegem Society of Balkaria, the Balkarukovs, Barasbievs, and Kelemetovs among them. This is real, current, peer-reviewed epigraphic scholarship on the site, entirely independent of the 1767 legend, and it demonstrates that the necropolis’s actual documented history is that of a working aristocratic burial ground for named, identifiable families across several centuries.
What Doesn’t Hold Up, and What’s Worth Separating
Two claims that circulate alongside the Chegem site deserve to be named and kept separate from the documented archaeology above. Local tourism accounts occasionally mention skeletons of unusual size, “two meters or more,” recovered during excavation near the crypts, framed as evidence of guardian giants. This claim appears in travel writing and local folklore rather than in any peer-reviewed excavation report, and it should be treated as local legend rather than an archaeological finding until a specific, citable excavation record says otherwise. Separately, a Russian tabloid report once claimed that scientists from a Russian Academy of Sciences institute found Eltyubyu to be a “unique chronal zone” where clocks show inconsistent times. This traces to a single tabloid article, not a published scientific study, and should be read accordingly.
What should not get lost underneath either of these add-on claims is that the real necropolis, the real 1767 archival report, and the real ongoing academic study of the site are all independently interesting without them. Eltyubyu is also home to the Balkarukov watchtower, known locally as the Tower of Love, tied to its own local legend of a stolen bride, and to a set of ancient defensive stairs cut into the gorge’s rock walls. The valley has been continuously significant to Balkar cultural and architectural history for close to a thousand years, which is a considerably longer and more substantiated story than the single 1767 report on its own.
Whoever the man and the girl the report describes actually were, and whatever happened to Abbot Gregory’s investigation after he was sent to the Caucasus, no surviving document answers the question. The crypts themselves, real, dated, and still standing above the Chegem River, are the closest thing to an answer the historical record actually provides.
