Venice stands on Permian piles

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Tentori writes that the city stands on nearly two million of these piles. In the books of the twentieth century, the number of piles for some reason decreased: "Four hundred thousand piles from the Ural larch trees from the early Middle Ages still reliably carry the weight of the palaces and houses of the city slowly sinking into the lagoon."

There is no doubt that they were brought from the Permian lands, otherwise why would the trees be called “Perm Karagai”. After all, larch itself still grows in Northern Italy, on the spurs of the Alps, and to this day, resin is extracted from this larch, which from time immemorial has been called "Venetian resin". Local historian Lev Bankovsky tried to find out why larch was transported to Venice from the Urals, and did not use their Alpine one.

He connected this with two factors: climate change and human activity: “During moderate warming and two very hot xerothermal periods, larch forests, or, as they are called in Siberia, leafy forests, were strongly pressed by the steppes and deciduous forests. In Western Europe, instead of the once solid massifs of larch, its small islets remained, many of which have completely or almost completely disappeared as a result of human construction activities. That is why, already in the early Middle Ages, larch piles for the construction of Venice had to be imported from the Urals around the whole of Europe."

But which way were the trees transported? “Around all of Europe” - that is, through the Baltic and North Seas, bypassing the Iberian Peninsula, through Gibraltar to the Mediterranean Sea? An unexpected clue was found in the work of N. Sokolov "Formation of the Venetian Colonial Empire", published in Saratov in 1963. It says, in particular, that starting from the XI century, Venice seizes a leading position on the Adriatic, and by the XIV century, the most important trade and strategic points of the Eastern Mediterranean are under its control. The Black Sea region played an important role in trade.

Among the final trade points of the Venetians here Sokolov names the cities of Kafu, Soldaya, Tanu, Astrakhan.

And only at the end of the 14th century Venice was able to oust the Genoese in the Western Mediterranean and penetrate the northwest coast of Europe. It is clear that it was much more profitable for the Venetian merchants to transport larch through the Black Sea than around Europe, especially since they were not able to get there right away.

Another clue is given by the name of the larch in Venice - "Permian Karagai". Perm - it is clear that from Perm, and Karagai is the name of larch in the Turkic languages. Now everything falls into place at once. The southern neighbor of Perm the Great was the state of the Volga Bulgars. The Bulgar merchants, knowing well the trading situation, bought the Great larch in Perm, delivered it by water to Astrakhan.

As you probably remember, this city was mentioned among the endpoints of the Venetian traders. And here they sold it under the name "Karagai". There was another way: to the Bulgar city along the Kama, and from it there was a land road to Kiev, and there the Black Sea is not far away.

If you bring larch from the Kama region "around Europe", then the Turkic name will appear nowhere. Trade would go through Russian Novgorod and some Western European state. In the same place, larch is called "larix".

But still let's mentally go back about 1000 years ago. We will not even figure out whether four hundred thousand or two million larch trunks were taken out of our forests by Venetian merchants. The scale at that time, with the development of technology and vehicles, was gigantic. Add to this the distance: where is Venice and where is our land. And these two million or four hundred thousand were brought to Venice in just a few centuries. It's thousands and thousands of trunks every year. Somewhere here, on the distant rivers of our land, Deaf Vilva or Kolynva, Urolke or Kolve, local residents procured larch of a special size and, probably, were very perplexed why, who needed so many ordinary trees, and for them they also gave expensive goods, as for furs or salt.

Then it all ended up on Kama. Here, goods unusual for local residents were taken by Bulgar merchants …

But, probably, the Venetian merchants did not confine themselves to what the Bulgars supplied them, they themselves tried to penetrate the places where the “tree of life” for their city grew. Otherwise, how to explain that in Europe the first map where the Upper Kama region was drawn was compiled in 1367 by the Venetians Francis and Dominic Pitsigani. Be that as it may, to this day it remains a mystery, as it was learned in Venice almost a thousand years ago that it is in our area that a tree so necessary for them grows. Maybe they got some information from the time of the Roman Empire. When Emperor Troyan at the beginning of the II century built a bridge over the Danube River from imported larch. The skeletons of the bridge were destroyed with a chisel only in 1858, after 1150 years.

Not only Venice bought larch from Perm the Great. For several centuries, the entire English fleet was built from larch exported from the Arkhangelsk port. And a significant part of it was from the Kama region. But since they bought it in Arkhangelsk, they called larch in England at first most often "Arkhangelsk". There were, however, other names: "Russian", "Siberian", "Ural". Only for some reason they did not call it "Permian".

Many thousands of years ago, steppe nomads and inhabitants of civilized states carried this tree thousands of miles away. It was always used where eternity was most cared for. Larch was used to build tombs, foundations for primitive pile settlements, supports for bridges, and much more. Today, as a memory of the former glory of the Permian larch, place names have remained - the names of the village and the village of Karagai.