«Legend of the Karadag Snake» — an object of the intangible ethnocultural property of Crimea

This was preceded by a big research work: the author of the application spent a lot of time in the library, collecting articles and research notes about the snake in print media, studied the legend of the sea reptile “Chershamba inhabited in Otuz” (modern brigbling), the autobiographical story of Vsevolod Ivanov “Zmiy”-about the meeting with the Karadagsky snake On May 14, 1952, during a vacation in Koktebel, entries by academician NAU EF Shnyukov that the geologist of Promtov saw a huge snake on Karadag near the wall of Lagorio.

Olga Andrushkevich collected many interesting facts, popular science essays, sketches and historical evidence of the existence of a marine monster. In her work on the collection of materials, she interacted with the director of the centralized library system of Feodosia Oksana Filatova and the head of the department of environmental education and scientific information of the Karadag Scientific Station named after T.I. Vyazemsky Marina Fedorenko.

In cooperation with the director of the Karadag Scientific Station. T.I. Vyazemsky Vyacheslav Litvin organized a working meeting of the folklore expedition of the Center for Folk Art of the Republic of Crimea together with the employees of the Sanknovsky Center for Culture and Leisure, whose representatives were held and video recording of the primary sources of information about the famous Crimean legend. The expedition participants recorded the stories of researchers of the station, who are carriers of this object of an intangible ethnocultural property (Dannah — NED), and also examined the places that are mentioned in the stories of eyewitnesses and guardians of the legend.

After careful processing of the materials of the expedition, the application for the “legend of the Karadag Snake” was submitted for consideration by the Expert Council under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Crimea on the assessment and selection of NED objects. According to the results of the work of the expert council on August 18, 2025, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Crimea issued an order to include objects of the intangible ethnocultural property of the Republic of Crimea in the register, the “Legend of the Karadag Snake” (city district of Feodosia) was awarded the register number of Crimeaned-012.

Employees of the Sanknovo Center for Culture and Leisure plan to hold in the future measures related to the legend of the Karadag Snake: thematic lectures, video materials, creative classes and exhibitions.

Source: press service of the Government of the Republic of Crimea