Six months ago, a French document containing the key to a lost treasure fell into the hands of Alexander Seregin and Vladimir Poryvayev. This unpublished document led Seregin and Poryvayev to conclude that 80 tons of gold and valuables hauled out of Moscow in 1812 by Napoleon’s retreating soldiers had been carefully buried in a secret location.
In October 1812, while Napoleon’s army was fleeing Moscow, his soldiers became walking treasure chests: each carried no less than ten kilograms of gold. Approximately 200 wagons were used to transport the booty. But they never made it to France… Old Smolensk Road, along which the French retreated, had been destroyed. The French themselves were responsible for making it impassable by the course of their invasion.
Then the frost struck. Hungry and freezing soldiers ate fallen horses. Russian troops and partisans repeatedly harassed the retreating army. The weight of the stolen treasure slowed the army’s retreat. Wagons fell apart even as they rolled. They had to get rid of the loot: dump it in water or bury it along the way…
Alexander seregin is director of the eccentric Museum of Forgotten Things, located outside Moscow, where for several years he has been collecting historical relics. We have gathered here before setting off on our treasure hunt.
It took four months to calculate the location of the treasure from the newly available documents. Local and Western historians, mathematicians, and experts from various regions were brought in. They translated old French metrics into modern. They measured distances. Seregin and his colleagues researched the towns to the west of Moscow, and in Kaluga and Smolensk regions stretching along the Old Smolensk Road. They schmoozed with the locals. They learned of a two-century-old legend that, in fall of 1812, the French expeditionary force stopped over for a few days between Yelnya and Kaluga, a short distance from the road. A large mound remaining after the French retreat marked their presence.
Seregin and Vladimir Poryvayev, a former employee of the Federal Agency for Government Communication and Information under the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, and today a professional treasure hunter, decided to establish the “Napoleon Treasure Search Center,” assemble a group of volunteers and set about finding the storied valuables. After Seregin published an announcement in the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, people of all professions and ages expressed interest in their initiative. Seregin said he accepts almost anyone as a volunteer, as long as they satisfy the main criterion: honesty.
One Alexei Matrosov, of Lipetsk, learned of the Center’s plans and donated his invention: a two-passenger, eight-speed swamp vehicle. Rodion Cherednichenko, the chairman of the Russian Recycling Association, became interested in the dig and assigned a master mechanic to service the vehicle. Eduard Uspensky, the children’s writer, provides “moral support.”
All volunteers must pass an interview and undergo a background check. In the end, the team consisted of an interrogator from the Odintsovo police force, a historian from one of Moscow’s universities, an auto mechanic, a businessman from Smolensk, a search and rescue worker, and a retired military officer (when the officer declared, “Soldiers never surrender, even when they retire,” Seregin took him on immediately). For Seregin, the most important thing was that the team be united and that everyone participate in collecting relevant information. For his part, Seregin sold his apartment to finance and outfit the expedition.
“My wife gave birth today,” Seregin declares at the door instead of a greeting, “A son. We named him Stepan. And I so wanted to call him Akaky. A forgotten, good Russian name. My spouse protested: ‘They’ll tease him!’”*
Seregin is wearing a full dress uniform of an officer in Napoleon’s army. “I bought it at a European auction for ten thousand euros,” he proclaims. “At first I thought that it is not patriotic to wear the enemy’s uniform. But then I decided that you can’t tell the difference! The French dress uniform is very similar to the Russian. But I should admit, the French cut is much more elegant.” Seregin shifts gears: “Today we are going to dig at Skolkovo. That’s a kilometer from here… ”
The retreating French went through the village of Skolkovo, two kilometers outside Moscow city limits. Interestingly, today, two centuries after Napoleon’s retreat, the Kremlin has designated Skolkovo as the site for its future “Russian Silicon Valley.” On the site of a former state farm, President Dmitry Medvedev hopes to create a new city of innovation where leading scientists will live and work for the good of Russian science. The majority of such scientists themselves are skeptical, but all the construction in the area works to the treasure hunters’ benefit. It provides easier access for those who want to dig around in the dirt, to unearth the remains of old weapons and baggage abandoned by Napoleon’s army to ease their flight.
We are in the attic of the Mu-seum of Forgotten Things. Quickly, Seregin writes out a permit for himself, a so-called “open page.” Behind him on a bare wall hangs a crooked painting, maybe nineteenth century, punctured by a bayonet.
“We are neither swindlers nor thrill seekers, and certainly not ‘black diggers,’” (see box, right) Poryvayev quickly warns. “They have all of Russia divided up into areas of influence. They try not to let you onto their territory. I don’t know who has the land we intend to work. We know, thanks to the experience of a few colleagues, that if we applied for a permit to state archaeologists, they would block us and try to get there first and dig it all up. And it’s fully possible that everything they find would go under the hammer somewhere abroad. We work within the bounds of the law, we have a lawyer. We do not ask for donations. We financed the project with our own savings. We want to give to the state and the church items that were stolen in their day by Napoleon’s army. The approximate value of the treasure, according to experts, equals modern Russia’s annual budget. Of course, if they want to thank us within the bounds of the law, we will not protest. But we must rely on ourselves for protection from profiteers, tramps, and the police. Our work requires absolute honesty, so that no one pockets even a single gold coin.”
We go below. There is no museum-quality sterility. It is complete chaos. A rusted Soviet toy truck sits next to a rare old typewriter. A silver frame for an old icon squeezes up against a dress portrait of Alexander I. There is a mirror used by the distinguished Soviet state and party leader Mikoyan; an old stuffed children’s cartoon character Cheburashka, beaten-up from use but still smiling; and a Gzhel-style hand-decorated toilet. This lattermost acquisition has a curious provenance: the former owner, a “new Russian,” did not appreciate the very original gift and decided to “forget” it at Seregin’s museum.
To discuss plans for our expedition, we cross over from the museum to Alexander’s house – a roomy log cottage. It previously belonged to a gypsy baron. We pass through a yard littered with old household goods: tea kettles, shiny and round; dusty samovars; iron fireplace pokers; pitchers; imaginative ceramic vessels. In the corner, a red Soviet-era phone booth shimmers. On its door is scratched, “Yana, I love you!” Will she ever read the inscription? They saved the booth from a recycling center and hauled it over from nearby Nemchinovka railway station.
“In the fall of 1812, more than 600,000 soldiers and officers of Napoleon’s army shamelessly sacked Moscow,” Seregin says sadly, having lowered his head to the worn maps.* “Like the worst kind of marauders, they tore apart private homes. The Kremlin and Moscow’s churches were also completely emptied. Their booty was gold and silver altar-ware, candlesticks, icon frames and jewelry. They did not even hesitate to take the gilded cross from the bell tower of Ivan the Great.”
Seregin interrupts his story with a proposal to share some red wine. Unfortunately, the wine is not from Napoleon’s era; it’s only about half a century old. But we do drink from a 200-year-old silver cup.
Seregin lays on the handwoven linen tablecloth the finds from their latest dig near Kaluga: bronze officer buttons, buckles, a cigarette holder, part of a revolver and musket balls. It is not exactly proof of the existence of “Napoleon’s Treasure,” but, then, no one knows what all that might have included.
“In our opinion, Napoleon’s attack on Russia was conceived not as a military operation,” Seregin says, “it was a conscious campaign for booty! They went in to every merchant’s place and took out a load of gold. Moscow’s merchants at that time were wealthy: they conducted wide-scale foreign trade; their storerooms were bursting with gold, precious stones, furs, and weapons. In Russia, the French were considered cultured, educated… and then – what a way to spoil your reputation! Commit plain theft! What they did in the churches – completely incomprehensible – they stabled their horses.” By way of proof, Seregin shows old lithographs. “In a word, horrible conduct. Can you treat us that way? Russians need a gentle approach. If they’d asked nicely – we undoubtedly would have given them a loan. Then, they would not have gotten a taste of Russian lapot*… Over there by the way, you can see one on a hook.”
The monstrously large shoe that Seregin indicates seems, at first glance, rather innocuous. But when you touch it you realize it is actually a weapon. They were “iron shoes,” used for knocking French soldiers off their horses.
“I would very much like to believe that these lapoty belonged to Denis Davydov…* but what are you sniffing at?” he asks, surprised when I take a whiff of the ancient footwear. “They were aired out ages ago…” Seregin brings out a map of Moscow’s looting that he and his colleagues have compiled. It shows that, in just a small part of the city center, nearly 15,000 homes were cleaned out by the soldiers.
It should be said that our treasure hunters put great stock on the “hat theory.” They got the idea from a Russian mathematician who lived for some time in France among White Russian émigrés while working as a diamond cutter.
One fine day, the mathematician dropped by Poryvayev’s treasure hunting office and from the doorway announced that he knew where Napoleon’s Treasure was buried. He told how, hiking near Kaluga, he had seen a suspicious, man-made alteration of the landscape. He started collecting information and spoke with the old-timers in the area. They shared a local legend: in that exact place, French troops had stopped and built campfires. It was not an army or a corps, but a large platoon. After politely listening to the old-timers’ legend, the mathematician forgot all about it. But, in time, the legend re-emerged. “The mathematican had spent nearly 30 years in archives, trying to find traces of Napoleon’s Treasure, when he stumbled across a strange engraving,” Seregin explains. “It was a real puzzle. Better even than The Da Vinci Code. It pictured a cavalry officer from the Emperor’s inner circle – he was arranging the successful transport of Russian valuables to France. The engraving’s creator (a court artist of the time) depicted the officer historically incorrectly. He did this on purpose: he placed a tri-cornered hat, which should have been on the head, on the ground. Having painstakingly studied the engraving’s background (that same altered landscape he had seen on his hikes), noting the position of the stars in the sky and orienting himself by them, the mathematician identified the location. The stars are depicted in the engraving not for beauty: even a century later, one can use them to calculate the position of the treasure. And the tri-cornered hat is a sort of key, a unique measurement of length. If you place a copy of this hat on the map in a certain way, the badge points directly to the location of Napoleon’s Treasure… And one more thing that alerted the specialist – Napoleon typically showed off all his medals and regalia. But none of them are in the engraving. In general, we had reason to suspect a code…”
A couple of years ago our “mathematician” (he asked that his name not be revealed) turned to the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, requesting that he finance his treasure hunt. He was rebuffed.
“Remember, in 1997, when the entrepreneur Herman Sterligov abandoned his business and started searching for Ivan the Terrible’s library?” Seregin asks. “More than $500 million was arranged for this adventure. Nothing was found. Since then, Luzhkov considers all such enthusiasts to be swindlers.”
Again the story is interrupted. Seregin’s children, Boris and Sofia, enter. They are going to join us on the hunt. For the road, we drink a local herbal tea, Ivan-Tea (its plants sprout from the ashes left by wildfires and we’ll later see it growing in the fields of Skolkovo). For luck, we drop by a little unheated wooden chapel and say a prayer to St. Nicholas. In the corner is a sixteenth century icon. On it is the striking, sorrowful face of Christ.
“We will return this icon to the Nizhny Novgorod diocese,” Seregin explains. “A man brought it to us: ‘I was a trouble maker in the 1960s ,’ he confessed. ‘Found the icon and hid it. Later wanted to sell it, but fell ill. Changed my mind.’ The tsar and the venerable Serafim Sarovsky* prayed before this icon.”
Armed with shovels and a handheld GPS, we set out for the future center of innovation, Skolkovo. Why Skolkovo? Igor Volchevsky, a local painter and expert on the region joining us, explains everything in a calm, unhurried, at times nostalgic manner: “Some of Napoleon’s troops made their first stop in Skolkovo and its surrounding area during the great army’s retreat from Moscow. You see, from this point, a view to the Kremlin opens up. Carts were loaded not only with military supplies, but with the richest trophies seized in the capital. To lighten the load, the French abandoned that part of their arsenal that they considered of secondary importance. Barrels of bullets were thrown into nearby pits and ravines, and they tried to hide some of their booty at the bottom of a pond in Skolkovo. According to some old-timers, once, in the 1960s, this pond was surrounded by soldiers. They drained all the water out and searched the bottom carefully. What did they find? It’s not known… For many years, an obelisk stood as a reminder of Russian soldiers who died at Skolkovo, but after the revolution it was removed. Besides that, generations of villagers passed on stories about a French cemetery. Now, at this place we see only a large mound of ‘excess’ dirt.”
The artist looks sorrowfully at the futuristic construction site. “Let’s go, I’ll show you some gravestones. They stick out of the water.”
We approach the lake. We see the stones. In the grass, I notice a rusted, bow-shaped object. I raise it skeptically, not suspecting that I have found a broken carriage spring.
Seregin’s young son Boris is already very skilled at hearing the metal detector’s “music.” If it squeals like a broken guitar string, it means there’s non-ferrous metal down there. A low hum means steel.
“Papa, it looks like a chest!” the boy calls out triumphantly.
Everyone runs over to the young treasure hunter. Two shovels full of dirt. Disappointment. Modern steel. The detector again nervously screeches. Just below the surface we find a bronze chamber pot with a century’s buildup of greenish corrosion. Napoleon had hemorrhoids and always had a chamber pot with him, even on the battlefield, the treasure hunters explain.
A minute later, the device repeats its melody. But the next object belongs neither to Napoleon nor his era. We find a pre-revolutionary pistol hidden under a scraggly bush and carefully wrapped in a rag. Holding the revolver with a piece of the rotten material, Seregin decides we must summon the police.
He doesn’t even have to pick up a phone. The team of treasure hunters includes Katerina, a 26-year-old a police officer from Odintsovo. Her talent for solving complex crimes is renowned far beyond this region. And she stands out from our motley crew because she moves among the mounds of Skolkovo in stiletto heels and a conservative suit. Honesty and utility – the two main criteria Seregin used in selecting his 10 team members from among the 40 prospects – are clearly present in this attractive, self-assured young woman.
“Yes, we’ll need to call my colleagues,” Katerina says. “They begged me when I left the office, ‘Katya, for God’s sake, just don’t find a corpse in the bushes, or anything suspicious.’ Looks like we’ll have to bother them after all.”
In short order the officers arrive, thank us, and relieve us of the antique.
“You gave it up for no reason,” Poryvayev grumbles, “you could hardly have committed a fresh murder with it. It’s prerevolutionary.”
On first impression, Poryvayev appears to be disorganized. Glasses, hair a bit mussed, a wrinkled jacket, erratic movements. But shortly all is clear: to him, the sounds of the metal detector are dearer than human speech. He is completely focused, peering at the soil. Poryvayev, 39, has spent 33 years as a treasure hunter. As a boy, he rooted about for old coins in stream beds. And now his quarry is real treasure. Poryvayev, like no one else, believes that legends last 200 or 300 years, handed down from one generation to the next. So when a man in the doorway of his office self-confidently announced that he knew where to look for Napoleon’s Treasure, Poryvayev was in no way surprised. He took the story seriously.
We continue to be surprised that artifacts lie in heaps, literally on the surface. Suspicious.
“It’s elementary!” Poryvayev says. “They’re planning to build a golf club in this field. Apparently, when the bulldozers took off the upper layer, many old objects were simply pushed up out of the earth.”
“The construction of Silicon Valley in Skolkovo is clearly to your benefit,” I comment.
“That’s how it turned out…” Seregin interjects, “but I also believe another version. Something similar happened with finds from the World War II era: at the time of the celebration of the 65th anniversary of the war, a huge number of them turned up. It’s as if the earth itself is pushing out these treasures. The same is happening now. Recently, my daughter and I were walking near here and suddenly she saw a strange object on the ground: an absolutely round metal sphere almost as big as a fist. Imagine, she found an old cannonball! Apparently a plow dug it up and it rolled from the upturned earth into the grass.”
Of course, Seregin and his companions did not leave things there. They carefully examined the area and found a whole “mother lode” of cannonballs. More than ten had been laid to rest in the earth. A few more were found by children from a local history group organized by the Museum of Forgotten Things.
“One local resident brought in 13 cast-iron cannonballs,” Seregin continues. “More accurately, he sold them for 500 rubles a piece. Apparently, he saw us digging. In all, we managed to find more than 40 French cannonballs from 1812…”
Over the past 200 years there have been more than a few attempts to find Napoleon’s lost treasure. Descendants of French soldiers who served in 1812 ventured to Moscow with this goal. The most active searches for Napoleon’s Treasure were made near a forest lake by Semlev, on the orders of the Smolensk Governor General Khmelnitsky in 1835-1836. A second wave of searches was conducted in 1911-12, at the time of the war’s centennial. A third wave occurred in the Soviet period, between 1960-80. None have had any success.
To this day, not one object from the emperor’s treasure has been found. As Poryvayev loves to say, “the man who buried Europe was no fool, and when they were carrying away their take, they divided the treasure into a few parts: each regiment had its own share to bury.”
We return to the Museum of Forgotten Things. An expedition to Maloyaroslavets lies ahead. There, along with the ataman (leader) of the Borovsk Cossacks, we will consider another account of the treasure’s location.
“After that, we’ll head to Belarus,” Seregin says. “We’ll have a little talk with the Batka;* maybe he’ll let us go further.” The treasure hunters still have three sweeps to make this season. And the Center’s goal is ambitious: find all the treasures.
“I hope we will succeed in time for the 200-year anniversary,” Seregin says. “But, if necessary, we will search our whole lives. This is worth it.”
The treasure hunter hangs his “working” uniform on a nail. RL
*Akaky Akakiyevich is the famous protagonist in Gogol’s story The Overcoat.
*Actually, by the time Napoleon approached Borodino, he had about 130,000 troops.
* lapot: a peasant shoe made of tree bark. Denis Davydov (1784-1839) – poet of the “Pushkin pleiade” and hero of the War of 1812 who led a partisan formation at Borodino that benefitted greatly from the fact that Davydov’s family estate had been nearby.
* Serafim Sarovsky (1754-1853) – generally considered the greatest of the 19th century startsy (elders). He extended the monastic teachings of contemplation, theoria and self-denial to the layperson, and taught that the purpose of the Christian life was to acquire the Holy Spirit. One of his most famous sayings was “Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands about you will be saved.”
* Batka: an ironic nickname for Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko, which means “little father.”
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