Location
On the high hill rising from the right-bank end of Kanavinsky Bridge, there is a small lane — Gremyachy Lane. At first glance it appears unremarkable, yet few people now know that the square at the approach to Kanavinsky Bridge from Pokhvalinskiy Descent, as well as the hill above it, were once called Gremyachy.
Today the name of the hill has been entirely forgotten, and only the small lane of a dozen or so houses preserves in its name the memory of the catastrophe that occurred here more than five centuries ago.
The Legend
In 1439, the Golden Horde Khan Ulu-Muhammad, having suffered defeat near Moscow, "stood ten days and departed," descended along the Oka to Nizhny Novgorod and captured, as the chronicles record, the old town, where he established himself. The Nizhny Novgorod residents — Prince Fyodor Dolgoglyad and the Lithuanian Yushka Dranítsa — were in the neighboring town. They soon burned the town so that it would not fall into enemy hands and withdrew. Thus both towns found themselves in the hands of the Tatar khan.
This is what the legend relates: "In Nizhny Novgorod, beneath the old town, upstream along the Oka River, there was a settlement on the bank of the Oka River, and by God's will, for the sins of men, the hill slid down upon the settlement from above, burying 150 households along with their people and all their livestock."
The date of the landslide is not given, but it may have occurred in 1445, when Ulu-Muhammad suddenly departed from here with his entire army. Perhaps it was this landslide that drove the superstitious Tatars away from such a dangerous place.
Indeed, if one looks carefully from the Nizhne-Okskaya Embankment at the high, hilly part of the city, one can clearly make out, in the stretch from the former Kazan railway station to the beginning of Rozhdestvenskaya Street, a vast depression along the upper ridgeline and an earthen mound below. These are the traces of the enormous landslide.
A mass of earth, together with forest and buildings, crashed down upon the settlement with a terrible crack and roar, as in an earthquake, wiping it from the face of the earth. The origin of the word "gremyachaya" itself is equally clear — that is, the hill "thundered" (gremela) during the landslide.