338: The Caspian Sea

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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. so matt for the last couple days i've been getting these phone calls where someone will call me sneeze and then hang up well that's weird yeah i'm getting real tired of these cold calls good evening everybody and welcome to the graveyard thank you for joining us tonight my name is adam and my name's matt now pull up a tombstone or settle into your casket and get comfortable because this is graveyard tales all right everybody here we are again matt how you doing tonight brother i'm doing pretty good man how about you i i i could be better but i could also be worse and we can always be worse the the reason i i chose the joke i did for this week is because like i was telling you before we started. I may sneeze during the middle of recording. Um, the mountain cedar is wreaking havoc on the Ballinger household. Uh, the last week or so we're sneezing. And if we go outside, it gets worse. So any of, any of our, uh, Texas listeners will understand the hellish conditions of mountain cedar season. But before I get off on a tangent of complaining about allergies, I'll say go over to patreon.com slash graveyard tales, sign up to become a patron. We have several different levels. All of them we think are a good deal. We think for the price, you get a bunch of content. We have a whole back catalog of bonus episodes that all of our patrons get. And then if you're a five or $10 a month patron, you get the weekly bonus episode. Plus you get the audio and video ad free versions of the main episode. And then our $10 month gets all that. Plus they get our second show side quest, which is, it's one of those things. It's hard to describe um it's matt and i hanging out talking trash trying to make the other one laugh or gross the other one out it's basically if you were hanging out with me and matt and just sitting talking with us it's the stuff we would talk about oh yeah and it has usually nothing to do with graveyard tales so it's a good kind of release for me and matt to do as a second show. But also go over and support our sponsors. If we have a sponsor on an episode, you can find their link in our show notes. You can find our discount code for them and you can get you some cool stuff because Matt and I, we may get a point to not take every sponsor that comes our way. If we don't think it's a good product or we don't think you guys will like it, then we say no. So So if we have a sponsor on our episodes, it means we genuinely like their product or their service. Yep. So check them out. We think you'll like them. Plus, if you get something from them with our code, it helps Matt and I out tremendously. But on that note, Matt, that's enough housekeeping and complaining about allergies. So why don't you tell us what are we talking about tonight, brother? Okay, so tonight we are going to talk about a body of water that the size of it is so incredible. It is so large that people in ancient times could not consider that they were not looking at the ocean. Okay, there was so little known about this body of water. It is four and a half times the size of Lake Superior, which is the next world's largest body of water. So even number two on this list is still four and a half times smaller than this body of water. Yeah. The Greeks used to believe that east of their land was another strange country, and that was the end of the world. That was where all the land ended, and on the other side was this body of water. So with history like that, you know, there's got to be some pretty wild stuff that is associated with the Caspian Sea. Oh, yeah. So we're going to dig into the history and the legends and a lot of the oddities about the world's largest body of water, the Caspian Sea. Yep. And as we always say, go check our sources down in the bottom of the show notes. You can find where we found all this information. Everything we talk about is sourced and referenced there in the bottom of our show notes. So you can make sure we're telling you what that source says and we're not just making stuff up. But like Matt was saying, the Caspian Sea is known as the world's largest inland body of water. It lies between Europe and Central Asia, and it's bordered by Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Now, the Caspian Sea sits between the Caucasus Mountains on the west and the Central Asian Steppe and deserts on the east. So it forms this major natural divide in Eurasia. now it covers about 244,200 square miles so just think about how large that is oh yeah yeah it makes it larger i know um it makes it larger in area than all five northern great lakes combined Yeah. So like Matt was saying, four times larger than superior, which is a superior lake, but it's just not as big as the Caspian Sea. Now that's the reason I would say that they call it the Caspian Sea and not the Caspian Lake. You're right. Yeah. Caspian Lake just doesn't, it doesn't carry the same gravitas as Caspian Sea. Well, true enough. I mean, it does not. the surface of the Caspian Sea lies around 28 meters below global sea level. And the Caspian Sea is a closed system, making it slightly salty. The salinity is 1.2%, which is about one third of typical ocean water. So it's a brackish area of water there. The area is extremely rich in oil and gas, and the surrounding area has a very, very diverse climates and ecosystems and everything. But that makes sense when you think about how big the Caspian Sea is and how much area it covers. It's going to range in climates and ecosystems from one shore to the next. Yeah. Oh, yeah. now the the basin it's in is usually divided into three parts there's a very shallow northern caspian a deeper middle caspian and then a very deep southern caspian and it's separated by underwater thresholds and i'm going to do my best to pronounce these um here we go as the mangeschlag and the absuron banks i i don't think that was too terrible yeah um you can comment and tell me how bad that was how bad it sounded but by then i'll know because i will have listened to myself a couple times while editing say that so now the maximum depth reaches about 3 356 feet or 1,023 meters in the south with an average depth around 558 feet or 170 meters. Now, most of the water volume is stored in the central and southern basins of the Caspian Sea. Now, here's something probably not a lot of people know, and this part of it fascinates me, Matt. More than 100 rivers flow into it. Now, it's dominated by the Volga River. Around 80% of the river inflow is from this one river. But the Ural, the Teric, the Kura, and others flow into it as well. Now, while there's no natural surface outflow and water is lost mainly through evaporation from what they say, But we also don't know for sure if there's not an underground outflow of water as well, which I would bet there is. Probably. If you've got 100 rivers flowing into this sea, it's still a finite bowl. So it doesn't matter how big it is. It's still a finite bowl. and my dumb brain says, well, there's not enough evaporation that would happen to keep it from flooding over the centuries if there was not some underground subsurface outflow. So I don't know. I just think there might be in one of the deeper parts that we haven't searched well, there could be an outflow there moving some of the water elsewhere. Right, right. Now, the northern Caspian experiences cold continental conditions, and it commonly freezes in the winter. But the southern and southwestern coast have much milder to subtropical climates. So it produces strong north-south environmental contrasts. And as we know that can cause storm systems and crazy weather sometimes. Now, coast range from low swampy deltas in the north, like the Volga River. The Volga Delta is especially swampy. And then you get to steeper mountain back shores along the western margin of it near the Caucasus. The sea contains dozens of mostly small islands with larger ones. The Chechen, the Chulini, the Kulali, the Zilhoi, and others, many serve as important bird and seal habitats. Now, geologically, the Caspian is a remnant of ancient Paratethes Sea that once stretched across much of Eurasia, becoming isolated during the Miocene and later evolving in today's enclosed basin that we know as the Caspian Sea. Over hundreds of thousands of years, it has repeatedly expanded and contracted, sometimes connecting intermittently with the Black Sea and the Aral Sea, leaving a complex record in coastal terraces and sediments. Now, the Caspian Sea hosts about 850 animal species in the water column and the seabed. Plus, there's more than 500 plant species that support the food webs around it. There's roughly 120 to 150 fish species that occur here, including a mix of marine-derived brackish and freshwater forms, many of them restricted to this basin. So they have basically, to put that in another way, there are fish species that are found other places, But in the Caspian Sea, they're slightly different because they have evolved to be able to deal with this slightly brackish water. So if you put that same fish from Lake Superior and you dropped it off in the Caspian Sea, it wouldn't live and vice versa because they may be the same species, but they've adapted to their environment. Now, the Caspian seal is the only marine mammal in the sea, and it's fully endemic to this sea. It's listed as endangered after a catastrophic population decline over the last century. Now, there's reptiles around the shore that include the Caspian turtle, which is, they call it a freshwater terrapin, um spur-thied tortoises uh horsefield tortoise in the drier step and semi-desert zones but the iconic fish of the caspian sea it includes six native sturgeons the beluga the russian the persian the starry the sterlet and the bastard ship sturgeon what a terrible name all these other ones are okay but this one i would be so mad if i was that sturgeon i like you you gotta somebody choose a different name for me please um yeah i don't i wonder how many how many people know that because you know there's a beluga whale and i think a lot of people in the u.s think when they hear beluga caviar they think of the whale it's not right whales because whales don't lay eggs right i had this conversation with somebody i remember years ago and they were like oh it's caviar from beluga whale i said oh they've discovered a whale that lays eggs that's fantastic i didn't know that's amazing um but yeah you know and what's what's amazing and i'm going to talk a little bit about the sturgeon too and and and some of my stuff um is is these things are like they are living fossils sure yeah they are they have adapted to their environment but they are not that different from their prehistoric ancestors right right and i mean when you look at a sturgeon you can see why it looks ancient i could show you a picture like a drawing of a sturgeon and tell you that this is an ancient dinosaur fish and you'd believe it you know i mean and they're still around and it was i mean yeah i mean no no no that's right yeah i could i could show you a modern picture and tell you it's ancient but you're exactly right you know they were you know they they were prehistoric fish and they're actually pretty amazing to me not only are they ugly as sin but uh they have the the bony armor along their back yeah it's actually under their skin a little bit so it's a scale but they don't have like if you catch a perch they don't have the same scales as a perch does right they've got these big bony like almost like plates yeah it's crazy Now, let's talk a little bit about the people who live around the Caspian. There's five states that ring the Caspian, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Now, the Caucasus stretch on the western shore, and they add dozens of smaller peoples to this. And the nomadic and semi-nomadic steppe cultures have roamed between the Caspian and the interior plains for a long time. So that just adds even more people's groups that have lived around the Caspian. Humans have lived around the Caspian Basin since at least the lower Paleolithic, this says. Later cultures from Hyrcania, Parthia, and Chorism to medieval Persia, Turkic, and Russian empires layer their cities and fortresses along the shores. The name Caspian from Caspian Sea, that actually comes from the ancient Caspians of the southwestern shore. But nowadays, this people's group has vanished. But called the Caspian Sea because of the Caspians that live there So real quick to finish out my notes let look at two of the major groups that live there So real quick to finish out my notes let look at two of the major groups that lived around the Caspian Sea and their contrasting beliefs Now the Hyrkanian world Hyrkania it lays along the southern Caspian coast, roughly in today's Gorgon and adjacent regions of Iran. they're famous in antiquity for dense almost jungle-like forests heavy rains lots of game animals and culturally it belonged to the iranian sphere under uh arca archimented the parthian and sassanian rule i know i'm pronouncing those wrong forgive me i think you did pretty good man. Its elites followed the Zoroastrian religion, honoring Ahura Mazda, sacred fire, and purity laws that included exposing corpses rather than burying them. So the landscape felt like a green edge of the empire. They said a human wooded fringe where imperial roads and frontier fortifications met this, quote, looming wall of the Caspian and the forested mountains behind it i heard a mazda i had a buddy in high school that drove one of those yeah yeah it was terrible car terrible car don't y'all love it when i make these terrible jokes how adam just completely glasses over them he's just like shut up yeah i figure if i give them too much credence and the listeners will think i'm i i believe you adam you know you and i and doing this for as long as we have you know you can tell that we are learners we love learning new stuff and and i i dig it so much it's why i love masterclass I love learning more about a topic that interests me. And I may have just a surface knowledge, you know, just enough to be dangerous. But Masterclass lets me dig deeper into things that truly interest me. And I learn from experts in these fields. For example, right now, Atomic Habits. And talking about changing your life and how you do things, it is fantastic. It's by the author, James Clear, who wrote the book of the same name, Atomic Habits. Get on there and take that master class. It can change how you go through your day. And I'll tell you, for me in the first of the year, I am knocking it out of the park right now. Yeah, that's great. That's great. And with Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. With plans starting at $10 a month, billed annually, you get unlimited access to over 200 plus classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. And you can turn your commute or workout into a classroom. With audio mode, you can listen to Masterclass lessons anytime, anywhere. And I love doing that when I'm on the road to go pick up Michael or drop him off at another art class or something. I'll do that and learn something while I'm sitting in traffic. And Masterclass fits right into your schedule with thousands of short, easy to digest lessons you can learn on your own time. And the classes really make a difference. three in four surveyed members feel inspired every time they watch Masterclass. And right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash graveyard, G-R-A-V-E-Y-A-R-D. That's right. It's 15% off at masterclass.com slash graveyard, masterclass.com slash graveyard. um now the caucasian albanian they lay on the western and northwestern caspian shores and it's what is now mainly azerbaijan and parts of dagestan um they had terrain running from coastal lowlands up into the sharp folds of the eastern caucus and its early religion was a local polytheism. So classical and later sources say that they had cults of the sun, moon, sky, and storm gods along with strong nature worship. So before Zoroastrian and then Christian influences arrived. But over time, Albania became a Christian kingdom at the crossroads of Romania and Byzantines. Persians and later steppe peoples would add churches and monasteries on top of older shrines and fire temples. So how do they contrast? Well, Hyrkania was a humid lowland forest frontier, and it was bound tightly into Iranian imperial and Zoroastrian structures, and Albanian was more fractured high highland lowland mosaic with a lot of tribes languages and competing religious currents so harkania's identity was relatively unified um and you know marked by imperial roads fortresses and fire cults and albania was this plural kind of liminal place where sun and moon pagans zoroastrian clergy and christian bishops all claim the same valleys at different times and you're probably asking yourself at this point why are you talking about their religious beliefs and i know i was well i was telling you before why um i think a lot of um a lot of what matt's going to talk about will tie into these different cultures religious beliefs and how they how they dealt with or explained some of these things. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But, you know, when you consider all the wildlife around and in the Caspian Sea, when you consider the types of people that inhabited this basin, It's not surprising that a place with all these natural wonders fed the imaginations of men. And that gave birth to so many strange legends and stories and myths and whatnot. Some, even now, believe that there is a creature living in the waters of the Caspian Sea. it is similar to the Loch Ness creature myth. That creature is called the Runin-Shah, or the King of Sea and Rivers. Like Adam said, there's like a hundred rivers that feed into the Caspians. So, you know, a lot of inlets. but this creature has been witnessed over the centuries by fishermen along the southern shores they describe it as an amphibious creature about 165 to 168 centimeters in length that's not huge and it makes me it makes me question um the that this was may have been a typo but i couldn't verify any other way that this is actually supposed to be meters centimeter this is pretty small it's not it's a large creature i wouldn't say it's probably meters yeah probably right but the the interesting thing is that it's mixed with human features Okay. It has a large mouth, large eyes, and an earless head. And it's covered with black and green hair. It has webbed feet and hands that are equipped with claws. And the nose is like a dolphin's beak. People believe that it swims accompanied by these large shoals of fish. And it produces these deep throaty screams from time to time. That's terrifying. You know, and this is, you know, you can look at things like whales and dolphins that use echolocation and understand that ancient civilizations that would have experienced this had no idea that that's where it was coming from. So they believed it was either some, you know, sea-dwelling creature or a deity of some type. They didn't fully understand. But that sounds like what they assume that the Runanshah does. And that may be how he calls these shoals of fish to them. Yeah. Now, the old myth came back into light around 2005 when the captain of an Azerbaijani crew told the press that they had witnessed the Runin Shah. This quote says that creature was swimming a parallel course near the boat for a long time, said Gaffar Gassanov to an Iranian newspaper. At the beginning, we thought it was a big fish, but then we spotted hair on the head of the monster, and his fins looked pretty strange. The front part of his body was equipped with arms. So they're looking at, this is 2005, mind you. This is not some ancient tale. Yeah, it's not 1405. Yeah, 20 years ago. Yeah. You know, a fisherman actually believes that he saw the Runin-Shah. And if you look up what the Runin-Shah looks like, you know, it's funny because like the third image you get is the creature from the Black Lagoon with Runin-Shah underneath it. Yeah. It's not far off. Make the nose a little bit longer and add some hair. And that's kind of what we're talking about. But the fact that he said it was a large fish, that kind of goes to the thing that centimeters was a typo. My bad. But it's not the only sea monster that has been associated with the Caspian Sea. Mm-hmm. As Adam talked about the sturgeon, the six surgeons, sturgeon, six surgeon, you know, there's an orthopedist, there's like a dermatologist. There's six sturgeon. Yeah. Six sturgeon. Always a proctologist. Sturgeon, always. But these six sturgeon species are found in the Caspian Sea. And the bulk of the world's remaining stock of wild sturgeon resources is in the Caspian, which accounts for between 80 and 90 percent of the world caviar production. And we talked about the living fossil. And we talked a little bit about their anatomy. I mean, they were swimming alongside dinosaurs. oh yeah okay 200 million years ago all the way back to the jurassic period these ancient armored fish um they are relics of prehistoric time so imagine you catch sight of one or more of the sturgeon um which can get pretty large and it does not look like all the other fish that you've been hauling in. This does not look like a fish that I'm going to catch and eat. So automatically you kind of go to, that doesn't belong. That is some kind of sea creature. Plus they're long and slender and sturgeon have been mistaken for sea monsters for centuries. so your first thought is let me grab it and squeeze the eggs out of it i'll eat that instead yeah why not you know actually the first thought is that thing is going to eat me or maybe i should worship this thing yeah um because if i don't it's going to eat me if they were more plentiful like if there were giant schools of these things i could see them getting used to them and saying, oh, they're a natural thing. But sturgeon are fairly small groups to loners. Yeah. So you wouldn't see like this big mass of them at one time. Right. And so you wouldn't say, oh, this is natural. You'd see one at a time, most likely. And you would think it was only one. Mm-hmm. And so I can see how that to ancient peoples could start a myth of a sea creature or something like that. I do question sometimes if they wouldn't get used to it and say, oh, this is natural. But then I go back to, well, we don't see them in big schools most of the time unless you're scuba diving or something. Well, they're not shoaling fish, so they're not going to do that. And I would imagine over time, humans did become to get used to it and realize that it was a natural phenomenon. But that may have taken hundreds of years. And by that time, the legends are already there. You know, the legends are entrenched in the culture. So, numerous, numerous legends about different types of sea monsters in the Caspian Sea. And a lot of people believe that it was one or more of the sturgeon that was actually being seen. Now, there's another sea monster that is associated with the Caspian Sea, but this one is not the natural type. The real-life Caspian Sea Monster was, in fact, the popular nickname given to an Akranoplan, which was a seaplane that flew around 420 kilometers an hour, just a few meters above the water. now around 90 meters long but with these little short stubby wings it was the world's largest airplane when developed by the soviet navy in the mid-1960s and they called it the caspian sea monster okay that was the nickname um it could carry payloads of around 50 percent more of an equivalent size plane, but it used half the fuel. Now, the Ekranil plan was conceived by the idea that with the right configuration, a hydrofoil boat, which you know what a hydrofoil is, it runs on these little skis, could lift its foils out of the water altogether and just fly by using the lift effect of a cushion of air between the short wings and the surface of the water. So, you know, a hydrofoil is a boat that's on these little skis. Imagine that boat having little stubby wings and then the skis as it's going along the water just kind of come out of the water. And the speed of it has created a cushion of air between the bottom of the plane and the top of the water. And now it's just flying right along. Okay. If you look at a picture of this thing, it is the craziest looking plane you've ever seen. Okay. From a military perspective, the benefit would have been that unlike a ship, it would have been safe from underwater torpedoes. But unlike conventional planes, it flew too low to be spotted on radar. Okay. So when the U.S. military caught wind of this, they were like, oh, this is bad. Okay. This is bad. And it was bad for a couple of reasons. One, it made us look like we were technologically behind the Soviet Union. Right. And number two, because if it was successful, it would give them an advantage. to be able to fly under the radar, so to speak. They researched and worked on this thing for 15 years and never really never really worked to you know beyond this area And the final one actually crashed into the Caspian Sea and sunk. And it's probably still there. So it, it was, you know, they were like, a lot of people could have mistaken this for a sea monster as the Russians were testing it. Maybe. Maybe. It does look very bizarre. And if you saw it from a distance floating above the top of the water and you couldn't hear an engine, then, yeah, you might go, look at that giant sea monster out there. We're talking about the 1970s, though. Yeah. So I don't know. But if you look up Caspian Sea Monster, this is what you're going to see. You're going to see this plane. i just typed in caspian sea monster and i i was given caspian sea monster caspian sea monster plane yeah right were my two options um but i included that because i thought that's fascinating that this this is where they developed this thing you know it is a really weird looking oh it's it's bizarre it's bizarre i've ever seen anything like it it looks it looks like somebody it looks like you asked a fourth grader to draw a battleship and put wings on it yeah kind of you know and when i say a fourth grader is because it's all kind of bubbly shaped you know with these weird weird angles on it yeah really weird angles are weird the engines are weird yeah really strange another oddity about the caspian sea and it goes along with some of these the myths is that the Caspian Sea supposedly has its own Atlantis, a city that disappeared within its waters. And there's a lot of stories that refer to underwater cities, and some vestiges have been found by archaeologists. But the fabled city of Ilthil, I-T-H-I-L. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably one of these cities. And this was a flourishing city built in the 9th century on the coast of northern Dagestan and was the capital of the Khazar Khaganate. But the city just suddenly vanished. Now, Ithil echoes the story of Saibail Castle, whose remains lie under the water. the Saba'iles are mentioned in the Quran and they were located in the land of Saba. How many times am I going to say Saba, Saba'ile, Saba'ile? A lot. Saba'ile, castle, is the castle that is under the water. The Saba'iles are the people, okay? And the land is Saba, if you're keeping score at home. Isn't it fascinating? just as you were talking about this what popped into my head how many cultures have stories of lost cities that were lost to the water i know i know it's crazy i mean like we we did the japanese atlantis um we haven't covered atlantis yet but we should yeah um it just it makes you wonder what happened because we're finding that it's not just all legend there are these cities that were in a in a part where they shouldn't have been i know and what's so fascinating about these lost cities is there's so many of them that we have evidence of you know that that's the ocean just decided to take this one back and it's happened multiple times now we don't have evidence of what what we believe would have been atlantis right um but that's the one that i have theory that's the one that we don't know um but we have the we have the evidence of all these other ones so the idea that atlantis did exist and could have i mean people like i in a way a whole city sunk i'm like there is other ones it's not alone so we know that the idea of there being a city of enlightenment sure there were tons of cities that were considered enlightened but the fact that another city could have been taken back by the sea we've got evidence of that happening too so it it stands to reason that atlantis may not be as much of a myth as some people want to believe right you know i think the stories of atlantis may have you know been embellished over the centuries yeah but the fact that there could have been a city known as atlantis that did sink is absolutely possible. Yeah, sure. But the people, the Saba'iles were sun worshipers. And as the story goes, they disobeyed God, so their land was submerged by the waters. Now, Saba'ile Castle can also be linked to a story involving Alexander the Great. Now, the Macedonian king was willing to conquer a city with a splendid castle by the Caspian Sea. Unable to gain the consent of the inhabitants, Alexander sought the advice of Aristotle, who pointed out that the city and castle were built on a large rock over the city. thus a special liquid was made to dissolve the rock resulting in flooding of the city now that let me let me explain this a little bit because it sounds odd some of these ancient cities were actually below sea level yeah and so the waters were held back you know by the the rock and if that rock went away crumbled or was dissolved by this magic liquid that alexander the great developed or had someone develop the water would just rush into the to the lowlands and cover everything this is potentially what happened we know the caspian is below sea level anyway correct so so that's what potentially happened to sabal castle um we we don't know for sure but if alexander the great was going to take over you know a city and it was on the caspian it's possible that this is one in the same i want to know what that liquid is right it's like game of thrones you know like they make that that crazy liquid fire stuff you know oh yeah just you know it's the the sitting on the surface of the water you know but i think that was actually real i don't i don't yeah it's not a game of thrones invention i think i think like the phoenicians actually had something like that you know i think you're right um because there's something like that and then the roman concrete that would harm you underwater and everything and we wonder how they did it like we still don't know exactly how roman concrete was made yeah we kind of do but we don't for sure so there was some alchemical knowledge that they had oh yeah absolutely so alexander could have very easily had something made if they knew these alchemical techniques. But another reason that there are these legends of lost cities in the Caspian is because of this geological appearance of ghost islands. And that definitely could play a role in what how ancient civilizations would have perceived you know the huge Caspian Sea now in 2023 okay just a couple of years ago just 25 kilometers off the eastern coast of Azerbaijan a new island was born but it wasn't just any island it was formed by the eruption of a mud volcano and very soon it will have completely disappeared you know mud volcanoes shoot up instead of lava like a traditional volcano these mud volcanoes shoot up rock and sediment and mud and gas and they release it and it goes to the surface and it creates basically these mud islands. Yep. And they usually stick around for a few months or years, and then they gradually erode back into the sea. Yep. Until it happens again. Now, this particular mud volcano is known as Kumani Bank, and there have been images captured by satellite. It has erupted enough material to form a ghost island in February of 2023. Over 300 mud volcanoes have been reported in eastern Azerbaijan and its waters. And the eruptions are very, very common. uh kumani bank having been documented as erupting at least eight times previously the first eruption being recorded all the way back in 1861 so we've got a recorded mud volcano eruption in 1861 go back a little further let's jump back to 300 years or even further, these mud volcanoes are erupting. You're a part of these ancient peoples. The sudden appearance of a new island must have been a bizarre occurrence. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? You get up one day, what is going on out there? And next thing you know, there's a new island without understanding the source i mean it's reasonable to believe that these people must have imagined that some some underwater god was at work you know sure that you know they were giving giving us new land to to explore to develop to cultivate You know, not knowing that maybe in a few months or years that brand new island was going to be gone. Yeah. So if it sticks around for a few years, people go out there. They start to kind of inhabit it, you know, poke around, maybe build some structures on it. Maybe it sticks around long enough to build a small city. Maybe it's big enough. and then somebody goes you know what i didn't have oceanfront property when i moved out here but i seem to be getting awful close to the water and then you know a few few months go by you know i don't really have much of a yard anymore i've got kind of step out of my front door and i splash you know what don't remember what's going deep water what's going on here And then that small little city or encampment or whatever sinks back into the sea. Okay. So I feel like that is probably where a lot of these sunken cities, these legends come from. Highly possible. You know, because it's more than one. I mean, you know, the one major one, you know, Saba'il, we know because we have evidence underwater that that castle existed. But all these other ones, you got to think, hmm, there's a really good chance that these mud volcanoes were responsible for this. Yeah. Yep. So let's talk about something else that's kind of fun about the Caspian Sea. The presence of lost treasure. okay i love these things yeah now step on timofeech rosin or i'm not i'm not gonna say raisin r-a-z-i-n i'd hate to think that this guy was named raisin yeah you're probably right it's probably rosin anyway he's uh he's also known by the name stinker rosin he's a he's a stinker Yeah, that guy was a stinker. He was. Let me tell you, he was a famous Cossack pirate who fought against the tyranny of Russian Tsar Alexis by pirating ships in the Caspian Sea. Now, because trade with Persia was very lucrative for Russia, they didn't take too kindly to piracy. and through throughout the mid 1600s rosin found great success in plundering ships overcoming insurmountable odds against seasoned sailors and soldiers giving him the allure of invincibility now in an attempt to capture rosin and put an end to this rebellion um menity khan and 3 700 persians attacked the cossacks at sea the persian commander chained his ships together in an attempt to encircle and fire upon the smaller lower cossack vessels so imagine you've got these big ships they chain them all together so they can make almost an encircling these small Cossack pirate ships. Okay. Flotilla. Yeah, we got you surrounded. And now they're going to just fire on them. Okay. And you farewell. This is it. This is it for old stink of rosin. A lucky shot from the pirates ignited the magazine of the Persian's flagship. And when that vessel exploded, all but three of their ships sank because they were all chained together. Oh, wow. So many Persians lost their lives and the pirates took many prisoners, including the Khan's son. So, I mean, once again, you know, they were thinking, we can't beat this guy. You know, how is he this lucky? How does he keep coming out victorious? He is overcoming odds that nobody should be able to survive. And yet he did it over and over and over again. That's why I said he was a tremendously successful pirate. But ultimately, he wanted to lead the Cossacks to freedom from the Russian Tsar rule. so rosin would eventually get a little bold and lead an assault directly on moscow with 200 000 of his followers he was unsuccessful but he did manage to escape with his brother now fearing further retribution from the czar cossack elders decided uh this guy's got to go um he's going to get us all killed and so the elders decided that they were going to capture rizen and they delivered him and his brother to moscow where rizen was interrogated tortured and ultimately executed in a unbelievably barbaric manner that i won't get into but if If you're interested and you like that kind of stuff, go look up the story of Stinko Risen and just see what they did to him. Well, I'm going to have to. I'm writing that down. Now, many, many treasure hunters have speculated that all of this horde of riches that he managed to plunder from these Persian ships is somewhere out there in the Caspian Sea. particularly around the Don river and the Volga river. Remember Adam said, these areas are pretty swampy, you know, a lot of places to hide, a lot of places to hide treasure. Um, so treasure hunters have speculated on where it could be. Um, it has yet to be found. Uh, if it has been found, nobody has waved a flag and said, Hey, we found it. it's over here. Um, which is probably the best thing to do. If you a treasure hunter is to not go I found it I mean somebody going to come take it away from you But a lot of historians look at it and say there's a really good chance because of the way the Cossacks lived that a lot of the Rosin's treasure probably went back to his people and to bring in more followers and to build them up as opposed to just make him rich. Like I said, 200,000 followers. That was the ones that were willing to go attack Moscow. So there were many, many more that were either too old, too young, or unable to fight. and you know they held back so a lot of folks believe that you know yeah he had all this treasure but he spent it you know on his people and you know he he wasn't necessarily just living in some gilded castle on the other side of the caspian um so it's unlikely that it's there I still like the stories of lost treasure, lost pirate treasure. Yeah. Any of those stories. Oh, yeah. I don't care which pirate it is, but you tell me, here's the story of this lost pirate treasure, I'm going to look into it. Yeah, exactly. Because it's cool. And my thought on it is, and I would imagine that's true for most of these treasure hunters, is we're not looking for all of it. we're just looking for some of it. Yeah. You know, they couldn't have gotten rid of all of it. You know, there's gotta be some of it. I mean, you think, well, you know, we uncover a chest that's full of gold and jewels and whatnot. Artifacts, even, you know, it's value is going to be, you know, astronomical, you know, not, not just monetarily, but historically, I mean, you know, so, um, we know it happened. because people have found Spanish galleons that sank. Exactly. So people still kind of look and they try to decipher from all the stories and the logs and whatnot where some of this might actually be, but it's all centered around the Caspian Sea. That's cool. Now, we talked about how the Caspian developed. um you know it was at one part at one point it was part of the black sea and that you know it's been a part of it and then not and then a part of it again you know so and then the fact that it sits below sea level causes some you know geological oddities so the recession of the caspian shoreline at one point revealed a strip of land that was developed between the 19th and 15th centuries. This was the site of what was known as the Old City, which was the historical inner portion of Baku, which is the capital city of Azerbaijan. Now, there is a 12th century monument in the Old City known as the Maiden Tower. it has served as the source for so many legends and folklore that's associated with the Caspian Sea. It's really a unique structure, especially to be considered when it was built in the 12th century. But the mystery of it is, we don't really know who built it, and we don't really know why they called it the Maiden Tower. But there is a legend as to why it is called the Maiden Tower. So this is a legend. It's pretty cool. It says a long time ago, there existed the ancient town fortress of Baku. The fortress had a fire temple tower. Remember, Adam talked about these fire-worshipping people. There was a temple that had this huge flame that sat atop of it. At one point in Baku's history, the enemy managed to encircle the fortress. The enemy demanded that the people of Baku surrender, but they refused. Consequently, the enemy launched a siege to demolish the fortress and capture all the inhabitants as slaves. As a result, many defenders of the fortress died while attempting to stop the enemy's attacks. The enemy's commander ordered the water supply lines cut in an attempt to drive the fortress's defenders into submission. Everybody in the fortress was thirsty. They had no water nor food, only blood and death. The supreme magi, together with other priests, prayed to the holy fire kept in the fortress's fire temple tower, asking the god Ahura Mazda to help and protect the people. They prayed day and night asking the almighty and merciful Ahura Mazda to save their lives and push the enemy back. Finally, the supreme god Ahura Mazda heard the magi and people's prayers. One day, people saw a large piece of the holy fire falling from the top of the fire temple tower. A beautiful girl came up from the fire. She had long fire-colored hair. The crowd went down on their knees and started to pray to her. The girl said, Don't be afraid. I am here to help and protect you. Give me a sword and helmet. The enemy must not see my fire-colored hair. Open the fortress gate. Meanwhile, the enemy commander was waiting outside for a one-on-one fight with the fortress hero. If the fortress hero were to win the fight, the enemy's army would retreat. But if the enemy commander were to win, the fortress would be destroyed and the surviving inhabitants would be enslaved. The fortress gate opened and the enemy commander saw the fortress's hero was coming to fight. A heavy battle began. In one of the God-blessed moments that ensued, the fortress hero unhorsed the enemy and put a sword directly at his neck. The enemy screamed. I love this. Oh, you win. You win. Yeah. Who are you? Take your helmet off. I want to see your face, hero. She took off the helmet and he saw that the fortress hero was a beautiful girl with long fire-colored hair. He exclaimed, You are a girl. You are a brave and beautiful girl. If the girls of Baku are so brave, I will never capture your fortress. Do not kill me. he immediately fell in love with her because of her beauty and bravery and asked her to marry him and the legend says of course the girl did not kill him fell in love with him because of his open heart ultimately the enemy did not capture the baku fortress and the locals named it the maiden tower pretty good story there's other versions of this story there's other versions that say the fire-haired savior actually killed the enemy general whom she loved but she was so distraught that she killed him she took her own life that version sucks but since there is no true record of why the ancients called the structure the maiden tower these legends serve as the story behind the name but you know I think it goes to show the The people that inhabited the area around the Caspian Sea, why there are so many legends and stories associated with this unique body of water is because the people that inhabited the area on all sides were very unique, very cultured, very different in their backgrounds. You know, it just, it made for, um, an incredible history, you know, maybe not so much paranormal, not so much supernatural, but, but definitely unique and fascinating all the same. And who knows? I mean, 20 years ago, somebody thought they saw, you know, the Ron and Shaw sea monster. I mean, how often do we get modern day sightings of an ancient creature? You know, so. Yeah. Well, and, you know, the legends of an area, I think you said it's not even, you know, it's not paranormal or whatever. I think the legends of an area or of a place, you know, building or whatever, are the backbone of what you and I do. Exactly, yeah. The legends kind of breed everything else, or they come from everything else. And if you look into the Caspian Sea, there is a bunch of legends, bunch of stuff from the different peoples, the different cultures and everything. And they all kind of like the sea monsters and stuff. They all kind of. They seem to have a common thread. And so I wonder it. it's like you and I have said before the there's always a point of truth within the legends so what what was it was there at one point an animal that lived in the Caspian that started some of these legends of the monsters that maybe doesn't live there anymore I don't know I just I'm fascinated with these different cultures that all have a similar sea monster legend. But you know me, I'm obsessed with cryptozoology. So I want to think that there was something that started all these legends more than a sturgeon. Oh, yeah. Right. I can see a sturgeon doing it, but I would like to think that there is or was something living in the Caspian that began the folklore of the sea monster. Well, I'll tell you this. You certainly think that a fisherman in the Caspian Sea in 2005 would know what a sturgeon looks like and would be able to identify it. I mean, certainly when you consider the caviar industry and that's where it comes from. So I can't imagine a professional fisherman mistaking a sturgeon for something that had arms. Right. That had hair. So just looking at that one eyewitness statement, you got to believe that he saw something. He saw something that he had never seen before, and it just so happened that there's an ancient legend about what he saw. Yeah, you would think by that time he would know a sturgeon. Sure. And he wouldn't get confused by a sturgeon. If not him, other fishermen on his ship would have known it. Right. and he wouldn't be confused by a seal the caspian seal thinking it had hair because they lived there right people had seen him already you know he's seen him yeah so there had to have been something yeah and uh maybe a mermaid you think it was a caspian mermaid i i you can believe anything at this point but i mean you just but i mean look at this i mean disappearing islands sunken cities sea monsters um you know these these incredible battles with supernatural heroes lost treasure you know one of the most prolific pirates in history that you've never heard of um i mean it just goes on and on and on so i'm with adam i mean there there is a there is a thread of commonality through all this is like, is there something that's unique, mystical about the waters of the Caspian Sea? I mean, it is not like any other place. I mean, there's, you know, it is so much larger than any other inland body of water on the planet. And the way it formed was so unique that maybe, maybe there is something to it, you know, maybe, maybe it's, it's there to house all, all of these oddities, you know, and, and over the centuries, we're now reading the stories that, um, you know, that, that these ancient civilizations experienced. So who knows, but it, it, it, it is truly fascinating. but what do you guys think you know is this just you know another tales from the sea you know kind of thing you know everybody everybody that's been out on the water for any length of time comes back with some strange story you know is it one of those things uh or is there something more to it um let us know and one of the best places to do that is in our facebook group it's called the graveyard. You can go on and search it. We've got thousands of members in there sharing stories, you know, asking questions about things, talking about the show, talking about personal experiences. And, and we love all of you guys and we appreciate you guys taking the time to share, share your jokes and all that stuff. Nobody's going to call you a nut job. We all just want to hear these cool stories. Yep. Don't forget to check out our website, which is graveyardpodcast.com And there you can find links to purchase Graveyard Tales merchandise. There's a lot of cool stuff in our merch store. And look, Adam and I don't, we don't really see anything, you know, from this. Okay. So you pick up your Graveyard Tales coffee mug, t-shirt, whatever. Really what you're doing is you're helping share the show when somebody goes, what's Graveyard Tales? You can tell them, you know, hey, go check these, you know, these guys out. You know, they, they enjoy doing this. They have a lot of fun. They're just like us. They're just having these conversations about weird stuff. You know, it's a, it's a good way to share the show. 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