Molebka

The village stands where the small Molebka river joins the Sylva. Its name comes from a 'prayer stone': on the high bank upstream, the Mansi people performed sacrificial rites for centuries, and the Slavs who came later named the place after it. In 1775 the mining surveyor Yegor Kuznetsov discovered iron ores here, and in 1779 the Demidovs built the Molebsky ironworks — the workers' settlement became the village. The works outlived its owners — the Demidov business passed through different branches of the family, and the pig iron was carried by barge down the Sylva and the Kama. When production closed in the early twentieth century, the village slowly went quiet: today it has some two hundred residents, an old dam and wooded banks. Its second fame came at the end of the twentieth century: journalists declared the surrounding woods the 'Molebka anomalous zone', or the M-triangle — a place of supposedly unexplainable phenomena. Science never confirmed these stories, yet people still come: some for the silence and the old ironworks story, some for the legend.