Mysterious stories about another unknown place in Odessa

This place is fraught with many interesting stories and mysteries about how
our ancestors used to live in our area. It is here that the early memorials have been preserved, which are almost never found anywhere else in our city.

Shkodova (Mountain) Gora got its name from the Ukrainian word "Skoda" - harm, damage. In time immemorial, when the Peresyp area was flooded, the carts had to go along the slopes of the mountain — through the rocks, through the bushes, where the carts usually got stuck and broke.

On the plateau, the so-called Usatov culture (by the name of the village), dating from the Copper Age - XXV-XX century. BC. (according to other sources, a thousand years earlier). Excavations of the late stage of Trypillian culture were carried out in 1921 by archaeologist M. Boltenko.

Here once lived the families of stonecutters - the people who built our city. After 1775, even before the founding of Odessa, Cossacks settled on the mountain. They lived in cave houses. Caves were most often made artificially by carving a shell rock. It was a sin not to use the resulting voids: one wall with windows was added - and the house is ready. They were equipped with ladders, passages, shelves, stoves with chimneys. It was possible to hide from the intolerable summer heat. Also here there is an old Cossack cemetery which is older than the city.

In the nineteenth century, these houses were used by the criminals: in case of a raid, they simply where hiding in the catacombs, where there was a passage from almost every "apartment".

Now houses are used as utility rooms rather than as residential premises. The passage to one cave house was thrown with branches, the passage to another was covered with garbage. So far, local authorities are not interested in making this place more tourist.

In Soviet times, an Oil Refinery Plant was built on Shkodova Gora, which occupied one of the leading places in the country, and a residential village of oil workers was located nearby. It still works and owned by Lukoil since 1999.

From 1883 to this day, a tram number 20, which is also called “reed”, runs to Shkodova Gora. This tram route was included in the list of the most interesting tram routes in the world by Forbes.