The village of Staraya Zburievka is located in the northern Black Sea coast, on the bank of the Dnieper-Bug estuary. In the XV century this territory was inhabited by Tatars. They, living at the crossroads of empires and religions, erected on their land a primitive watchtower, later rebuilt to the level of a defensive fortress. It became part of the system of the so-called Kinburn bridgehead and more than once became a bargaining chip during the Russian-Tatar war.
So, the history of Zburievskaya fortress began in the XV century, and the completed fortification was considered in 1696, stopping all construction work. The Zburjevo Fortress is an irregularly shaped quadrangle. A battery was erected in each corner of the fortification — there were 26 artillery guns in the fortress. At the base of the construction was an earthen rampart lined with stone slabs. Communication with the outside world was carried out by a single gate and a wicket.
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A mosque was erected in the middle of the fortress. Stone warehouses for ammunition and for food were built. In the courtyard of the fort and today you can see the ruins of wells and mazanok houses. In peacetime about 50 soldiers lived in the garrison. In wartime about 200 Janissaries «imported» from the Ottoman Porte arrived here. The fortress was surrounded by a Tatar settlement, whose inhabitants were engaged in cattle breeding, and also grew melons, pumpkins, cabbage and cucumbers, providing food for themselves and the fort garrison.
In 1736, a detachment of Russian General Leontiev captured all the fortifications of the Kinsbourne bridgehead — the famous Kinburnskaya and the less famous Zburievskaya fortresses. The next year Zburievskaya fortress was repulsed by the Turks, and then again by Russian troops. There was a plague epidemic among the soldiers who made up the garrison, so they left the fort, having destroyed it beforehand. In 1768, during the next stage of the Russian-Turkish war, the ruins of the Zburiev fort were seized by Zaporozhian Cossacks led by Colonel Panas Kolpak.
At the signing of the Kyuchuk-Kainardzhi Peace Treaty, this entire area, as a potential fortification, was written out and given to the Russian Empire in a separate clause. In 1855, an attack by the Anglo-French flotilla turned the partially destroyed fort into a pile of ruins. After that, the fort was never restored and was never used for its intended purpose again.
Staying on vacation in the Iron Port or Lazurnoe, many people do not even suspect about the attractions lurking in the area. Prognoenska palanka Zaporozhian and the remains of Zburievskaya and Kinsbourne fortresses, music festivals in Skadovsk and a bazaar in Kherson, The Church of the Assumption and the Falz-Fein crypt, Scythian burial mounds and a spring of thermal iodine-bromine water are worth a visit to the Black Sea region.