The legend about Chernihiv Dracula

One of the legends of the city tells about the "Ukrainian Dracula" - the famous colonel Vasyl Kasperovych Dunin-Borkovsky. It is known that he had the rank of general convoy of the Zaporizhian Host and was one of the richest men in Hetman Ukraine. At his expense were: the Church of the Ascension, Peter and Paul Church, the refectory of the Yeletski Monastery, the restored Transfiguration and Assumption Cathedrals, and the Piatnytska Church. He died in 1702. The colonel was buried with all honors in the Assumption Cathedral of the Yelets Monastery.

It is said that after the colonel's death, terrible things began to happen in the city. Exactly at midnight, a ghostly carriage pulled by raven horses, in which Colonel Dunin-Borkovsky was sitting, flew out of the gates of the Yeletski Monastery. The carriage took the owner to his estate on the Black Cliff above the Desna River. There the dead man walked around his possessions, and before dawn he stopped at the old well and pointed his finger at it.  With the first roosters, the ghost disappeared. When the patience of the townspeople ran out, a procession of priests led by Archbishop Ioann Maksymovych stopped the ghostly carriage on the Krasny Bridge and forced them to turn back. When Borkovsky's coffin was pulled out of the crypt and opened, the colonel lay in it as alive, with a pipe smoking in its teeth. The vampire's chest was pierced with a peg and reburied in the ancestral estate on the banks of the Desna River. The same night, a strong storm passed through the city, the river overflowed its banks and flooded the burial place.