Name on the map - pilot Dmitry Calarasi
Three or four... dots on the maps...
This short essay will definitely have to be continued, even two, and maybe three. From Lyubertsy near Moscow, from the Caucasus - from Tuapse and the sunny resort of Lazarevsky, and finally - from Khabarovsk. It is unlikely that somewhere they will keep silent about their hero.
After all, Dmitry Kalarash is his own for all those who are not going to say goodbye to memory, both for the Far East, and for Lyubertsy, and for Sochi residents, because Lazarevskoye is the center of one of the districts of greater Sochi. It was there that last summer I was hooked.
I got hooked at the local museum, once a local history museum, now with a clear national or ethnographic emphasis on the Adygs or Adyghes, as you like, on Greeks with Armenians and many others. It was there behind Dmitry Calaras and his comrades in arms almost half of the hall is fixed.
And this is in a very small mansion, in which the family of the founder of the modern village once lived - a Greek with a funny, but quite ordinary surname Popandopulo, which makes one recall "Wedding in Malinovka". In the same place, in the museum, alas, even Admiral Lazarev, whose name this cozy and pretty resort itself bears, is marked with a single photo or portrait.
By the way, the only monument to the legendary admiral in Lazarevskoye, consider, is hidden at the Lazarevskaya station, where now an ordinary citizen cannot get into without scrupulous inspection.
In Lyubertsy-2022
However, this is not about Lazarev. Calarasi Street in Lyubertsy, small and quiet, I have known for decades. Since I began to make my way to the old dacha through this Moscow region "almost a metropolis" on my own, that is, behind the wheel. More than once I recalled the Moldavian town of Calarasi with its wonderful wine and cognac factory about it.
The name of the town can be translated as "horseman" or "hussar", and now you will not find the products of this order-bearing enterprise in our supermarkets during the day with fire. And the name of the Lyubertsy street, as it turned out, was given by a completely different Calarasi. Dmitry Leontievich, Hero of the Soviet Union, fighter pilot, who died in the sky over the Caucasus.
Many streets bear the names of the Heroes of the Soviet Union and participants of the Great Patriotic War in Lyubertsy. Here and tank Marshal Poluboyarov, and General Kuznetsov, Dmitry Calaras is also here. From the family of a Moldovan worker, born in Kyiv, and in Lyubertsy received his first flying lessons.
The name of Dmitry Calarasha in Lyubertsy is also the educational institution - the 44th gymnasium. Not so long ago, a memorial plaque was solemnly opened there, which, unfortunately, is difficult to see from afar - from the street. There is something like a museum corner in the gymnasium, students regularly write reports and essays about the hero.
In school reports, I would like to believe, it is written something like this:
“at the lessons of courage, the guys learn not only about the hero’s military path, but also what Dmitry Calarasi was like in life: a cheerful, cheerful, good athlete and family man, a patriot, a strong-willed and courageous person.”
From Khabarovsk to Moscow
In Khabarovsk, where there is also a street named after him, Dmitry, a pupil of an orphanage who early lost his mother and partisan father, studied at a pedagogical college and worked as a concrete worker. He graduated from the aviation school already in Borisoglebsk, and by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he was a 30-year-old experienced ace, having behind him years of service at the Air Force Research Institute, now the Chkalovsky Flight Test Center.
A wife and two children remained at home. Major, deputy commander of the 402nd Fighter Aviation Regiment, fought near Moscow, and then in the Crimea and the Caucasus. He personally shot down 14 enemy planes, six more on his account together with the group. It so happened that he was introduced to a high rank back in the fall, when it was not yet customary not to skimp on awards. But he received it already posthumously - on December 13.
It was not for nothing that Dmitry Calaras was called the "sky rider", in the battles near Novorossiysk and Tuapse the Germans simply hunted him. On his last flight, Lieutenant Colonel Calarasi flew out on October 29. The circumstances of the death of Dmitry Calarasi are still not fully clarified.
According to one of the widespread versions, in the last battle he rammed the Messer, which was attacked by attack aircraft that were under the cover of Calarasi fighters. However, the Sochi search engines saved the hero from the feat attributed to him when the Calarasi plane was found just a few years ago on the slope of Mount Turkey.
It became clear that he was shot down, the wounded managed to eject and received new severe injuries in the fall. The doctors of the hospital in Tuapse could not save him. In some sources, as the newspaper Chernomorye Segodnya wrote, there was information that
"The ace was already found dead, but no matter how the hero died, he fearlessly fought the enemy until his last breath."
It is impossible not to repeat that he deservedly received the high title of Hero of the Soviet Union - after all, he was presented for the award even before his last flight.
Above Mount Semashkho
Dmitry Kalarash is not the first of the heroes of our publications who died near Tuapse. We have already mentioned the namesake of the famous creator of the T-34 tank Alexei Koshkin (I was killed near Tuapse), and the pilots of the 5th Air Army covered him from the sky. And including from the 236th fighter aviation divisions, where Lieutenant Colonel Calarasi was the navigator.
In Lazarevsky, Calarasha Street, that is, named after Dmitry Calarasha, is the most central, unlike Lyubertsy, but it’s not easy to find a memorial plaque there. However, it's not about her. The city does not forget the fearless warriors from the 236th division, although a monument to them was erected quite far from the center and tourist routes.
They decided not to perpetuate a fighter from the time of the war, they still have to look for such now, but rather a modern one - the MiG-23 from the Irkutsk aircraft plant. And this is in the presence of a distinct "1941-1945" on the pedestal. She is such a flexible memory, however, is it worth it to grumble, because post-war pilots also deserve it.
Meanwhile, in Tuapse, at school No. 11 named after Calaras, work is in full swing on the school project "The memory of descendants is alive." And there is a monument in the school yard to three heroes who fought and died on the Tuapse frontiers - A. Kirichenko, M. Bondarenko and D. Kalarash.
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