The history of the Volga-Don region is much richer than it is commonly believed. Yes, the fateful battle of World War II - the Battle of Stalingrad took place here, the drama of the civil war was played out right there, and the history of the local Cossacks, and their struggle for a free life, first with the tsarist, and then with the Soviet regime, goes back centuries. However, an inquisitive person has a question - what was before the Cossacks? In general terms, this is known right up to the Sarmatian nomads, but the details, for obvious reasons, remain secret. In the process of research, the mysterious name Exopolis or Exopolis appears in the sources, as the settlement of the Greek colonists, located at the bend of Tanais (Don), was supposedly called. On the map, the authorship of which is attributed to Ptolemy (although in fact it was created in the early modern period according to earlier sources), he is located approximately on the site of the present farmsteads of Logovsky or Lyapichevo. It cannot be ruled out that the remains of the Greek outpost now rest at the bottom of the Tsimlyansk reservoir or were destroyed in the process of its creation. It also raises doubts about the assertions of anonymous authors that they place Exopolis on the site of the present city of Kalach-on-Don, if only because it does not agree well with the same "Ptoleemev" map.
Network sources claim that Exopolis is indicated not only on the maps of Ptolemy (II century AD), but also on the maps of Mercator in the 16th century, and even later authors. The latter, apparently, redrawn the early source codes, for by the indicated eras on the Don the Cossacks had strengthened and the events taking place there no longer had anything to do with the Greeks. Neither in the 16th nor, moreover, in the 17th centuries, there could be no Greek settlements in the indicated area. And the authors of the maps clearly have problems with geographical accuracy. For example, on European maps of modern times, the Don and Seversky Donets are shown as a single river system.
On later European maps, no Exopolis no longer exists, but there are completely different settlements with completely different names, which is understandable. Time passes, everything changes. In addition, one must understand that many places indicated on the maps may have never existed at all, or existed, but under a different name. Therefore, any sources, especially distorted in the Middle Ages and the early period of modern times, must be approached with a certain degree of caution.
In general, this story is still only waiting to be confirmed and something can be judged only by indirect signs. It so happened that many years ago, in the places where Exopolis was supposed to be located, there were already fragments of clay jugs with traditional Greek patterns. It is also noteworthy that when drilling wells at a fairly large distance from the coast, river shells are extracted, and there is every reason to assert that in the not so distant past, the riverbed looked completely different than it does now.
It is known for sure that the Greeks had colonies in the Crimea and at the mouth of the Don. Nothing prevented them from going upstream for both research and selfish purposes. Also, nothing prevented them from building a base in those places where the Don is closest to the Volga. True, they had to travel tens of kilometers to the Volga by land. Much later, the Russian Empire partly solved this problem by building one of the first railways in the state there, and the USSR already laid a navigable canal through the steppes, but in ancient times this path was not only long, but also dangerous. But the local climate would hardly have seemed unusual to the Greeks, who came from a hot country. And nature is similar in many ways. Although not as much as the same Crimea is similar to the original Greek islands.
If Exopolis was real, then with a high degree of probability it was a small settlement with elements of a guard post and a transshipment base, and possibly a market. With the rise of the economic power of the metropolis, researchers went further and further. With the decline of Greek influence, the colonists left these places, and the settlement was ravaged by time and natural disasters. Several centuries later, the strategically important river routes of the Don were taken under control by a completely different people who still inhabit them.
Will there ever be a real search for the mythical Exopolis? It is possible that yes. Every year, in the summer, teams of Volgograd archaeologists go to excavations in various parts of the region. Perhaps someday they will be interested in this topic. By the way, in our time, a settlement named Exopolis also exists. This is the name of a village on the island of Crete, in modern Greece.
