Russi Kabussi

A strange woman of unknown origin

In the barony of Vilhelmsborg, there was a bay that ships would use to load and unload cargo, so no one thought anything of it when a ship one day entered the bay, cast anchor, lowered a boat into the water and then sailed off when the boat had returned.

But the ship hadn’t dropped off any cargo, at least not the kind you would expect. It had dropped off a woman.

She walked up to the nearby Moesgaard Manor where the residents couldn’t understand what she was saying or what she wanted. They had her taken to a hospital, where she became even more incoherent.

She got the name Russi Kabussi because the language she spoke sounded like Russian but couldn’t be understood by Russian speakers. No one ever managed to piece together who she was or what her story was from her incoherent ramblings, but there were rumors that King Frederik the 6^th would visit her when he was in the area, and that his successor Christian the 8^th made improvements to her accommodation

She died in 1868 and the newspapers wrote that Aarhus had lost one of its colorful characters. They wrote what little they knew about her: That she had arrived in the beginning of the century, that she had lived in a convent ever since arriving, and that she was probably 70 years old when she died. They speculated whether she might have been one of the Romanovs or one of the Boyars, many of whom had been displaced or fled during one war or the other, around the same time Russi Kabussi showed up in the forest outside Moesgaard.