To a modern world steeped in the political culture of the nation state, schooled to believe in the unique value of the nations to which we belong, with their long and illustrious histories, great literary traditions, and irreplaceably distinct customs and cultures, visiting Crimea can be disconcerting. With its ghostly, abandoned cities and settlements, once the homes of thriving civilisations that are now no more, Crimea is testament to all that is transient, insecure and ephemeral in the world. Civilisations grow, flourish, and then pass into history, leaving only haunted remnants of what is gone forever.
In many countries we are used to thinking of our nation’s history as a progression, through different eras, changing, and yet continuous, with layers of heritage building on each other, all contributing to the formation of a modern nation, a gradual accretion of experience and accomplishment, gain and loss, continuing on into the future. Just as the English perceive a thread linking them with Alfred the Great, so nations on every continent find unique value in their heritage. But Crimea bears witness to the vanity of such notions.
Gifted by Krushchev to Ukraine in the 1950s, Crimea had been taken over by imperial Russia only in the 1780s, its colonisation taking place on the back of the displacement of the Tartars. The history of Crimea is not one of continuity, but rather of repeated invasion and migration, each new arrival displacing or assimilating those who were already there.
The landscape around Bakhchisaray and southern Crimea is one of high-cliffed plateaus, with deep ravines in between. Bakhchisaray itself sits in one such ravine, cliffs rising dramatically on both sides. Nearby is the stronghold of Chufut Kale, strung out along one such plateau. Now abandoned, Chufut Kale means ‘Jewish Fortress’ in the Crimean Tartar language. The site had once been inhabited by the Sarmatian Alans, but was taken over by the Tartars when they invaded Crimea. In the 15th Century, it was established as the Khan’s capital, before it was moved to nearby Bakhchisaray. From the 17th Century, the only remaining inhabitants were adherents of the Karaite Jewish sect, hence the name, Chufut Kale.
The main street in Chufut Kale
The religious origins of the Karaites are disputed, as well as the ethnic origins of the Crimean Karaim. Contrary to Rabbinic Judaism, they accept only scripture as having ultimate authority, and not the interpretations of the Talmud. The sect thrived in Mesopotamia a thousand years ago, but the origins of the Turkic-speaking Karaim of Crimea are uncertain. It has often been claimed that they are descendants of Khazars, converts to Judaism who once ruled an empire in swathes of territory in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine.
Following Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Karaim abandoned Chufut Kale, settling in towns on the Crimean coast and elsewhere in Russia. The Karaim managed to avoid some of Russia’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws, citing spurious proofs that the community had been living in Crimea since before the time of Christ, and that therefore they could not share in the perceived collective, inherited Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. The assertion that they were Turkic converts was also cited in their favour. In a further, even more bizarre twist, during the World War Two German occupation, Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin were persuaded that the Karaim were not Jewish at all, although of inferior racial stock, and that they should therefore be spared the holocaust.
Today, the Karaim are gone from Chufut Kale. The remaining adherents of the sect are found mainly in Israel and the United States, with just a small number remaining in Crimea. Chufut Kale itself is a ghost town, its streets frequented by tourists and a few artists. Some buildings remain intact, including a prayer house and the former home of Avraam Firkovich, now a museum displaying old photos of the once thriving community. It was Firkovich who had provided the falsified ‘evidence’ of the Karaim’s history in Crimea that won favour with the Tsars.
As in many of these high settlements in Crimea, Chufut Kale was partly built below the ground, in caves carved and enlarged out of the rock. Now bare, their windows and doors open to the elements, exploring these caves, with their ledges and niches, it is hard to imagine the people that once lived here, the lives they led. This was a living, settled community for hundreds of years, with traditions, a language, customs, and now it is all over, the people gone.
Cave room, Chufut Kale
Spookiest of all is a stroll through the vast cemetery in the Iosofatova Valley, below Chufut Kale. Here, for centuries, the Karaim buried their dead. The graves are still there, thousands of them, higgledy-piggledy among the trees, many of the tombstones, covered in Hebrew script, overturned or upended by tree roots or subsidence. I walked through this forest cemetery, alone in the silence, in the early evening, with the sun low in the sky sending its beams almost horizontally through the trees. But the feeling of spookiness was not because of the long-dead people at rest there. Rather, it was that walking among these thousands of graves brings home that this is not just a cemetery of the people buried there, but of the civilisation, the world to which they belonged, which is now extinct. There are no Karaim left at Chufut Kale to tend or visit the graves. The tombs are just there, a silent memory of a lost world, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Among the ancient tombs are a handful of graves from recent years, their inscriptions in Cyrillic, Karaim from elsewhere, for whom Chufut Kale is their home soil, in which, together with their ancestors, they would like to rise on judgement day.
Karaite cemetery, Chufut Kale
A few miles south of Bakhchisaray, is the site of another abandoned cliff-top stronghold, Mangup Kale. At one time, Mangup Kale was the capital of the Crimean principality of Gothia. Migrating from north-west Europe, the Germanic Goths conquered much of the northern Black Sea coast, including Crimea, in the 3rd Century AD, before being pushed out by the Huns a hundred years later. But some of the Goths hung on in Crimea, were Christianised and incorporated into the Byzantine Empire. Following a failed attempt to resist the Khazar conquest of Crimea in the 8th Century, the Goths retreated to their plateau at Mangup, and there they remained, worshiping at their basilicas, living their isolated lives until the 15th Century, when, a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Turks besieged and conquered Mangup as well.
The citadel, Mangup Kale
Little is known about the Crimean Gothic realm. Linked by religion and its long association with Byzantium with the Greek world, at the end Gothia was allied with the Empire of Trebizond (modern-day Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey). Probably Mangup had been a true Crimean ethnic mix, Gothic, Greek, Sarmatian, Jewish. Certainly there were Karaim there. Walking up through the forest to the Mangup plateau, one passes through another Karaite cemetery, hundreds more tombs eerily bearing witness to the people that were once there. At the top, there is not much left. The monumental gateway to the citadel is still standing. The basilica of Saint Constantine is no more than a couple of overgrown walls. At the tip of the plateau, beyond the citadel, overlooking terrifying precipices, are more elaborate cave rooms, hewn out of the rock, with stairways, alcoves, windows and doors.
The Mangup plateau is a beautiful place to stroll on a hot summer’s day, broad meadows with a profusion of wild flowers, with walls, towers, the foundations of buildings scattered about here and there, the remains of the city that once stood. Walking there is a humbling experience. Here was a city, with fine buildings and monuments, a distinct people with their own language and traditions. And it is all gone, bar a few almost forgotten ruins, returned to dust.
Mangup Kale
What a romantic idea! That once upon a time, in the mountains of southern Crimea, far away from the Germanic peoples of western Europe, a Gothic realm endured from ancient times almost to the modern era. It is an idea that excited travellers and scholars. Adolf Hitler too was interested, and plans were discussed by the Nazis to resettle Germans from South Tyrol, the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, in a renewed Gothia, in Crimea, its cities renamed to reflect the Gothic heritage. But it was a fantasy. The Crimean Goths are long gone. But where did they go to? Most likely they simply converted to Islam and were assimilated into the Crimean Tartar people. As my hostess in Bakhchisaray told me, in different regions of Crimea the Tartars have different physiognomies, reflecting their various ethnic antecedents. Some of them are probably more than a little Gothic.
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